What does it mean to speak of sentience from a human perspective when boundaries between biological and artificial systems are difficult to maintain? Can sentience emerge anywhere? Often associated with the capacity of living beings to feel, perceive, or experience, sentience has been challenged alongside transformations in labour, technology, and biology. Particularly, as we reconsider our ethical and social frameworks in a world where sentience may emerge in both silicon-based and organic entities. It is no longer unfamiliar to consider sentience in an organoid cluster, in an AI model trained on terrestrial data, or in subtle feedback between sensor, signal and landscape. These forms of sentience do not necessarily mirror our own; rather, they invite us to consider cognition as a distributed property, enacted through relations rather than possessed by isolated entities. Sentience is better understood as a grammar of relation, structuring encounters between bodies, materials and systems. The challenge is not to extend old hierarchies into new forms, but to invent the very languages and logics by which we might perceive otherwise: plural, relational, and poly-valued grammars that undo the binaries of life and non-life, natural and artificial, animate and inert. With this special issue, Synthetic Sentience enters this unstable territory to investigate how sentience is articulated, enacted, and reimagined across biological, technological and conceptual domains.
This paper argues that technical sensing does not extend the human sensory system but instead establishes a distinct, non-experiential sensory regime. Rather than amplifying human faculties, sensor-based systems register, process and compute signals according to operational logics that are irreducible to embodied experience. To conceptualize this shift, the paper introduces sK/n as a media-theoretical figure that articulates the relationship between technical skin (sK) and human, embodied skin (n). sK/n marks a split sensorium in which heterogeneous sensing regimes become operationally entangled yet remain non-convergent, and is structured by translation, asynchrony and temporal disjunction. Drawing on examples from e-skin technologies, interface design, (soft-)robotic systems, and artistic practice, the paper shows how touch and tactile input are increasingly translated into data-driven processes. This transformation is framed as a shift from multisensual to multisentient configurations of sensing, in which sensing is distributed across bodies, technical infrastructures, and computational systems. Rather than describing the machine sensorium as a system in opposition to a unified human sensorium, the paper proposes sK/n as a media-theoretical grammar for analysing distributed, asynchronous sensing regimes.
Este artículo analiza los discursos intergeneracionales sobre la construcción social del género generados a partir de un dispositivo de mediación artística basado en el cine. El estudio se desarrolló mediante el visionado y la discusión colectiva de tres películas vinculadas al cine español, seleccionadas por representar distintos momentos históricos y diferentes modelos de feminidad. Participaron 75 personas organizadas en 21 grupos focales intergeneracionales. Los discursos obtenidos se analizaron desde un enfoque cualitativo mediante un análisis temático inductivo. Los resultados muestran que el cine funciona como un dispositivo de mediación cultural capaz de activar procesos de reflexión compartida sobre la identidad femenina, las expectativas sociales y los roles de género. Asimismo, evidencian diferencias generacionales en la interpretación de los imaginarios de género y confirman el valor de la cultura visual como espacio para la producción colectiva de sentido y la problematización crítica de las representaciones de lo femenino.
The Internationale lettriste (1954-1957) and the Internationale situationniste (1957-1972) were avant-garde groups characterised by the organisation of operations aimed at "sublation of art". If we present their views on technology-as multifaceted as they are scattered-it is to highlight the inseparable relationship they establish between artistic, technological and political development. Herein lies the decomposition of modern art, which ties in with the heated debates on automation, or their interpretation of cybernetics as a technique capable of influencing the behaviour of the State as a political form.
This article examines the work processes developed in the artistic research Casa de Tres Llaves, which explores a typology of worker housing arising in Alcoy (Alicante) adapted as worker housing during the 19th century-houses with two keys or casas de dos llaves-as a countermodel from which to imagine other ways of living. The project is articulated from an indisciplinary work process, typical of artistic practice, that is developed in an interconnected way with a critique of the working house understood as a disciplinary device. From an intra-action logic, the research is articulated in four interconnected phases: 1) the configuration of the Archivo Casa de Tres llaves, 2) its transfer to the mud as speculative extension through participatory workshops, 3) the three-dimensional digitization of the mud pieces and 4) its location in a virtual environment that allows them to be traversed. Thus, through the intertwining of archive, mud and virtual reality, the research interrogates the disciplinary frameworks through which the domestic has traditionally been thought, proposing a simultaneous displacement of the imaginaries of housing and the ways of producing knowledge about it. Consequently, this article contributes to the literature on artistic research through an indisciplinary approach in which art, architecture and technology overflow and are redefined in their doing.
