Sensorium: Embodied Experience, Technology, and Contemporary Art

by Caroline A. Jones (Editor)

Artists and writers reconsider the relationship between the body and electronic technology in the twenty-first century through essays, artworks, and an encyclopedic "Abecedarius of the New Sensorium." The relationship between the body and electronic technology, extensively theorized through the 1980s and 1990s, has reached a new technosensual comfort zone in the early twenty-first century. In Sensorium , contemporary artists and writers explore the implications of the techno-human interface. Ten artists, chosen by an international team of curators, offer their own edgy investigations of embodied technology and the technologized body. These range from Matthieu Briand's experiment in "controlled schizophrenia" and Janet Cardiff and Georges Bures Miller's uneasy psychological soundscapes to Bruce Nauman's uncanny night visions and François Roche's destabilized architecture. The art in Sensorium —which accompanies an exhibition at the MIT List Visual Arts Center—captures the aesthetic attitude of this hybrid moment, when modernist segmentation of the senses is giving way to dramatic multisensory mixes or transpositions. Artwork by each artist appears with an analytical essay by a curator, all of it prefaced by an anchoring essay on "The Mediated Sensorium" by Caroline Jones. In the second half of Sensorium , scholars, scientists, and writers contribute entries to an "Abecedarius of the New Sensorium." These short, playful pieces include Bruno Latour on "Air," Barbara Maria Stafford on "Hedonics," Michel Foucault (from a little-known 1966 radio lecture) on the "Utopian Body," Donna Haraway on "Compoundings," and Neal Stephenson on the "Viral." Sensorium is both forensic and diagnostic, viewing the culture of the technologized body from the inside, by means of contemporary artists' provocations, and from a distance, in essays that situate it historically and intellectually. Copublished with The MIT List Visual Arts Center.

Genres: Art, Nonfiction, Technology, Science, Unfinished, Art History

268 pages, Paperback

First published October 1, 2006

About the author

Caroline A. Jones is Professor of Art History in the History, Theory, Criticism section of the Department of Architecture at MIT. She is the editor of Sensorium: Embodied Experience, Technology, and Contemporary Art (MIT Press).

Reviews

[Aimée]

Sensorium aims to examine “the current mediated status of the percipient center of human consciousness, while also historicizing the present condition and delineating trace elements from our collecting past” (Jones 4). The term sensorium refers to the sum of an organism’s perception, the “seat of sensation” where it experiences and interprets the environments within which it lives. The short essays in this volume focus on variations in the sensorium across social contexts. Most importantly the kind of sensorium we are talking about here entails the relations between the body and electronic technologies. The editor, Caroline A. Jones argues that while our sensorium has always been mediated, over the past few decade, “the condition has greatly intensified” (Jones 5). She claims that this is “a moment for artists and other cultural workers to interpret, think, and reckon with the sense of our mediation sensorium (5). The argument of the book is that “embodied experience through the senses (and their necessary and uncessary mediations) is how we think” (5). The authors suggest that the world is explained and experienced differently depending on the specific “ratios of sense” that members of a culture share in the sensoria they learn to inhabit—perhaps the contextual and socially learned nature of sensation. Importantly, new media artists work to make the sensorium visible. Practicing new media artists “are not interested in having us disappear within a given apparatus. They work to surface the effects of technology, making the viewer question mediation even within the pleasure of media” (Jones 3). [This can indeed be used to support Wysocki’s definition of new media for the 21st century].

[Zachary · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is an absolute must-read for any artist working in installation or an experiential medium. The deconstruction of our obsession with ocularity is not only refreshing but also allows us to move beyond it and reclaim our other senses in practicum. As for the Abecedarius at the end of the book, it is a wonderful anthology of mediums and references for any studio. I can't say enough good things about this book! I recommend it to anyone interested in the new paradigm of contemporary art or art theory in general.

[Lette Hass · Rating 4 out of 5]

Sensorium..
"The relationship between the body and technology, extensively theorized through the 1980s and 1990s, has reached a new technosensual comfort zone in the early twenty-first century. ... The art in Sensorium captures the aesthetic attitude of this hybrid moment, when modernist segmentation of the senses if giving way to dramatic multi-sensory mixes or transpositions. ... Sensorium is both forensic and diagnostic, viewing the culture of the technologized body from the inside, by means of contemporary artists' provocations, and from a distance, in essays that situate it historically and intellectually."