Abstract

Starting from a forgotten machinic site in London I introduce the idea of shifted spaces whose investigation is the purpose of this work. Shifted spaces are seen as the deconstructed territory of the object where the subject is revealed. They provide the potential to act as an urgently necessary counterweight to the technological revelation in a Heideggerian sense. He sees technology’s revealing is a transformation of things as they are by a self-assertive and calculative mode of thinking that excludes the subject. To establish a methodology for dealing with shifted spaces the theory of a sensible geometry by Jean Nicod is discussed. In his geometric order which is built around a perceiving observer, the fragmentation of sense data and the notion of a sensible time form the core aspects. Furthermore the power of poetry is examined to open spaces beyond fixed objects. Both, poetry and the idea of an intuitive geometric order, are then applied to the ultimate operator of technological revealing—the machine. This leads us to the construction of sensitive machines as site for shifted spaces