We find ourselves amid an ontological drift in how existence is structured and experienced. Public discourse, social relations, and collective imagination are increasingly shaped—if not displaced—by the logics and permutations of an algorithmic spirit. This is not simply a technical phenomenon, but one that quietly contours the production of culture itself: how thought is organized, how action is oriented, how meaning circulates. Bernard Stiegler names this condition the proletarianization of knowledge, wherein capacities for thinking, remembering, and judging are progressively exteriorized and automated. Our continued participation in—and design for—these technological systems renders this drift both permissible and pervasive, making it a matter of contemporary relevance.
    Our relationship with the technological is not incidental, nor optional. It is indivisible, and it materializes the cultural imperatives of productivism and self-optimization that characterize the neoliberal condition. Through these imperatives, technology is configured less as a tool than as an environment—one that reorganizes attention, value, and time. We now find ourselves altered not only by how the technological constructs worlds but also by its modes of observation—cognitive, perceptual, and anticipatory, as postulated by Tony Fry. In this sense, technics does not merely mediate experience; it conditions what can be sensed, known, and acted upon.
    Attending to this condition requires learning to notice what typically recedes from view. The projected symbolisms, promised satisfiers, infrastructures, material and immaterial constraints, and—perhaps most significantly—the inertias that stabilize technological arrangements over time. These latent dynamics do not announce themselves as change; rather, they normalize dependency, habit, and compliance. Recognizing them compels a reconsideration of how everyday life becomes integrated with technological systems, and how this interdependence quietly prefigures possible futures long before they appear as choices.
    Trevor Embury’s inquiry and body of work take up this condition by examining how design operates as a form of programming within techno-social systems. Design is not only concerned with the formation, circulation, and reception of messages; it actively participates in and designs for the (re)configuration of values, power, and control. Through mechanisms such as visuality, language, and constructed environments including coding, design contributes to the maintenance—or disruption—of cultural legacies. These operations are inscribed within material and aesthetic conditions of mediation, where technological processes abstract, extract, intersect, instrumentalize, and circulate relations, meanings, and behaviors.
    His work seeks to problematize and make perceptible the conditions under which agency, resistance, congruence, history, and mediation emerge or erode. Through speculative and visual practices, he asks how design might engage these dynamics—not to resolve them, but to render them available for reflection and negotiation. In doing so, the work considers how social relations and ecological systems are shaped by—or exist in relation to—this so-called programming, and how we, as participants within an increasingly (re)configured world, might learn to dwell more deliberately within its constraints.
    His work includes printed matter, writing, photography, video, and site-specific installations and should be regarded as a means rather than an end, providing new perspectives on reified status, and whereby critical inquiry leads to “irreplaceable capabilities for thinking and acting well in the artificial.” (Dilnot)

︎︎︎Diagram: Yuk Hui’s Technodiversity and the Bifurcations of the Future. Published in e-flux Journal issue #96, 2019.

His practice is situated within the domain of inquiry-led, creation-based research—connecting artistic and academic discourse through scholarly examination, visual exploration, and critical reflection. His methods and perspectives engage critical discourse in fields ranging from cultural studies to ecological thinking rendered through the lens of graphic design.