Sensory States and Objects (original) (raw)
Related papers
A Sensory Gaze into Embodied, Material and Emplaced Meanings
Anthropological Journal of European Cultures
Creative leisure occupations, such as arts and crafts, can give rise to meaningfulness. To date, much of what is known about meaningful occupations relates to verbalised meanings. This article assumes a sensory gaze to examine the tangible creative leisure occupations of three women in midlife. A sensory ethnographic approach comprising participant observation, a reflexive ethnography diary, and photo elicitation was augmented by semi-structured interviews, revealing the ways that meaningfulness is felt and sensed in the body through emplaced interactions with nonhuman elements: materials, objects, space and time. The findings provide fresh insights into embodied and emplaced experiences of meaningfulness in occupation in the context of meaningful ageing, illustrating how meaningfulness in occupation goes beyond what can be experienced or expressed in words, spanning both tangible and intangible themes.
Libri
This is our story, a tale of us, we the five senses as we experience an organ-isation. In this narrative, we ex-press and discuss our experiences as ‘Erlebnisse’ as a body in the every-day life of a ‘corporation’. As we would like to show you our role in sense-making and -giving in organ-isations, our sensual perceptions and qualities are described as concrete as well as generative media of meanings and aesthetics. We, the different senses are telling you about our embodied situations and letting you know about when, how and why (not) our sensitivity and potential for ‘aiesthesis’ are activated and vivid or stifled and excluded. The later one happens also because we senses have been deprived and atrophied under the regime of modernity, dominating in organ-isational life. As a structural and functional system this organ-sation seems to organise itself rather formal and mechanistic. Thus we face various snags, difficulties, obstacles and troubles while trying to enact our creative possibilities. Powerful conditions and constraints inside and around the context of current organ-isations try to use us in a limited, often instrumentalised way. At the same time we yearn for our aiesthetic expressions and responses to be awakened, and reinvigorated as we accompany the company. Thus by our reporting we try to communicate to you about our belonging and longing to play a more deliberate sensuous role and about the hindrances to do so. This re-telling aims at re-embodying us senses in order reconceive how we are always already present in the life-world you call organ-isation, which for us has diverse givens and affordances by materialities and immaterialities, facts and arte-facts, but also passions and actions. Thus, we senses are given a form and forum here for in-forming you about our very presences, but also our pressing challenges and sufferings, as we are neglected or merely one-sidedly exploited. You will learn about how we that is sight, hearing, smell, taste, and touch, plus one+: the mediating body and embodiment, experience and strive for an creative life – each alone and together. With regard (look!) to the latter one, it seems important to understand that and how our significance as a responsive community of senses in organ-isms and organ-isations can be considered and approached. The goal we are trying to realize here is not to fall into a romantic sentimentalism, but to reveal us in our inherent, living and expressive sensuality respectively sensorium and its impact on a different kind of sense-making! As what you call “sense-making” is mediated by us enlivened and enlivening senses, we are a sense-ful part(ner) of the work of you as member of your organ-isationor you as a researcher. Accordingly, your understanding of us, the look, sound, smell, taste and tactual feel is the very base for all your individual and collective perceiving, knowing, deciding, communicating, acting, in its i-n-t-e-r-relational being and becoming…
What Sense is there in Art? workshop programme (The Courtauld, 26 Sep 2016)
Throughout 2015/2016 the research project “What Sense is there in Art? The Politics of (Multisensory) Experiences” has promoted a conscious awareness of sensory experiences of art and enquired into the cultural, social and political implications of such encounters. These were conducted via visits to exhibitions, talks and the curation of an experimental sound exhibition. As an initiative that traversed all periods of art history and all types of art, this platform examined the evocation, mediation and representation of sensory experiences of art works. As on previous occasions, this final event aims to encourage the exchange of ideas about art and senses among scholars, curators, artists and the general public. Organised by Dr Irene Noy (The Courtauld Institute of Art)
Much has been said about the constitutive and generative potential of matter, of its vibrancy, endless productivity and resilience. With its impersonal kind of agency, matter is both a producing force and a relationality. New Materialism, specifically, calls for a refiguration of the question of matter, bringing new approaches to debates on embodiment and interactions among bodies. Finally, the troubled divide between the ‘living’ and the ‘non-living’ is shaken too, as it begins to strike us as increasingly obsolete. Accordingly, the present paper examines encounters with artifactual creatures in artistic practice. In looking at kinetic sculptures of Theo Jansen and U-Ram Choe, as well as Merleau-Ponty concept of ‘the flesh’, it develops an extended notion of interaction whereby organic ‘human’ bodies are invited to participate in the terrestrial biome affirmatively by empathetically responding to that which is non-animalesque and not even biological – artifactual automata. What is foregrounded here is the relative autonomy of artifactual entities, the immersion in environments defined by the presence of artifactual agents, and the possibility of a human-artifactual participatory becoming. Here ‘living’ material bodies are defined in terms of their capacities to generate events and regimes of novelty. A body becomes a meta-stable locale composed of diffuse responsive states opening up toward the entirety of an environment. Here notions of empathetic immersion and participation intertwine to shape a new ecology of interlacing material bodies with their singular forms of interaction and response.
Welcome to the revolution: art history and the sensory turn
Discourses concerned with the sensorially embodied subject have emerged since the 1990s in various disciplines including history, anthropology, sociology, geography, film studies and literary studies. The purpose of this article is to bring the conversation regarding audiences’ embodied engagement in culture closer to art history by investigating the implications of, what has been termed, the ‘sensory turn’ for this discipline. One of the accusations lodged against art history by supporters of the multi-sensoriality of embodied human experience is its alleged ocularcentrism, the implication of which is a detached autonomous subject. In this article, the sensory turn is defined and contextualized, particularly in light of the body of criticism targeted at art history’s emphasis on the visual. The proposed ways in which art historians might usefully deal with audience’s embodied experiences of not only immersive installation works of art, but also artworks in traditional media, such as painting and photography, are teased apart. Keywords: sensory turn, art history, multi-sensorial subjectivity, embodiment