[mediation | action]
An actant can be both human and thing, "literally can be anything provided that it is the source of an action" (Latour, 1996c: 53).
The mediator is an "event which disturbs what comes in and what goes out
What is translated through mediation is modified. ...
A communication is an event in time. If another communication is not linked to the event, then communication disappears. Communicative systems are systems of events that are recursively linked together in time, observed from the distinction between future and past (Luhmann, 1995: 37). What is new is a distinction in time, the signal of a "transition from an unmarked to a marked state of the world" (Luhmann, 1995: p. 55)…
As an actant, the mediator makes a difference as to what it mediates…
…
Works of art emerge and are perceived through a multiplicity of human and non-human mediators, and they are themselves such mediators.
... Such mediation is person-making or, rather, presence-making, re-sensing the event of presence through the redirection of attention. Presence, "by the very passage of time, is always lost" (Latour 1998: 434). Presence is an event that disappears in time if another presentation is not presented.
[BULENT DIKEN /Niels Albertsen & Bülent Diken/ Artwork versus Network]