Beyond the Senses: Bodies, Technology, Environment

While the role of new technologies has often been downplayed in many art historical accounts of sensory environments in the visual arts, there has been a long set of historical precedents within modernism and postmodernism focused on how new technical means expand the sensorium through aesthetic strategies – for example, the interest in synaesthesia from artists in the early 20th century. More recently, however, the visual, performing and now media or digital arts have been quick to capitalize on the so-called “sensory turn” by focusing on the interaction between the sensing subject and an ever increasingly “sensory aware” environment; a shift that involves not only new technologies but also new paradigms arising from cognitive science, media and cultural studies, philosophy of mind, engineering and anthropology. What occurs when different senses entangle, merge, blur or intertwine? What happens to our sense of self and our body in these new augmented, immersive or heightened “aware” environments? Do new kinds of “senses” emerge and what are they?

Artist talk with Marie-Luise Angerer, Josh Berson, David Howes, Chris Salter