How do we relate to technologies when absent, turned off, not in use? How to think of mediation of disconnection? »Apps against Apps« that are designed to keep us away from apps such as Freedom (2008), AppDetox (2013) or Digitox (2019) promise to provide more »off time«; they also mark a paradigm shift within public attitudes towards technologies. Even when dystopian panic and utopian hysteria are put aside, nostalgia towards the analogue can be observed. Conditions of »offline, unplugged, disconnected…« have become an almost trendy desire for a temporary Internet - free being. The quantitative qualities of being with the virtual OR the natural body can be felt but not separated within self-identity constructions. We have come to understand our technological gadgets as more than just objects of utility or objects to be studied separated from us. Rather, we acknowledge their relational character. Well-known American philosopher of technology Don Ihde’s concept of Postphenomenology grew out of experimental phenomenology (Ihde 1986 ) and offers a systematic approach to decode human— technology—world relations. He rejects the search for essence while emphasizing the plurality of technologies as well as their non-neutral nature. Functionalities are multi-stable and cannot be fully anticipated within the design process. Ihde’s formulas open up methods especially useful for designers and increasingly fruitful within art. His work is known but not broadly represented in the German language nor design schools. How can the phenomenon - the experience of the absent technology be conceptualized within Postphenomenology and can it be put under the lens of historical variations? Consciousness of a technology is enough to alter the lifeworld - that is not whole - until disconnection becomes part of it. Through a speculative artistic methodology I aim to coin down the term »absence-relations« to describe phenomena of unintended or purposeful disconnection of the self from a network.​

​​Ihde, Don. 1986. Experimental Phenomenology: An Introduction. Albany: State University of New York Press

Tutors:

• Prof. Dr. Marc Ries, Prof. Kerstin Cmelka
• www.kurzannie.com

• 2024: “Aesthetic Promises of ‘Digital Detoxing’”, EASSTS /4S Conference, Making and Doing Transformations, Juli 16-19, 2024, Amsterdam, NL

• 2023: “Postphenomenological Categories of Nothignesses”, SPT - Society for Philosophy and Technology Conference, Juni 07-10, 2023, Tokyo, JP

• 2022: “Staring at Nothing - Ihde, Sartre and the Problem of Non-Use”, PHTR - Philosophy of Human Technology Relations Conference, Juli 05-07, 2022, Copenhagen, DK
• 2021: “Offline, Unplugged, Disconnected...” SPT - Technological Imaginaries,Society for Philosophy and Technology Conference (online), Juni 28-30, 2021, Lille, FR
• “Offline, Unplugged, Disconnected...” Workshop on Philosophy of Technology (BudPT21), 09-10 Dez., 2021, Budapest, HU
• 2020: “Offline, Unplugged, Disconnected...” PHTR - Philosophy of Human Technology Relations Conference (online), Nov., 04 -07, 2020, Twente, NL

• 2023: "Nothing in Practice: Entanglements of Sartre’s Nothingness and Social Media Practice". Workshop on Phenomenology and the Philosophy of Technology at the Design Lab, Twente, NL
• “Offline, Unplugged, Disconnected...”, STS and Philosophy of Technology Workshop, 13 Nov. 2023, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, US 
• 2019: "Google can you see me?" Reutlingen University, DE
• "SkypeLab 100 Questions", SympoLab, 22@ Barcelona, RMIT Europe, ES
• 2017: Artist Talk: "Mother Inbox", Picture Berlin, DE
• 2013: Artist Talk at RMIT, Department of Art in Public Space, Melbourne, AUS