Experience: Culture, Cognition, and the Common Sense

by Caroline A. Jones (Editor), David Mather (Editor), Rebecca Uchill (Editor)

A book that produces sensory experiences while bringing the concept of experience itself into relief as a subject of criticism and an object of contemplation.

Experience offers a reading experience like no other. A heat-sensitive cover by Olafur Eliasson reveals words, colors, and a drawing when touched by human hands. Endpapers designed by Carsten Höller are printed in ink containing carefully calibrated quantities of the synthesized human pheromones estratetraenol and androstadienone, evoking the suggestibility of human desire. The margins and edges of the book are designed by Tauba Auerbach in complementary colors that create a dynamically shifting effect when the book is shifted or closed. When the book is opened, bookmarks cascade from the center, emerging from spider web prints by Tomás Saraceno. Experience produces experience while bringing the concept itself into relief as an object of contemplation. The sensory experience of the book as a physical object resonates with the intellectual experience of the book as a container of ideas.

Experience convenes a conversation with artists, musicians, philosophers, anthropologists, historians, and neuroscientists, each of whom explores aspects of sensorial and cultural realms of experience. The texts include new essays written for this volume and classic texts by such figures as William James and Michel Foucault. The first publication from MIT's Center for Art, Science, & Technology, Experience approaches its subject through multiple modes.

Publication design by Kimberly Varella with Becca Lofchie, Content Object Design Studio.Cover concept by Olafur Eliasson in collaboration with Kimberly Varella (Content Object).

Genres: Art

352 pages, Hardcover

Published September 2, 2016

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

[Maria · Rating 4 out of 5]

True to its title, this is the sort of book you engage in for the experience of reading it as well as its content. The black cover is printed with heat-sensitive ink. The pages a strong and stiff without being too thick, and are bound (with black thread!) so that a spread will remain open as you read it. Four black strings dangle from the top to work as bookmarks. The body text runs down two wide columns along the center of the book, while notes, like an annotated volume, run in columns along the edges. The fore-edges don't have an image, but they do have color: from front-to-back green fades into pink; from back-to-front the colors are reversed. Even the pages that are solidly black, if you look closely enough, have hints of green and pink, a specific configuration of what prints call rich black. Images are included throughout, both photographs and diagrams.

A fun detail: the section on Seeing includes how The Dress is a good example of how "color judgments of any sort are context dependent." The surrounding controversy (do you see white-and-gold or blue-and-black?) "is probably the most compelling example of individual differences in color perception ever documented."

[Chris · Rating 2 out of 5]

Interesting for a while, but then the themes get repeated over and over. Also a bit too academic for my tastes.

Overall worth it for introducing me to Alvin Lucier's I Am Sitting in a Room.