Glossary of A Manifesto for Technoid Landscapes

The technoid landscape can be any landscape, that is being read as the product of its actors' techniques. Based on techniques, actors of the landscape are performing actions, like reading, writing, navigating, communicating, transforming, carrying.This glossary presents an example that reads the technoid landscape based on actors, who are performing actions via ultrasound techniques.Read the full text 'A Manifesto for Technoid Landscapes' here.

actors

Substrate of the technoid landscape

An actor can be any instance of the technoid landscape, that is able to perform actions.

Humans are one kind of actor along many others, who utilize ultrasound in their techniques. More animals, like rats, mice, bats or dolphins have each developed ultrasound-based communication techniques already well before us. Trees are also able to produce sounds in the ultrasonic spectrum.

techniques

Infrastructure of the technoid landscape

Actors are performing actions based on their techniques.

Ultrasonic techniques of the bats

Bats have developed a spatial orientation technique based utilizing ultrasound, that has been proven to be at least 50 million years old, as they found 50 mio. years old bat fossils old nearby Darmstadt, Germany. The anatomy of these fossils' hearing apparatuses already enabled the bats to receive ultrasonic sound.

To navigate a space bats 'ping' their environment with sounds and listen to their feedback for short time period. With this echo in mind the bats are able navigate a space and locate other bats or prey. The bats do not consider sounds that are reflected back to them after the time period for listening has ended. This filters out distorsions or sonic navigations from other bats.

Ultrasonic techniques of the humans

Since 1917 humans are utilizing ultrasound in technical applications, first developed to detect submarines. The human-made ultrasound applications follow a similar technique to the bats, usually called 'sonar', acronym for 'sound navigation ranging'.

In this technique an ultrasonic pulse is sent into a certain direction. If there is some other actor in this direction, their body will reflect the pulse. This echo can then be read and interpreted.
 

Ultrasonic techniques of the trees

When researchers recognized in the 1980s that trees are able to produce ultrasounds, they only noted that this would happen, when the trees are in danger to run dry. In 2014 researchers have revisited this technique of the trees.

As water is evaporating from their leaves or needles, a low pressure level in their vessel cells is sucking the water from these cells upwards. If a tree is experiencing a lack of water in the soil, the low pressure is accrusing along the water in their vessel cells, until eventually a small vacuum bubble appears. This vacuum immediately fills with water vapor and air. This immediate appearance and disappearance of the vacuum oscillates in the walls of the vessel cells, which is producing ultrasonic sounds.

actions

Actors are performing actions.

Many kinds of actions have been recognized as based on ultrasound. Orientation, communication, detection, transformation. These actions are performed via ultrasonic techniques.

structures

Through techniques actors are developing organized structures.

As bats are communicating via ultrasonic sounds, these techniques are fundamentally developing and forming their social structures.

Humans have initially developed their sonar applications as a defend mechanism during a war. The development of this technique effects many different kinds of structures.

The effect that the ultrasounds of trees have are not known yet. The ability of other actors to react to the trees' ultrasonic lack of water could not yet be understood by humans. Therefore the structures that emerge from the trees' ultrasounds have not been explored yet.

technoid landscape

Through techniques actors interleave in a location.

All structures that share a close neighborhood are being interpreted as related to each other. The impression of a landscape emerges.

A whole technoid landscape can not be read as alone based on ultrasound. But the examples before show, that ultrasound as a technique does have a fundamental effect not only on how landscapes can be perceived, but also how they are being composed.

in parallel with many

Actors of the technoid landscape are wired in parallel.

The technoid landscape unparses the humans as a superior type of actor.

Therefore the humans find themselves as one kind of ultrasonic actors in parallel along with many actors in the technoid landscape.

read as technoid

Landscape have to be read as technoid by nature, since they are perceived as a product, emerging from actors' techniques.

infrastructures of the technoid landscapes

Infrastructures are one kind of structure in the technoid landscapes.

Bats have established ultrasound as communication infrastructures. Humans have to adapt their ultrasonic techniques to the standards of the techniques that have been already implemented by other actors. Trees' ultrasounds have not been understood as an infrastructure yet.