Networked infrastructures extend action and perception across spatial distances while compressing them temporally – whether in telesurgical systems, algorithmic decision chains, or satellite-based networks. Yet where interactions appear instantaneous, temporality persists: not as a negligible residual, but as a constitutive condition. Every form of medial coupling necessarily produces temporal offsets – latencies, cadences, differential times. These delays do not disappear with increasing transmission speed; they shift, fold into the infrastructures, and become the structural condition of what can be perceived, witnessed, and held accountable at all.
The dissertation investigates delay as such a material-immanent temporal fold: a differential time in which technical, embodied, and epistemic practices are coordinated asynchronously. It asks whether, where, and how delay manifests in distributed sociotechnical assemblages – in which humans, machines, data, and infrastructures interact – how it structures perception and affect, and under what conditions it enables or interrupts witnessing. Witnessing is understood here not as a punctual act but as a relationally distributed practice in which responsibility and agency circulate between actors, apparatuses, and infrastructures. Theoretically, the project is situated at the intersection of media culture studies, cultural anthropology, praxeology, and post-phenomenology.
About:
Juliane Ahn is an interdisciplinary design and media researcher focused on complex human–machine interactions and their media-philosophical implications. Her research combines perspectives from STS, cultural anthropology, media philosophy, and spatial theory with design-ethnographic fieldwork.
Since April 2026, she has been a doctoral candidate and research associate at RTG 3064 “Technologies of Witnessing” (Techniken des Bezeugens) at JGU Mainz. Previously, she was a research associate at the University of Wuppertal from 2023 to 2026, where she taught interface and interaction design in the sub-program Design of Interactive Media. From 2022 to 2023, she co-led the interdisciplinary field research project Robotic Operations – Man and Machine in Surgical Collaboration together with medical professionals, investigating the perceptual and operational modalities of robot-assisted telesurgical operations through participant observation. This project resulted in her first publication: Beyond Boundaries (TETI Journal, 2024), a henomenological inquiry into the exteriorisation of the surgical gesture in teleoperative systems.
She completed her Master’s degree in 2022 at the Cologne International School of Design with the thesis A City on Demand, in which she analysed the algorithmic transformation of urban space through platform economies. Her Bachelor’s thesis, developed in cooperation with the University Hospital Cologne, used image and video analysis to examine the processes of translation and transformation underlying the access to – and intervention in – the human body in minimally invasive robot-assisted teleoperations.
Website: www.juliahn.de
Email: ahn@uni-mainz.de
