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The Senses of Humor: Self and Laughter in Modern America
by Daniel WickbergWhy do modern Americans believe in something called a sense of humor, and how did they come to that belief? Daniel Wickberg traces the relatively short cultural history of the concept to its British origins as a way to explore new conceptions of the self and social order in modern America. More than simply the history of an idea, Wickberg's study provides new insights into a peculiarly modern cultural sensibility. The expression "sense of humor" was first coined in the 1840s, and the idea that such a sense was a personality trait to be valued developed only in the 1870s. What is the relationship between medieval humoral medicine and this distinctively modern idea of the sense of humor? What has it meant in the past 125 years to declare that someone lacks a sense of humor? Why do modern Americans say it is a good thing not to take oneself seriously? How is the joke, as a twentieth-century quasi-literary form, different from the traditional folktale? Wickberg addresses these questions among others and in the process uses the history of ideas to throw new light on the way contemporary Americans think and speak about humor and laughter. The context of Wickberg's analysis is Anglo-American; the specifically British meanings of humor and laughter from the sixteenth century forward provide the framework for understanding American cultural values in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The genealogy of the sense of humor is, like the study of keywords, an avenue into a significant aspect of the cultural history of modernity. Drawing on a wide range of sources and disciplinary perspectives, Wickberg's analysis challenges many of the prevailing views of modern American culture and suggests a new model for cultural historians.
Senses of Place (School for Advanced Research Advanced Seminar)
by Steven Feld Keith H. BassoThe complex relationship of people to places has come under increasing scholarly scrutiny in recent years as acute global conditions of exile, displacement, and inflamed borders-to say nothing of struggles by indigenous peoples and cultural minorities for ancestral homelands, land rights, and retention of sacred places-have brought the political question of place into sharp focus. But to date, little attention has been paid to the ethnography of place, to how people actually live in, perceive, and invest with meaning the places they call home. In this compelling new volume, eight respected ethnographers explore and lyrically evoke the ways in which people experience, express, imagine, and know the places in which they live. <p><p>Case studies range from the Apaches of Arizona's White Mountains to the residents of backwoods "hollers" in Appalachia and the Kaluli people of New Guinea's rain forests. As these writers confront the dilemmas and possibilities of an anthropological consideration of place, they make an important and moving contribution to our understanding of ourselves.
Senses of Place: Senses of Time (Heritage, Culture and Identity)
by G.J. AshworthBringing together case studies from Ireland, the Netherlands, Canada, Germany and Mexico, this book examines the link between senses of place and senses of time. It suggests that not only do place identities change through time, but imagined pasts also provide resources which the present selects and packages for its own contemporary purposes and for forwarding to imagined futures. The reasons behind the creation of place image are also explored, setting them within political and social contexts. In its three main sections - Heritage in the Creation of Senses of Place; Heritage and Conflicting Identities; and Heritage and the Creation of Senses of Place - the book examines the creation of place identities at the urban, rural, regional and international scales. It questions how senses of place interact with senses of ethnic/cultural identity, what the roles of government, media, residents and tourists are in creating senses of place, and how and why all these variables change through time.
The Senses of Touch: Haptics, Affects and Technologies
by Mark PatersonTouch is the first sense to develop in the womb, yet often it is overlooked. The Senses of Touch examines the role of touching and feeling as part of the fabric of everyday, embodied experience. How can we think about touch? Problems of touch and tactility run as a continuous thread in philosophy, psychology, medical writing and representations in art, from Ancient Greece to the present day. Picking through some of these threads, the book 'feels' its way towards writing and thinking about touch as both sensory and affective experience. Taking a broadly phenomenological framework that traces tactility from Aristotle through the Enlightenment to the present day, the book examines the role of touch across a range of experiences including aesthetics, digital design, visual impairment and touch therapies. The Senses of Touch thereby demonstrates the varieties of sensory experience, and explores the diverse range of our 'senses' of touch.
The Senses Still: Perception and Memory as Material Culture in Modernity
by C. Nadia SeremetakisWhat has happened to regional experiences that identify and shape culture? Regional foods are disappearing, cultures are dissolving, and homogeneity is spreading. Anthropologist and award-winning author of The Last Word: Women, Death, and Divination in Inner Mani, C. Nadia Seremetakis brings together essays by five scholars concerned with the senses and the anthropology of everyday life. Covering a wide range of topics—from film to food, from nationalism to the evening news—the authors describe ways in which sensory memories have preserved cultures otherwise threatened by urbanism and modernity. <p><p> The contributors are Susan Buck-Morss, Allen Feldman, Jonas Frykman, C. Nadia Seremetakis, and Paul Stoller. <p> C. Nadia Seremetakis is Advisor to the Minister of Public Health in Greece and visiting professor at the National School of Public Heath in Athens. She is the author of The Last Word: Women, Death, and Divination in Inner Mani, available from the University of Chicago Press.
The Senses Still: Perception And Memory As Material Culture In Modernity
by C. Nadia Seremetakis C Nadia SeremetakisHow can culture and experience be conceptualized when theorists drag social meaning back and forth between institutions, objects, or acts, as if the dense communication between persons and things were only a quick exchange between surfaces? This volume challenges mentalist approaches to material culture through the historical and ethnographic analyses of sensory memory. The sensory landscape and its meaning-endowed objects bear within them emotional and historical sedimentation that pose crucial questions: What cultural practices enable the sensory-affective experience of history? How does the history of perception speak to the perception of history? The editor, in her four essays, discusses sensory memory as a cultural form not limited to the psychic apparatus of a monadic, pre-cultural, and ahistorical subject but embedded and embodied in a dispersed surround of created things, surfaces, depths, and densities that are stratigraphic sites of sensory biography and history. The volume demonstrates that any ethnographic discussion of the senses involves a priori claims about modernity. Thus the senses are explored in contemporary political and racial violence, exchange practices, the emotions, national identity, food-ways, spatial organization, leisure activity, and the electronic media. Well-known authors examine personal and social investments in objects and substances as the tip of a submerged collective language of materiality that firmly grasps the mutable structure of contemporary experience. Social memory is treated as a meta-sensory organ and shown to be a culturally mediated performance that is activated by material acts and emotionally tangible artifacts.
Sensible Objects: Colonialism, Museums and Material Culture (Wenner-Gren International Symposium Series #5)
by Elizabeth EdwardsAnthropologists of the senses have long argued that cultures differ in their sensory registers. This groundbreaking volume applies this idea to material culture and the social practices that endow objects with meanings in both colonial and postcolonial relationships. It challenges the privileged position of the sense of vision in the analysis of material culture. Contributors argue that vision can only be understood in relation to the other senses. In this they present another challenge to the assumed western five-sense model, and show how our understanding of material culture in both historical and contemporary contexts might be reconfigured if we consider the role of smell, taste, touch and sound, as well as sight, in making meanings about objects.
Sensing Absence: Chapter 1 from Absence in Science, Security and Policy
by Brian RappertChapter 1 of this book is open access under a CC BY license.This is a chapter from Absence in Science, Security and Policy edited by Brian Rappert and Brian Balmer. This chapter is available open access under a CC BY license. Part reflection on the forthcoming chapters, part analysis of academic literature, and part programmatic agenda setting, this introduction chapter forwards the importance of questioning taken for granted assumptions in sensing what is absent as a concern. It undertakes this through initially examining what it means to characterize concern as absent or present in the first place. While absence and presence are often treated as binary opposites, it will be argued this distinction is difficult to sustain and unhelp for analysis. On the back of an appreciation of the inter-relation of absence and presence, this chapter then reviews the literature in sociology, ethics, STS and elsewhere relevant to the themes of the volume. A goal is to outline the methodological and epistemological possibilities and problematics of studying what is missing. By way of then proposing what is required, and to set the stage for the other chapters in Part 1, this chapter ends by asking how autostereograms provide a metaphor for viewing that can guide the study of absence.
Sensing Art in the Atmosphere: Elemental Lures and Aerosolar Practices (Ambiances, Atmospheres and Sensory Experiences of Spaces)
by Sasha EngelmannThis book engages artistic interventions in the aerial elements to investigate the aesthetics and politics of atmosphere. Sensing Art in the Atmosphere: Elemental Lures and Aerosolar Practices traces the potential of artistic, community-driven experiments to amplify our sensing of atmosphere, marrying attentions to atmospheric affect with visceral awareness of the materials, institutions and processes hovering in the air. Drawing on six years of practice-led research with artistic and activist initiatives Museo Aero Solar and Aerocene, initiated by artist Tomás Saraceno, each chapter develops creative relations to atmosphere from the studio to stratospheric currents. Through narrative-led writing, the voices of artists and collaborators are situated and central. In dialogue with these aerographic stories and sites, the book develops a notion of elemental lures: the sensual and imaginative propositions of aerial, atmospheric and meteorological phenomena. The promise of elemental lures, Engelmann suggests, is to reconcile our sensing of atmosphere with the myriad social, cultural and political forces suspended in it. Through tales of floating journeys, shared envelopes of breath and surreal levitations, the book foregrounds the role of art in crafting alternative modes of perceiving, moving and imagining (in) the air. The book ends with a call for elemental experiments in the geohumanities. It makes an important and original contribution to elemental geographies, the geohumanities and interdisciplinary scholarship on air and atmosphere.
Sensing Chicago: Noisemakers, Strikebreakers, and Muckrakers
by Adam MackA hundred years and more ago, a walk down a Chicago street invited an assault on the senses. Untiring hawkers shouted from every corner. The manure from thousands of horses lay on streets pooled with molasses and puddled with kitchen grease. Odors from a river gelatinous and lumpy with all manner of foulness mingled with the all-pervading stench of the stockyard slaughterhouses. In Sensing Chicago, Adam Mack lets fresh air into the sensory history of Chicago in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by examining five events: the Chicago River, the Great Fire, the 1894 Pullman Strike, the publication of Upton Sinclair's The Jungle, and the rise and fall of the White City amusement park. His vivid recounting of the smells, sounds, and tactile miseries of city life reveals how input from the five human senses influenced the history of class, race, and ethnicity in the city. At the same time, he transports readers to an era before modern refrigeration and sanitation, when to step outside was to be overwhelmed by the odor and roar of a great city in progress.
Sensing China: Modern Transformations of Sensory Culture (Routledge Contemporary China Series)
by Shengqing Wu and Xuelei HuangThis book presents the first collection of studies of the senses and sensory experiences in China, filling a gap in sensory research while offering new approaches to Chinese Studies. Bringing together 12 chapters by literary scholars and historians, this book critically interrogates the deeply rooted meanings that the senses have coded in Chinese culture and society. Built on an exploration of the sensorium in early Chinese thought and late imperial literature, this book reveals the sensory manifestations of societal change and cultural transformation in China from the nineteenth century to the present day. It features in-depth examinations of a variety of concepts, representations, and practices, including aural and visual paradigms in ancient Chinese texts; odours in Ming-Qing literature and Republican Shanghai; the tactility of kissing and the sonic culture of community singing in the Republican era; the socialist sensorium in art, propaganda, memory, and embodied experiences; and contemporary-era multisensory cultural practices. Engaging with the exciting "sensory turn," this original work makes a unique contribution to the world history of the senses, and will be a valuable resource to scholars and students of Chinese Literature, History, Cultural Studies, and Media.
Sensing Cities: Regenerating Public Life in Barcelona and Manchester (Routledge Studies in Human Geography #14)
by Monica DegenAs cities globally re-design their urban landscapes, they produce a different urban aesthetic and create new experiential milieus. Urban regeneration processes generate radical physical, social and cultural changes in neighbourhoods that demand new conceptual frameworks to address their impact upon daily urban life. Sensing Cities investigates the reconfiguration of contemporary public space and life through the prism of the senses. The book explores how the increased stylization of cityscapes requires an understanding of public life as a spatial-sensuous encounter. Degen examines how power relations in public spaces are embedded in, exercised and resisted through the sensuous geography of place. This sensory paradigm is then applied to compare two emblematic regeneration projects, namely el Raval in Barcelona and Castlefield in Manchester. By combining detailed ethnographic analysis and interviews with those involved in planning regeneration processes and those experiencing them, the book argues that a changing sensuous landscape is crucial in redefining people’s social practices, attachments and experiences in places. Focusing on two European cities at the forefront of urban design, Barcelona and Manchester, Degen draws on sociology, geography, anthropology, cultural and architectural studies to provide a critical account of the politics of publicness in the entrepreneurial city. With numerous photographs and maps this book stresses the ongoing, embodied and active nature of regeneration as a lived social process rather than merely a physical or economic exercise. Ultimately, Sensing Cities examines how urban regeneration is made effective through the organisation of sensory experience. This book is essential reading for students and researchers of Architecture, Urban Studies and Human Geography.
Sensing Disaster: Local Knowledge and Vulnerability in Oceania
by Matthew LauerIn 2007, a three-story-high tsunami slammed the small island of Simbo in the western Solomon Islands. Drawing on over ten years of research, Matthew Lauer provides a vivid and intimate account of this calamitous event and the tumultuous recovery process. His stimulating analysis surveys the unpredictable entanglements of the powerful waves with colonization, capitalism, human-animal communication, spirit beings, ancestral territory, and technoscientific expertise that shaped the disaster’s outcomes. Although the Simbo people had never experienced another tsunami in their lifetimes, nearly everyone fled to safety before the destructive waves hit. To understand their astonishing response, Lauer argues that we need to rethink popular and scholarly portrayals of Indigenous knowledge to avert epistemic imperialism and improve disaster preparedness strategies. In an increasingly disaster-prone era of ecological crises, this provocative book brings new possibilities into view for understanding the causes and consequences of calamity, the unintended effects of humanitarian recovery and mitigation efforts, and the nature of local knowledge.
Sensing Machines: How Sensors Shape Our Everyday Life
by Chris SalterHow we are tracked, surveilled, tantalized, and seduced by machines ranging from smart watches and Roombas to immersive art installations.Sensing machines are everywhere in our world. As we move through the day, electronic sensors and computers adjust our thermostats, guide our Roombas, count our steps, change the orientation of an image when we rotate our phones. There are more of these electronic devices in the world than there are people—in 2020, thirty to fifty billion of them (versus 7.8 billion people), with more than a trillion expected in the next decade. In Sensing Machines, Chris Salter examines how we are tracked, surveilled, tantalized, and seduced by machines ranging from smart watches and mood trackers to massive immersive art installations. Salter, an artist/scholar who has worked with sensors and computers for more than twenty years, explains that the quantification of bodies, senses, and experience did not begin with the surveillance capitalism practiced by Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, and Google but can be traced back to mathematical and statistical techniques of the nineteenth century. He describes the emergence of the &“sensed self,&” investigating how sensor technology has been deployed in music and gaming, programmable and immersive art environments, driving, and even eating, with e-tongues and e-noses that can taste and smell for us. Sensing technology turns our experience into data; but Salter&’s story isn&’t just about what these machines want from us, but what we want from them—new sensations, the thrill of the uncanny, and magic that will transport us from our daily grind.
Sensing Spirits: Paranormal Investigation and the Social Construction of Ghosts (Interactionist Currents)
by Marc A. EatonBased on ethnographic research, this book examines the paranormal investigation subculture in the US. Presenting interviews with investigators as well as extensive field observations, it explores their reasons for getting involved, their use of different investigative methods, the interpretive processes by which they individually and collectively ‘sense’ spirits, the ways in which these processes are influenced by small group power dynamics, and what paranormal investigation ultimately means to those who participate. While focusing on the practices by which investigators ‘sense’ spirits in small groups, the author also situates paranormal investigation within a broader cultural context and attends to how investigators attempt to legitimize their practice despite being marginalized by both science and religion. A fascinating study of ghosts as an inherently social phenomenon, Sensing Spirits will appeal to sociologists with interests in ethnography, interactionism, cultural studies and subcultures.
Sensing the Divine: Influences of Near-Death, Out-of-Body & Cognate Neurology in Shaping Early Religious Behaviours (New Approaches to the Scientific Study of Religion #9)
by Michael N. MarshThis book proposes another unique basis for the origins of religion from disturbances in brain function. It proposes the novel idea that near-death and out-of-body experiences (ND/OBE) engendered “a sense of the divine” in ancient man.As the author points out, key aspects of ND/OBE are thematic of all later established religions. These include journeys to heaven, sightings of brightly-lit godlike figures, and dead people now alive. Thus, ND/OBE could be the originating source of these spiritual motifs. To this, the author adds a fourth factor: various brain influences contribute to or modulate ND/OBE. Such cognate neurological disorders include REM-sleep intrusions, sleep paralysis, narcolepsy, and the Guillain-Barré syndrome. Errors due to aberrant switching between key neural control centers disrupt critical state-boundaries between consciousness and dreaming. This may induce NDE. Thus, in this state, subjects temporarily fail to understand where they are, undergo loss of self, and detached from the world. They imagine a “union with Gods.” Here, then, is the biological basis of ineffability.Ancient humans gained beliefs about the "supernatural" through day-to-day existence. This book argues that near death experiences and cognate neurological conditions, some genetically-determined, could have facilitated, even augmented such beliefs. Hence, in configuring another realm of “spiritual” experience beyond the known environment, these neurological possibilities offer effective traction.
Sensing the Everyday: Dialogues from Austerity Greece (Theorizing Ethnography)
by C. Nadia SeremetakisSensing the Everyday is a multi-sited ethnographic inquiry based on fieldwork experiences and sharp everyday observations in the era of crisis. Blending sophisticated theoretical analyses with original ethnographic data, C. Nadia Seremetakis journeys from Greece to Vienna, Edinburgh, Albania, Ireland, and beyond. Social crisis is seen through its transnational multiplication of borders, thresholds and margins, divisions, and localities as linguistic, bodily, sensory, and performative sites of the quotidian in process. The book proposes everyday life not as a sanctuary or as a recessed zone distanced from the structural violence of the state and the market, but as a condition of im/possibility, unable to be lived as such, yet still an encapsulating habitus. There the impossibility of the quotidian is concretized as fragmentary and fragmenting material forces. Seremetakis weaves together topics as diverse as borders and bodies, history and death, the earth and the senses, language and affect, violence and public culture, the sociality of dreaming, and the spatialization of the traumatic, in a journey through antiphonic witnessing and memory. Her montage explores various ways of juxtaposing reality with the irreal and the imaginal to expose the fictioning of social reality. The book locates her approach to ethnography and the ‘native ethnographer’ in wider anthropological and philosophical debates, and proposes a dialogical interfacing of theory and practice, the translation of academic knowledge to public knowledge
Sensing the World: An Anthropology of the Senses (Sensory Studies)
by David Le BretonSensing the World: An Anthropology of the Senses is a highly original and comprehensive overview of the anthropology and sociology of the body and the senses. Discussing each sense in turn – seeing, hearing, touch, smell, and taste – Le Breton has written a truly monumental work, vast in scope and deeply engaging in style. Among other pioneering moves, he gives equal attention to light and darkness, sound and silence, and his disputation of taste explores aspects of disgust and revulsion. Part phenomenological, part historical, this is above all a cultural account of perception, which returns the body and the senses to the center of social life. Le Breton is the leading authority on the anthropology of the body and the senses in French academia. With a repute comparable to the late Pierre Bourdieu, his 30+ books have been translated into numerous languages. This is the first of his works to be made available in English. This sensuously nuanced translation of La Saveur du monde is accompanied by a spicy preface from series editor David Howes, who introduces Le Breton's work to an English-speaking audience and highlights its implications for the disciplines of anthropology, sociology, and the cross-disciplinary field of sensory studies.
Sensitive Research in Social Work
by Sharif HaiderThis book addresses issues related with researching sensitive topics in social work, focusing on marginalized, vulnerable and hard to reach people. It covers the definition, characteristics, challenges and opportunities of sensitive research, its philosophical roots and methodological debates, and the skills and values that are required along with the ethical, political and legal issues involved in conducting social work research. This book will cover innovative research methods appropriate for research on sensitive topics involving vulnerable people. It shines light on how to use traditional research methods sensitively, and how to generate data while minimizing the harm that can potentially be caused to research participants and researchers.
Sensitive Subjects: The Political Aesthetics of Contemporary German and Austrian Cinema (Film Europa #23)
by Leila MukhidaBoth politically and aesthetically, the contemporary German and Austrian film landscape is a far cry from the early days of the medium, when critics like Siegfried Kracauer produced foundational works of film theory amid the tumult of the early twentieth century. Yet, as Leila Mukhida demonstrates in this innovative study, the writings of figures like Kracauer and Walter Benjamin in fact remain an undervalued tool for understanding political cinema today. Through illuminating explorations of Michael Haneke, Valeska Grisebach, Andreas Dresen, and other filmmakers of the post-reunification era, Mukhida develops an analysis centered on film aesthetics and experience, showing how medium-specific devices like lighting, sound, and mise-en-scène can help to cultivate political sensitivity in spectators.
The Sensitives: The Rise of Environmental Illness and the Search for America's Last Pure Place
by Oliver BroudyA compelling exploration of the mysteries of environmental toxicity and the community of &“sensitives&”—people with powerful, puzzling symptoms resulting from exposure to chemicals, fragrances, and cell phone signals, that have no effect on &“normals.&”They call themselves &“sensitives.&” Over fifty million Americans endure a mysterious environmental illness that renders them allergic to chemicals. Innocuous staples from deodorant to garbage bags wreak havoc on sensitives. For them, the enemy is modernity itself. No one is born with EI. It often starts with a single toxic exposure. Then the symptoms hit: extreme fatigue, brain fog, muscle aches, inability to tolerate certain foods. With over 85,000 chemicals in the environment, danger lurks around every corner. Largely ignored by the medical establishment and dismissed by family and friends, sensitives often resort to odd ersatz remedies, like lining their walls with aluminum foil or hanging mail on a clothesline for days so it can &“off-gas&” before they open it. Broudy encounters Brian Welsh, a prominent figure in the EI community, and quickly becomes fascinated by his plight. When Brian goes missing, Broudy travels with James, an eager, trusting sensitive to find Brian, investigate this disease, and delve into the intricate, ardent subculture that surrounds it. Their destination: Snowflake, the capital of the EI world. Located in eastern Arizona, it is a haven where sensitives can live openly without fear of toxins or the judgment of insensitive &“normals.&” While Broudy&’s book is wry, pacey, and down-to-earth, it also dives deeply into compelling corners of medical and American history. He finds telling parallels between sensitives and their cultural forebears, from the Puritans to those refugees and dreamers who settled the West. Ousted from mainstream society, these latter-day exiles nonetheless shed bright light on the anxious, noxious world we all inhabit now.
Senso: Letters to the Editor of "Asahi Shimbun"
by Frank Gibney Beth CaryThis acclaimed work is an extraordinary collection of letters written by a wide cross-section of Japanese citizens to one of Japan's leading newspapers, expressing their personal reminiscences and opinions of the Pacific war. "SENSO" provides the general reader and the specialist with moving, disturbing, startling insights on a subject deliberately swept under the rug, both by Japan's citizenry and its government. It is an invaluable index of Japanese public opinion about the war.
Sensorial Investigations: A History of the Senses in Anthropology, Psychology, and Law (Perspectives on Sensory History)
by David HowesDavid Howes’s sweeping history of the senses in the disciplines of anthropology and psychology and in the field of law lays the foundations for a sensational jurisprudence, or a way to do justice to and by the senses of other people.In part 1, Howes demonstrates how sensory ethnography has yielded alternative insights into how the senses function and argues convincingly that each culture should be approached on its own sensory terms. Part 2 documents how the senses have been disciplined psychologically within the Western tradition, starting with Aristotle and moving through the rise of Lockean empiricism and cognitive neuroscience. Here, Howes presents an anthropologically informed critique of experimental and cognitive psychology, sensory science, and phenomenology. In part 3, he introduces the paradigm of the “historical anthropology of the senses and sensation” and applies it to the analysis of trade relations between Europe and China in the early modern period, to the treaty-making process in North America during the colonial period, and to all the unresolved disputes over land rights and Indigenous sovereignty that continue to this day, arguing that these differences are rooted in a cultural clash of sensoria.Designed for the classroom, Sensorial Investigations displays an expansive critical engagement with generations of scholarship. It is essential reading for students and scholars of the history and anthropology of the senses, the psychology of sensation, and socio-legal studies.
The Sensorium of the Drone and Communities
by Kathrin MaurerA comprehensive overview of how civilian drones sense the world and how they build the aesthetic imaginaries of our communities.Drone technology has garnered critical attention across many fields, from engineering to the humanities. While the first wave of drone scholarship was key in initiating the debate on drones, it also privileged the idea of the &“scopic regime&”—a militarized regime of hypervisuality—in its analyses of the connection between vision and power. The Sensorium of the Drone and Communities broadens the drone&’s spectrum of perception by acknowledging its creative, life-affirming possibility with the notion of the sensorium. The sensorium of the drone is a multimedia, synesthetic sensing assemblage in which the human agent is enmeshed with the drone. Drone sensoria can sense in many more ways than the scopic regime—with sound, touch, smell, temperature, and movement.In The Sensorium of the Drone and Communities, Kathrin Maurer shows how drone sensoria can change our understanding of human communities by constructing imaginaries of social communities based on decentralized and fluid sensing processes. Maurer takes an aesthetic approach to technology, working with two understandings of aesthetics. One understanding refers to aesthetics as a way of experiencing, and it explores how the drone-human assemblage perceives the world. The other refers to aesthetic mimetic representation, and focuses on how aesthetic drone imaginaries in literature, popular culture, visual arts, and films negotiate the sensorial technology of the drone.Bringing together key ideas in technology studies, studies of aerial views, visual and aesthetic studies, posthuman sensing, machine–human interaction, and communities, The Sensorium of the Drone and Communities sheds a welcome and necessary light on this technology&’s creative potential as well as its dangers and risks.
Sensory Arts and Design (Sensory Studies)
by Ian HeywoodArtists, designers and researchers are increasingly seeking new ways to understand and explore the creative and practical significance of the senses. This ground-breaking book brings art and design into the field of sensory studies providing a clear introduction to the field and outlining important developments and new directions. A compelling exploration of both theory and practice, Sensory Arts and Design brings together a wide variety of examples from contemporary art and design which share a sensory dimension in their development or user experience. Divided into three parts, the book examines the design applications of new technology with sensing capacities; the role of the senses in creating new imaginative environments; and the significance of the senses within different cultural practices. The thirteen chapters cover a highly diverse range of issues – from the urban environment, architecture and soundscapes to gustatory art, multisensory perception in painting, music and drawing, and the relationship between vision and smell. Initiated by Insight, a research group at Lancaster Institute for the Contemporary Arts –widely recognised as a center of research excellence – the project brings together a team of experts from Britain, Europe and North America. This timely book is destined to make a significant contribution to the scholarly development of this emerging field. An important read for students and scholars in sensory studies, design, art, and visual culture.