Sensory Entanglements: Knowledge Rituals in the Digital Age
by Elise Racine
In the liminal space between the physical and digital realms of human thought and creation, our relationship with knowledge undergoes a profound transformation. Through this series of works, I examine how emerging technologies reshape not just our access to information, but the very physicality of our engagement with it. Together, these pieces explore the sensory dimensions—touch, sight, sound—of contemporary knowledge transfer, asking how the digital age reshapes materiality, intimacy, and the archive while situating the viewer at the crossroads of tradition and innovation. The transition from bound volume to infinite scroll represents more than a shift in medium—it fundamentally alters our sensory and cognitive relationship with knowledge itself.
Figures 1-3. Elise Racine. A Book by Any Other Name (2024), Folio Fragments (2024), and Field Guide Distortions (2024). Digital collages involving archival images, photography, digital art, and artist-generated annotations.
A Book by Any Other Name (fig. 1) juxtaposes a weathered physical tome with its digital counterpart, highlighting how artificial intelligence reinterprets the essence of “book-ness.” The textured, ornate cover of the book—a Bible from ca. 1602—stands in stark contrast to the sleek, minimalist e-reader interface. Still, both objects serve as vessels for human knowledge and demand their own form of tactile engagement. The artist-generated yellow frames mimic the bounding boxes used in AI object detection. The accompanying annotations reveal how algorithms “see” and interpret visual information, highlighting elements the system identifies as significant. The boxes have the added benefit of drawing attention to how our eyes and fingers must navigate differently across these surfaces. Here we engage with the tension between physical and digital tactility—between the controlled, bounded experience of turning a page and the potentially endless scroll of digital content.
Meanwhile, Folio Fragments and Field Guide Distortions (figs. 2-3) employ fragmented compositions to further examine how digital media disrupts traditional ways of organizing and accessing information. Building again on the pattern of AI annotations, these pieces feature yellow boxes that highlight the tension between machine and human interpretation. The geometric abstraction framing the original archival image in Folio Fragments causes new details and patterns to emerge. In Field Guide Distortions, this effect is captured by AI annotation boxes whose contents and borders dissolve into pixels and halftone displays, further blurring the distinction between digital and analog representation. As vibrant colors bleed across these boundaries, the image becomes a metaphor for the chaos and the creativity inherent in digital knowledge systems.
Figure 4. Elise Racine. [Crow]dsourced (2024). Digital collage involving archival images, photography, and digital art.
By placing a traditional ex libris crow within the frame of an early personal computer, [Crow]dsourced (fig. 4) reflects on the shift from individual, physical possession to shared, digital knowledge generation. Historically a mark of ownership, the ex libris bookplate is recontextualized in an era of collective authorship and the crow, long symbolic of intelligence and memory, suggests our enduring drive to gather and share knowledge, even as the means of doing so evolve. Meanwhile, the fragmented hand in the corner speaks to the intimate gestures, or human “touch,” that persist in these virtual spaces and the collaborative nature of such acts.
Figures 5-6. Elise Racine. At the Altar (2024) and Holy Trinity (2024). Digital collages involving archival images, digital art, and artist-generated annotations.
In At the Altar and Holy Trinity (figs. 5-6), we again see the hand. Originally a symbol of religious iconography, it now also mirrors the anatomical positions for scrolling, swiping, and liking. These actions—scroll, swipe, like—form a modern “holy trinity.” While digital interfaces may seem to distance us from the materiality of knowledge, we must also consider how they create new forms of sensory engagement, ones that merge historical devotional gestures with contemporary, technologically mediated rituals.
Figure 7. Elise Racine. On Loop (2024). Video art playing on an infinite loop.
On Loop and Scroll A(n)d Infinitum (figs. 7-8), extend this exploration, particularly the destabilizing, distortive nature of digital consumption, with motion and sound. Both were previously on view as Infinite Objects video prints in Boundless: An Exhibition of Book Art hosted by the Arts Galleries at the Peddie School in New Jersey.1
On Loop captures TikTok as a contemporary vessel for knowledge-sharing, pairing the hypnotic feed with an audio soundscape of clicks and taps. Through its fragmented structure, the piece mirrors how our attention splinters across infinite content streams. Scroll A(n)d Infinitum critiques the infinite scroll as a digital reading experience by featuring a long-form article endlessly looping, with glitch aesthetics and chromatic aberrations visualizing the sensory overload of contemporary interfaces. As text fragments blur and degrade, nearly reduced to a binary code of 1s and 0s, the piece highlights how machines can now “read” these digital texts even as they become illegible to human eyes. With the rise of Large Language Models, it poses the question of whether we are creating digital content not just for human consumption, but for an emerging audience of artificial readers—algorithms that process and interpret our knowledge in ways fundamentally different from human cognition.
These moments of friction are precisely why the relationship between physical books and digital interfaces is so compelling. This goes beyond how our fingers engage differently with each medium to how we navigate and control our progression through content and how these sensory interactions shape our reading experience. I strive to recreate the sensation of “doomscrolling,” a phenomenon that arises from the absence of natural endpoints that we find in traditional reading material. The slight discomfort or disorientation viewers might experience navigating this essay points to our larger cultural moment of adjustment to these evolving forms of knowledge transmission.
This work invites viewers to consider not just how we read and learn in the digital age, but how these new practices reshape our fundamental relationship with knowledge—at once more immediate and more mediated, more accessible and more fragmented, more tactile and more ephemeral. Perhaps most striking is how contemporary knowledge is simultaneously in a perpetual state of transition yet immortalized in the digital ether—forming new archives that train the next generation of machines.
Figure 8. Elise Racine. Scroll A(n)d Infinitum (2024). Video art playing on an infinite loop.
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Elise Racine is a Washington, DC-based multidisciplinary activist, emerging artist, and PhD candidate at the University of Oxford. Using arts-based methodologies, her research examines the socio-ethical implications of emerging technologies, like artificial intelligence. Recent exhibitions include: The Bigger Picture (Beta Festival 2024, Ireland) and Unearthing (Sims Contemporary, NYC).
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1. Infinite Objects are freestanding displays housed in acrylic that permanently loop one video. They can be picked up and handled, allowing viewers to physically engage with otherwise ephemeral digital media. In other words, they make the ephemeral tangible again.