sK/n: towards a seamful grammar of distributed sentience

This paper argues that technical sensing does not extend the human sensory system but instead establishes a distinct, non-experiential sensory regime. Rather than amplifying human faculties, sensor-based systems register, process and compute signals according to operational logics that are irreducible to embodied experience. To conceptualize this shift, the paper introduces sK/n as a media-theoretical figure that articulates the relationship between technical skin (sK) and human, embodied skin (n). sK/n marks a split sensorium in which heterogeneous sensing regimes become operationally entangled yet remain non-convergent, and is structured by translation, asynchrony and temporal disjunction. Drawing on examples from e-skin technologies, interface design, (soft-)robotic systems, and artistic practice, the paper shows how touch and tactile input are increasingly translated into data-driven processes. This transformation is framed as a shift from multisensual to multisentient configurations of sensing, in which sensing is distributed across bodies, technical infrastructures, and computational systems. Rather than describing the machine sensorium as a system in opposition to a unified human sensorium, the paper proposes sK/n as a media-theoretical grammar for analysing distributed, asynchronous sensing regimes.