Notable Work
In his first book,Embodying Technesis:Technology beyond Writing (2000),Hansen examines the theoretical approach to technology by influential cultural-philosophical authors of the 20th century,namely Martin Heidegger,Jacques Derrida,Sigmund Freud,Jacques Lacan,Michel Foucault,Gilles Deleuze,and Félix Guattari. He identifies a theoretical trend toward reducing the phenomenon of technology to the concept of the machine. However,this ultimately misinterprets technology as essentially "discursive," thus underestimating its material power and inherent dynamics. He names this reductive strategy—in analogy to Alice Jardine's concept of gynesis—technesis,or "putting-into-discourse of technology." Drawing on Walter Benjamin and neuroscientific theses,Hansen strives to develop a theory that can do justice to the cultural power of technology in its physical presence. [4]
This project is expanded upon in New Philosophy for New Media (2004) with regard to digital media. Referencing the philosophy of Henri Bergson,the neuroscientific concept of embodiment,and the revision of cybernetics by Donald MacCrimmon MacKay and Raymond Ruyer,he attempts to redefine the relationship between humans and technical media in the digital age. The digital image is no longer to be understood as an independent object,but merely as a process that presupposes both an interface and an embodied recipient. Accordingly,he rejects the theory of a “disembodiment”of humans triggered by the digital media revolution. Rather,it is through digital media that the affective-physical “underside”of every act of perception becomes accessible to experience,which can be seen as an active expansion of the affective potential of the human body. The art of the new media,among others. by Jeffrey Shaw,Robert Lazzarini and Bill Viola,Hansen analyzes in detail as a testing ground for such an affective-physical extension of the recipient. [5]
In Bodies in Code (2006),Hansen expands this perspective by drawing on Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of the body. His most recent book,Feed-Forward:On the Future of Twenty-First-Century Media (2014) was described by Choice Magazine as "A major contribution to the field" and a "potentially canonic book for specialists in philosophy,ethics,and media studies." [6]
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