About

novacene investigates how the human changes through its entanglement with technology. As perception, thought, and action extend across bodies, instruments, and systems, the location of the self becomes uncertain. Where does intention begin? What gives experience its apparent centre? Through photographic, tactile, and computational encounters, the practice explores how these relations shape who we are and the realities we inhabit.

Authorship names this difficulty of locating the “I” that perceives, decides, and acts. A camera reorganizes seeing through framing, position, and time. A tool becomes almost imperceptible in use, then announces itself through resistance or failure. A computational system alters the intention brought to it. These encounters make the boundary between ourselves and our instruments available to experience and question.

Marshall McLuhan’s account of media as human extensions and Andy Clark and David Chalmers’ extended-mind thesis inform this inquiry. They offer distinct ways to consider how technologies transform perception and how processes beyond the body can participate in cognition. What becomes of agency when the conditions of thought and action exceed the individual?

The question also concerns our shared reality. Jean Baudrillard’s writing on simulation examines how representations precede and organize what we experience as real. Guy Debord’s account of the spectacle brings the social and political organization of mediation into view. Together, they sharpen the question of who shapes the conditions through which we encounter the world—and how those conditions distribute attention and power.

This inquiry guides the current phase of novacene, while earlier works retain their particular histories and concerns.

The name comes from James Lovelock’s Novacene: The Coming Age of Hyperintelligence. His vision of an emerging age of artificial intelligence provides a provocation to reconsider the place of the human and the possibilities of coexistence.

novacene is the artistic practice of Ashwin Rajan. Of Indian origin, Ashwin works across Helsinki and Hyderabad. His background combines psychology and sociology with postgraduate study in interaction design at the Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design. He is a member of Pixelache Helsinki, a platform for transdisciplinary art, design, research, and activism.