Also spelled as Artefacts…artifacts as the result of art or industry. "Technifacts?"
According to Leroi-Gourhan: the technological object is nothing outside of the technological ensemble to which it belongs. "As one encounters a new device or system,...it is crucial to ask what the form of this thing presupposes about the people who will use it." (Langdon Winner)
artifact/ideas: The ideas embodied in material things: the increased crystallization of knowledge and practice in the physical structure of artifacts, in addition to mental structures. Through the combination and superimposition of task-relevant structure, artifacts came to embody kinds of knowledge that would be exceedingly difficult to represent mentally. (see Bruno Latour, "Visualization and Cognition: Thinking with eyes and hands." Knowledge and Society 6: 1-40, 1986.) (see also Marion Waller Natural Artefacts) (see tech philosophy for "the fabrication of scientific facts and technical artifacts." )
Many of the instruments of Western navigation are based on the principle of building computational constraints of the task into the physical structure of the artifact. (See Edwin Hutchinson, Cognition in the Wild.) Hutchinson studies the ecology of tools, based on the flow of computational products, in which each tool creates the environment for other.
The technical objects or events that characterize a culture. Jay David Bolter calls these artifacts the "defining technology" of a period. "The thought of every age is reflected in its technique." (Norbert Weiner, Cybernetics, p.38) "If the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries are the age of clocks, and the later eighteenth and nineteenth centuries constitute the age of steam engines, the present time is the age of communication and control." (p. 39) cf. Kern's association of the culture of simultaneity with the telephone.
Cultural historians like Siegfried Gideon, Walter Benjamin, Norbert Elias, and Dolph Sternberger (Panorama of the Nineteenth Century) explore the ways in which the physical experience of technology mediated consciousness of the emerging social order, giving form to a revolutionary rupture with past forms of experience, and producing, as Marx remarked, their own subject.
cf diagram