Week 4: Post-Digital Cyborgs: Co-Dependent Spaces in the Age of Hybrid Media

Introduction

This week’s sessions explored what it means to make and experience art in the post-digital era, where digital technologies are no longer novel but embedded in the everyday. Florian Cramer’s seminal article What is “Post-Digital”? frames this shift as a point of saturation, even disillusionment, with “new media” (Cramer, 2014). As an interior architecture graduate passionate about designing spaces that support ethnic minority users, I find the post-digital discourse particularly relevant to my practice. It suggests that neither the built environment nor digital technologies can exist in isolation; instead, they form symbiotic ecosystems. The human, the interface, and the space are now inseparable.

Key Reflections: Defining the Post-Digital

Cramer argues that the post-digital is less about the absence of digital and more about living after its novelty has faded. It's not an anti-digital movement, but a pragmatic return to whatever medium works best, regardless of whether it’s analogue or algorithmic. Cramer offers the example of a street writer using a typewriter for practicality and public engagement, an old medium used with new logic.

This hybridity, where a Twitter handle supports a typewriter service, is emblematic of post-digital art. Likewise, post-internet art, net art, and new aesthetics aren't sequential evolutions but networked expressions, often coexisting or overlapping.

From Rhizome’s anthology of net art (https://anthology.rhizome.org) to Chilton Computing’s Flexipede (https://www.chilton-computing.org.uk/acl/htmls/flexipede/overview.htm), what becomes clear is that post-digital practice is less about the digital tool and more about the embeddedness of digital thinking in how we make and relate to art. Whether using generative AI or Super 8 film, the contemporary artist engages systems, networks, and interfaces as environments, not tools.

For an audiovisual breakdown of these concepts, I found the video essay “What is Post-Internet Art?” by The Art Assignment (YouTube, PBS Digital Studios) especially useful in making connections between historical net art and today’s digitally infused aesthetics.

Applying to Practice: Post-Digital Architecture

Post-digital thinking has transformed both the external architecture of buildings and the internal experience of space. Buildings are now embedded with sensor networks, responsive lighting, smart climate control, surveillance systems, and more. However, without the human presence, the gestures, patterns, touch points, these systems are meaningless. Likewise, humans increasingly rely on digital technologies to navigate and inhabit space such as touchless entry systems, QR-coded public services, and virtual waiting rooms.

This mutual dependency between human and system mirrors Cramer’s view that digital and non-digital can no longer be cleanly separated. In fact, I would argue that space has become a cyborg. The walls may be concrete, but the user’s experience is mediated by augmented systems, from AI-generated art projections in lobbies to biometric doors in secure housing. The materiality of design is no longer just tactile but experiential, crafted through digital feedback, layered access, and hyper-personalisation.

This theme is echoed in The Future Of Cities, a Netflix short documentary from the Explained series, where architects and urban planners discuss the fusion of sensor-driven infrastructure with inclusive public design. These examples reinforce that buildings are now dialogical partners in experience, not passive backdrops.

For ethnic minority users, these shifts offer both potential and risk. Post-digital spaces can amplify inclusion through adaptive accessibility, or they can deepen exclusion through biased algorithms and inaccessible design. The cyborg space must be critically designed, not just technically.

Extra Research Insight: Cascone’s “Aesthetics of Failure”

Kim Cascone’s essay on “The Aesthetics of Failure” aligns with Cramer’s thinking by embracing the imperfections of digital systems glitches, distortion, compression artefacts, as aesthetic tools (Cascone, 2000). These “failures” are not defects, but signatures of the post-digital. Similarly, in architecture, material wear, cultural layering, and adaptation over time are now understood not as degradation, but as evolving expression.

Artists like Ryoji Ikeda and Susan Hiller have explored this kind of digital decay in audio-visual installations. A useful resource here is Glitch: The Rise of the Digital Malfunction (YouTube, The New School), which explores how errors have become stylistic choices in contemporary culture.

Critical Response: Where I Stand

In my view, we are not post-digital because we moved past technology, but because we’ve become naturalised to it. As a designer, I’m constantly toggling between SketchUp models, AI-driven parametric, and hand-drawn plans, choosing media not for trend but for fit. Cramer’s point about making “post-digital choices” rings especially true here. For example, when designing inclusive interior spaces, analogue textures such as exposed wood or handwoven rugs offer sensory grounding in a digitally saturated world. But their placement and purpose are often informed by data-driven insights into user preferences, cultural context, and biometric comfort.

Conclusion

Post-digital art and architecture do not discard the digital; they integrate it until it becomes invisible, ambient, even existential. This week deepened my understanding of how cyborg-like integration between human, machine, and space is now the default, not the exception. As I continue designing spaces that center marginalised voices, I aim to use this hybridity not only as a design strategy but as a political choice, to construct inclusive environments that are both technologically literate and humanly grounded.

References

Cramer, F. (2014). What is “Post-Digital”?. APRJA 3.

Cascone, K. (2000). The Aesthetics of Failure: “Post-Digital” Tendencies in Contemporary Computer Music. Computer Music Journal, 24(4), 12–18.

Rhizome. (n.d.). Net Art Anthology. https://anthology.rhizome.org

Chilton Computing. (n.d.). Flexipede Overview. https://www.chiltoncomputing.org.uk/acl/htmls/flexipede/overview.htm

Netflix. (2019). Explained: The Future of Cities [Documentary episode]. PBS Digital Studios. (2019). What is Post-Internet Art? The Art Assignment. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8tN1c-_7a8Y

The New School. (2020). Glitch: The Rise of the Digital Malfunction. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XOEb0v9SmXc