Diana Lengua is a philosopher working at the intersection of the sociology and history of science and technology. Her research examines how technology shapes human experience, particularly the socio-political dimensions of algorithmic infrastructures and agency. She recently submitted her PhD thesis on the notion of presence in early telerobotics in the Department of Sociology at the University of Essex, and was a Visiting Researcher at the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence, University of Cambridge (Michaelmas 2025 – Easter 2026).

She holds a BA and MA in Philosophy from the University of Milan (110 cum Laude). She is an Associate Fellow of the Higher Education Academy (AFHEA).

Her work has appeared in Media Theory, Computational Culture, and New Media & Society, and has been presented at venues including MIT, the British Science Festival, Trinity College Dublin, and the ACM Aarhus Conference. She has taught at the University of Exeter and the University of East London, and currently serves as External Examiner at the University of Portsmouth.

Currently, I am working on the concept of presence in telerobotics. A long-standing tradition views mediation technologies as tools that transmit an action already constituted by an agent to a remote environment, a surgeon operating through a robotic arm, an operator piloting a rover. I suggest that in these cases it is not only the action that is transmitted, but the agent itself that is redistributed: where the operator ends, and the system begins becomes an open question, and this indeterminacy is what I call presence. I am exploring how results from robotics, bioelectrical interfaces, and neuroergonomics can be reinterpreted in these terms, and what empirical questions arise from this.

The three questions I take to be central follow a progression. The first concerns the threshold at which presence emerges: under what conditions does an interface cease to be represented as an external tool and become incorporated into the operator’s body schema, to the point of altering the perceived boundary between self and system? This is the moment at which indeterminacy first becomes measurable, through the extension of peripersonal space, the modulation of multisensory integration, and the neuroergonomic correlates of agency and proprioception. The second question concerns what happens within that indeterminacy: when the operator and the system act on partially incompatible representations of the situation, the resulting action is not reducible to the intention of one or the algorithm of the other. What is the structure of this co-produced action, and can a genuinely irreducible regime, one in which neither party can account for the full trajectory, be distinguished empirically from mere computational complexity? The third question concerns what presence implies normatively: if the boundary between agent and system is structurally indeterminate during real-time co-production, existing frameworks that condition moral responsibility on the separability of human and machine contributions become difficult to apply. How does responsibility distribute when the very condition that makes attribution possible, the distinguishability of the two contributions, is suspended?

I am also engaged in a project examining the implications of human-robot interaction, in which I am applying this framework to a particular case. I am collaborating with the roboticist Dr Minja Axelsson on the topic of robot detention; we have been invited to present our findings, including at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), the 18th International Conference on Social Robotics (ICRS), and as part of the ERC Robotcrim project at the Department of Law and Philosophy, Jagiellonian University.

Other topics I have worked on include: [agency, ownership, AI, absence, interaction, emerging technology, bioelectricity, embodiment, neurocapitalism, neurolabour, synthetic phenomenology, android epistemology, world models, speculation, pragmatism, technogenesis]. Part of my work is informed by hands-on training in EEG signal decoding, which I undertook at the BCI-NE Lab, University of Essex.

Publications

• Lengua, D. and Axelsson, M. (in press, 2026). How to Detain a Robot: A Speculative Exploration through Design Fiction. Proceedings of the 18th International Conference on Social Robotics (ICSR).
• Lengua, D. and Sampson, T. (in press, 2026). From Ergonomics to Neurolabour: The Cognitive Architecture of Exploitation in the Age of Preintentional Neurocapitalism. In Turner, C., ed. The Ethics and Politics of Neuroenhancement. Berlin: De Gruyter.
• Lengua, D. (under review). Cognitive Horizons: On Post-War Telepresence, and the Epistemology of Human-Machine Interaction Systems. History of Human Sciences.
• Lengua, D. (2026). Presence Without Consciousness: Media, Machines, and the Metaphysics of Synthetic Experience. Media Theory, Special Issue Stimulating Media.
• Sampson, T., Markelj, J. and Lengua, D. (2026). On Modes of (Over)Stimulation: Editorial Introduction. Media Theory, Special Issue Stimulating Media: Cognitive and Sensory Approaches.
• Lengua, D. (2025). SOMA: Stories from the Post-Cognitive Era. Proceedings of the Aarhus Conference: Computing X Crisis (AAR ‘25). ACM, New York. https://doi.org/10.1145/3744169.3744193
• Lengua, D. (2025). Review of Kemper, J. (2024). Frictionlessness. Bloomsbury Academic. Computational Culture: A Journal of Software Studies.

• AI and the Return of Technogenesis: A Comparative Perspective, paper (to be) presented at Philosophy of Technology and AI: Traditions, Transitions, and Tensions, Centre for Science and Thought, University of Bonn, 4–6 November 2026.
• How to Detain a Robot: A Speculative Exploration through Design Fiction (with M. Axelsson). ERC-funded project Philosophical Foundations of Criminal Law in the Age of Robots (RobotCrim), Department of Law and Philosophy, Jagiellonian University, Kraków, 2026.
• How to Detain a Robot: A Speculative Exploration through Design Fiction (with M. Axelsson). Seminar, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), sponsored by Radius and Disintegrator, 2026.
• On the Unconscious Architectures of Digital Fruition. British Science Festival, London, September 2024.
• The Cataract Surgery: Emerging Perspectives in Spatial Computing and New Dimensions of Interaction. Screen Studies in the Age of Extended Reality and Synthetic Media, Trinity College Dublin, 2024.
• From Collective Hallucination to Neo-Somnambulistic Perceptual Act: Being Half Awake in Virtual Reality. The New Daydream Imaginary: On the Ethico-Aesthetics of Spontaneous Thought, School for the Contemporary Arts, Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, 2023.
• When the Virtual will Become only an Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response: Immersive Neo-Somnambulism, Avatar Without Legs, and User Experience Temporalities. MeCCSA 2023, Glasgow Caledonian University, 2023.
• Heuristics of Somatic Immersion. How to Study the Metaverse: Cognition, Embodiment and Experience in Immersive Worlds, University of East London Media Research Seminar, London, 2022.
• Fungible and Non-Fungible Waste: On the Problematic Status of NFTs’ Pervasiveness and Use. DRHA: Digital Matters, Berlin, 2021.