[D]isplacing his own agency as the privileged (or exclusive) channel for media to enter experience, Crandall implicates his sensibility within the circuits and flows created by the ubiquitous media surrounding him precisely in order to open new possibilities for experience. Specifically, his self-implication allows this media environment to express its potentiality directly, as primary elements in the very gatherings in which Crandall himself is implicated and, importantly, to which he can bear witness... Crandall's performance positions the subject...as fully immanent to the world and as directly emergent from the total situation of any given gathering. To put it more simply, we could say that the privilege claimed by Crandall's performance is wholly relative: it marks the specifically human experience of a process--gathering--that can neither be reduced to this experience nor fully grasped from its perspective. Far from being a mere accident of its particular configuration, the partiality of the witnessing at issue in Crandall's piece is an endemic aspect of the experience of any gathering whatsoever. And what his performance underscores so effectively--here in marked contrast to most contemporary theorizations of computational networks and sensor technologies--is how the specifically human experience of gatherings remains central. By repositioning the human witness as an emergent phenomenon that is fully immanent to the world from which it emerges, Crandall's performance manages to capture both the particular "marginalization" of the human subject that occurs as human bodyminds are implicated within twenty-first-century media networks and the continued, if repositioned, "centrality" of human witnessing that alone can make this implication, and the greater expansion of environmental agency it betokens, meaningful for human experience.

Mark Hansen,

Feed Forward: On the Future of Twenty-First-Century Media, Univ of Chicago Press, 2015, pp. 267-8.