Introduction: Human perception and digital information technologies

The collection seeks to better understand the ways that digital information technologies form and influence human perception and experience. Contemporary computational media increasingly govern our experience through their capacity for externalising our knowledge and memories (Stiegler), mining data from our behaviour to influence our decision-making, creating emotional rewarding and sensory pleasure. Their networks continue to expand as their capacities become faster, more efficient, more accurate, and more sensory. In this light, it can be argued that the computational media embedded environment is becoming inseparable from embodied human experience. This leads to the assumption that human perception is becoming a product of human-machine symbiosis in a new type of media ecology. This is a particularly pressing issue that confronts us, given our growing dependence on computational platforms and software which have become essential to contemporary everyday life and are now practically almost impossible to eliminate. The collection thus seeks to explore the transformations in human perception in the era of pervasive computational media. The aim is to counter technological determinism by taking on board more discursive humanities’ perspectives. The collection therefore draws on the broader scope of pieces written by scholars who have not only been working in the fields of digital media, but also on affect and body studies. Although all the pieces discuss the wider implication of contemporary computational media, they consistently focus on animation (moving images) as the key concept and the body as a field to analyse the role of affect in human perception.