Sascia Pellegrini Chthulucene Visions: the Contemporary Obsession with Seeing, and the Denial of the Tangible Keywords: phenomenology, emplacement, visual representation, kinesthetic, acoustic communication, aesthetic, media, theory. Abstract This paper investigates the kaleidoscopic notion of vision in the age of the Chthulucene, the era that begins with our awareness of environmental crisis, following Donna Haraway’s teachings (Haraway, 2016). I am inquiring into the contemporary reliance on the sense of sight, fostered by the massive adoption of digital devices in everyday working and private life. I observe how the imposed dependency on digital devices and online connection for socio- economic purposes, has drastically rerouted the meaning of sensorial experience for many individuals; the latter very often reduced to the passive gesture of peeking into a screen, or moving a single finger over a mobile, laptop, or other digital devices (Flusser, 2000). I am observing that the personal ownership of these digital gadgets and the apparent freedom of choice in the use of the former, is a baleful trap, with the potential consequence of reduced scope, and nuance of the lived sensorium (Howes, 1991); reduced meaning of direct experience; reduced awareness of physical space and its tangibility (Classen, 2012). I am investigating the interstices, the liminal spaces of the current digital world, and its affect, following Massumi’s notions (Massumi, 1995). As such, I take into consideration: the seemingly reduced sense of emplacement, or awareness of the continuum between body, mind, and environment (Howes, 2005); the ties of the current hyper-digital obsession to an accelerated reality (Crary, 2013), functional power relationships in global economic systems, and mid-twentieth century zoosemiotic and functionalist cybernetics; the bio-technologies of bodily control and monitoring (Haraway, 1990); the obsession with communication technology and systems of the regulation of human behaviour (Foucault, 1995). By recording first-hand experimental investigation into the perception of various species of time (mechanical, integral, physical, psychological, cyclical), space (in terms of human perception) and the human body (Merleau- Ponty, 2005); this experiment relies on feedback from the author’s own body to bring the processing of sense-phenomena into focus. One example of this is an experimental design the researcher calls soundography in which space is probed and mapped through sound (Pellegrini,