CONCEPT
Strange Tools
Noë's concept for artworks, philosophical practices, and other reflective activities that take the ordinary tools organizing our experience — and make them visible again, reorganizing our relationship to the technology or practice that had receded into invisibility.
In his 2015 book of the same name, Alva Noë distinguished ordinary tools — which organize our engagement with the world and become invisible through habitual use — from strange tools, which take the ordinary organizing structures and reflect on them, making the habitual visible for critical examination. A painting that depicts the act of painting, a novel that interrogates narrative conventions, a philosophical argument that examines the conditions of philosophy itself — these are strange tools. They do not merely employ their medium; they turn the instrument back upon itself. In the AI age, the strange tool becomes an urgent practical necessity: the means of keeping the increasingly invisible operation of AI systems open to critical reflection.
In The You On AI Field Guide
Noë's distinction builds on Heidegger's analysis of the ready-to-hand — the way well-functioning tools withdraw from conscious attention to become transparent extensions of the user's will. The experienced carpenter thinks