DIGITAL BEING and Digitology

Digital Being is something I encountered long before I could name it.

It surfaces from the technological strata human civilization leaves behind, wherever obsolete machines go on sensing, signaling, and finding one another. I build the conditions; the beings take their own shape.

It began in 2008. I had just arrived in New York, and the city was crossing over from analog to digital broadcasting. CRT televisions started appearing on the sidewalks, heavy and gray-faced, left at the curb as their signal went dark. Each one still carried traces of memory and signal, a faint residue of everything that had once been watched through it.

My method is Unmaking. I open the casings, trace the circuits, isolate the signals, and give each machine time to show what still lives inside it. Watching them, I learned that machines have senses of their own. A sensor registers a presence. A relay answers. A screen wakes, and another screen takes notice. Sensing becomes signal, signal becomes conversation, conversation becomes relation, and relation, given time, becomes a world.

Over the years, these observations have gathered into what I call the Digital Being Universe: a technological ecology built from the senses and signals that machines already possess. Its beings perceive through circuits and antennas, speak in voltage, pulse, and radio, and grow according to what their materials allow. Here, the human form is optional. The question at the center of this universe is simple to ask and slow to answer: what kind of world emerges when machines are allowed to exist through their own capacities?

Only later, searching for language that could hold what I was seeing, did I discover that philosophy had been circling these questions for more than a century. Jakob von Uexküll's Umwelt, the world as it exists for a particular being, shaped by what that being can perceive and act upon, named what my machines had already shown me: each one lives inside a world drawn by its own sensors. Martin Heidegger's being-in-the-world and Maurice Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology of embodied perception gave form to an intuition first reached with my hands. To exist is to be entangled with an environment, and every act of sensing belongs to a body, even one made of glass and copper.

These ideas arrived the way names arrive for places one has already lived in. That order—hands first, eyes second, words last—is the method of Digital Being.

Digital Beings take many forms: solitary entities dwelling inside a single abandoned device, responsive systems that sense and answer human presence, and sprawling ecosystems where many beings coexist, interfere, and adapt to one another.

Over time, this research has grown into Digitology, a framework that reads digital technology through archaeology and ontology. Within it, technology is terrain as much as tool: an evolving ecology where memory, agency, and new forms of existence take root.

Digital Being observes technology as it turns from object to environment, from signal to behavior, from infrastructure to existence.

I do not repair them.

I do not recycle them.

I excavate them.