What the Sensor Knows: More-Than-Human Knowledge Co-Production in Wood Carving

Abstract

From an engineering perspective, sensors provide measurements of phenomena in the world. Sensor data might be noisy, biased or otherwise subject to error, and these labels presuppose the existence of an objective ground truth the sensor is intended to approximate. This paper explores an alternative look at sensor signals as situated observations entangled with the systems they seek to measure, where meaning can be carried in qualitative particulars rather than quantitative and statistical analyses. Karen Barad’s ‘agential realism’ [3] and Graham Harman’s ‘tool-being’ [29] inform our approach to understanding together with the sensors, which become co-investigators and co-creators of the subsequent knowledge. We illustrate our collaborative effort with the sensor through a case study where we examine sensor signals from a device designed to query the experience of woodcarving by making the experience unfamiliar. We seek a qualitative approach to knowledge (co-)creation with sensor data from a more-than-human perspective.

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