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One of the most compelling effects of digitally enhanced and digitally enabled immersive exhibitions is their paradoxical dematerialization of “analog” experience. What leads exhibition visitors to accept that immersion is a state achieved only through technological mediation? Are we not already perceptually immersed in the world, as the phenomenologists asserted? This essay explores how digital enhancement disengages self-awareness by masquerading as immersion. In contrast, contemporary artists Karin Sander, Janet Cardiff, and Chris Salter employ desynchronizing and dislocating tactics to challenge naïve notions of what comprises an aesthetic experience, in order to requaint viewers with their own perceptual and ethical agency.

Cet essai étudie les avantages et les limites du sublime lorsqu’il est utilisé comme une stratégie rhétorique et narratologique pour représenter et décrire les animaux non-humains, et plus précisément dans les mémoires, un genre littéraire qui demeure sous-étudié mais pourtant riche et prometteur pour envisager les liens entretenus entre humains et non-humains. Au vu de l’absence d’une révision conclusive des théories fondatrices du sublime (e.g., Burke et Kant) qui rendent compte d’une esthétique clivante entre animaux « beaux » et « sublimes » et/ou entre humains et animaux, le présent article analyse deux cas (American Buffalo: In Search of a Lost Icon [2008] et Meat Eater: Adventures from the Life of an American Hunter [2012] de Steven Rinella) qui déploient le sublime dans des descriptions d’animaux vivants ou morts. Les animaux morts représentés par Rinella deviennent des natures mortes (ou mourantes) qui suscitent des réflexions, à la fois chez l’auteur et chez le lecteur ou la lectrice, sur l’éthique de la chasse et du bien-être animal ainsi que sur les tensions qui persistent dans les relations entretenues entre animaux humains et non-humains. This essay explores the avenues opened and limits set by the sublime when used a rhetorical and narratological strategy for figuring and describing non-human animals in the memoir, an understudied but promising genre for examining human/nonhuman relationships. Since few (if any) recent theories of the sublime provide a viable revision of the fraught aesthetic distinction between sublime and beautiful animals and/or between humans and animals outlined in foundational works on the sublime (e.g., Burke’s and Kant’s texts), this article analyzes two case studies (Steven Rinella’s American Buffalo: In Search of a Lost Icon [2008] and Meat Eater: Adventures from the Life of an American Hunter [2012]) that imaginatively deploy the rhetoric of the sublime in descriptions of living animals and dead animals. In Rinella’s memoirs, the described dead animals become still lifes which produce reflections on the ethics of hunting, on animal welfare, and on the tensions existing in the relationship between human and non-human animals.

After identifying some of the aesthetic, rhetorical, and ontological pitfalls of the nuclear or atomic sublime (the over-aestheticization of nuclear risks and the resulting absence of any sense of responsibility) this essay undertakes narratological and rhetorical analyses of one novel, Gerald Vizenor’s Hiroshima Bugi: Atomu 57 (2003), and one creative memoir, Lindsey A. Freeman’s This Atom Bomb in Me (2019). As this article shows, the two works offer alternate ways of representing and critiquing the beguiling but dangerous nuclear sublime while shedding light on a wide array of notions that are intimately associated with atomic culture but have yet remained understudied from this perspective, at least in the fields of (American) literary studies, ecocriticism, and the environmental humanities. These include the dichotomies invisibility/visibility (or absence/presence) and whiteness/color, and the related trope of silence. By engaging with non-dominant traditions and cultures (Anishinaabe; Japanese) and elaborating complex metaphors in the case of Vizenor, or in multisensorial experiences which draw on theories from new materialisms in Freeman’s, the two works converge to suggest that experimentation in the contemporary novel and memoir can lead to an ecocritical revision of the dominant and ocularcentric nuclear sublime, and of the risks it aestheticizes and conceals. ispartof: Épistémocritique : revue de littérature et savoirs vol:21 status: Published online

This article serves as an introduction to the special section on Sensorial Politics, which includes articles by Nicholas Caverly, Elsa Davidson, Susan Falls and Ali Kenner. The introduction outlines the arguments of the articles before proceeding to a discussion of the common themes they illuminate as a whole. In particular, they address four key issues: the relationship between the sensorial and the political; the role of sensorial disruption and its political effects; the issue of labor; and the issue of knowledge. We conclude that while these pieces advance our understanding of the relationships between the sensorium and politics, they also open up avenues for ongoing research and theorization, particularly in our contemporary situation, in which the Covid-19 pandemic has recast sensorial politics in new ways.

Background: The experience of Recreational SCUBA Diving (RSD) is unique and exciting because participants can feel innermost and special sensations. Aim: By exploring the role of the senses in RSD This paper seeks to illustrate the complex, kaleidoscopic and inter-relational connections beginner SCUBA divers make with aquatic environment within the sensorium experience for the first time. Methods: The present research draws upon the qualitative inquiry away from the positivist approaches to capture insider views, meanings, and interpretations. Audio-recorded semi-structured interviews with a convenience sample of 12 undergraduate students who had experienced a first-time SCUBA diving through Discover SCUBA Diving (DSD) Program were transcribed and thematically analyzed. A thematic analysis was performed with the Nvivo 11 Plus software package program. Results: Analysis illustrated that both positive and negative emotions are experienced due to (a) Diver Dimension of Marine Wildlife Touching, (b) Diver Dimension of Marine Wildlife Viewing, and (c) Diver Dimension of Marine Wildlife Hearing. Conclusion: The opportunity to experience aquatic environment for the first time during active leisure reflects participants’ ability, which offers encouragement, enthusiasm, well-being, and satisfaction. In unravelling the negative diving experience, as experienced by divers, we argue some physical and psychological distress and difficulty arise due to chemical and physical properties of aquatic environment, however. Keywords: Active Leisure, Aquatic, Sensorium, SCUBA Diving, Well-being.

Objectives: To successfully prescribe a homoeopathic remedy, it is important to have not only good knowledge of symptomatology but also an ability to closely differentiate a remedy from others indicated for similar conditions. Despite good knowledge of Materia Medica, its clinical application often fails. Therefore, the best way to understand Materia Medica is to study it in an actual clinical setting. Fright which is an extreme fear excited by sudden danger; something strange, ugly or shocking, is one such emotion that the homoeopathic physician encounters in his practice. Materials and Methods: Five successfully treated cases with prominent shades of fright from the author’s practice were studied to understand the causation, evolution and expressions of fright. The qualified expressions were studied through repertory and their finer shades were studied through Materia Medica to understand the key differential indications of the remedies prescribed. Results: The events or life situations that lead to fright and the patients’ response and its evolution lend a characteristic value to individualisation and prescribing based on differentiating from other remedies. Aconite, Opium, Stramonium and Gelsemium were drugs found in this study. Aconite has sudden and extreme effects of fright or repeated sudden effects leading to febrile expressions. Opium has prolonged effects of fright at the sensorium in the form of insomnia, but lacks the intensity or violence of Aconite. Stramonium has a fear of imminent danger or being attacked. The fears are intense, to the extent of terrors; the patient desires company and clings to persons OR hides and tries to escape from the situation. Gelsemium has fright leading to anticipation as well as fear of falling and/or receiving injury. Conclusion: In this study, plant remedies prescribed in higher potencies and infrequent repetition brought about effective resolution of fright in all five cases. The remedies also mitigated the consequences of fright on the mind and body and improved the overall susceptibility in all cases.

If the American presidency is a catalyst for and exemplar of the power of rhetoric, so too is the presidential museum. Indeed, the confluence of material, textual, and visual rhetoric in these constructed places of memory continues to make these sites compelling and influential. Much like its counterparts across the country, The Jimmy Carter Presidential Museum seeks to captivate visitors with an array of immersive exhibits that appeal to the visitor’s full sensorium. In this essay, I extend the concept of political scopophilia to better account for rhetoric’s impact on the visitor’s full sensorium in presidential museums. Through activating and enhancing the visitor’s scopophiliac impulses, the Carter Museum creates an illusion of intimacy in its attempt to refocus American collective memory around Carter’s post-presidential successes.

The human body is a central entity and analytic within African life and Africanist scholarship. The source of perception and the seat of animation, of life, it grounds experience of the world while also providing a rich set of symbols from which humans draw in political, social, and religious life to create and communicate meaning. Livingston reviews approaches to the body as a key concept in Africanist scholarship, tracing regimes of bodily representation ranging from the deployment of bodily symbolism in ancient smelting furnaces to the hypervisibility of the black female body in the European colonial imagination. She discusses a welter of bodily experience, from the pain of childbirth and the vulnerabilities of illness and accident to the sensorium or the kinesthetic power of movement and dance. In the process, Livingston considers developments within the field of African Studies via the body.

The range of available tracking technologies that target parents and children has increased dramatically over the last decade, providing functionalities such as location and activity tracking. Situ...

Accounts of the cultural aspects of food consumption have conventionally privileged acts of production and consumption rather than acts of disposal. In the case of eating, attention has been given to ingestion as the moment when cultural values are consumed and expressed, so that choice and taste preferences are presented as part of the act of consuming. As a result, the sensory dimensions of taste are located at the palate: flavor, aroma, texture, appearance, and sound. Yet processes of digestion move foods through and out of the bodies of consumers, thereby producing different sensory responses and cultural interpretations of those sensory responses. This article examines the sensory experiences of digestion through a discussion of how Russian consumers interpret digestive processes as means of engaging in and responding to larger cultural phenomena. Ultimately, by arguing for a politics of the gut, I show how cultural trends are deeply embedded in the most intimate bodily spaces of Russian consumers an...

The article deals with the question of primacy of verbal or visual modus of perception and representation within the long-lasting European dispute — ut pictura poesis or ut poesis pictura — as reflected in the oeuvre of the Norwegian artist Edvard Munch. It discusses the basic philosophical issues related to the phenomenology of perception and covers the main features of artists’ sensorium. It analyzes some of the features of intermediality in the texts of writing artists in general and Munch in particular. The author’s own classification of the types of intermediality in Munch’s works is presented. Munch’s paintings were often accused of being too programmatic. However, interaction between the verbal and the visual media in his art is much more nuanced. The article highlights some of the key principles central to Munch’s work and determines the main types of intermediality he used: paratextual dependent relationships (visual work — explanatory title; text — illustration; graphic work — later explanatory text to it); parity, or bitextuality; interpenetration, or synthesis, of the media (The Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil). The article also considers Munch’s visual-text work Alpha and Omega, an early comic book, as well as the types of mental narrative “frames” in his oeuvre as means of switching from the external to the internal point of view: the use of third person narrator, past tense, and pseudonyms. In some cases, such a frame can materialize in graphic form as a visual frame surrounding the text, as in sketches for Baudelaire’s “The Flowers of Evil”, or as an image included in the text, as in the artist’s diaries. The discovery of specific structural parallelism between the visual and verbal discourses in Munch’s art can be considered groundbreaking.

In this article we argue that menthol-containing products, like chewing gums, vapour rubs and mouthwashes, are used as moral things within everyday practices. They take on moral functions because of how their material qualities contribute to sensory experiences. Specifically, we focus on scenarios in which menthol products become associated with the moral work of care and highlight the temporal dimension of what people do with moral things. We review the literature on morality as a practical, everyday accomplishment and stress the embodied nature of caring practices to outline how care is bound up with sensory experience. We draw on rich qualitative data generated through creative methods, including film, photography and sketching, as part of object-elicitation interviews, focus groups, home tours and ‘pop-up stalls’. We develop three concepts regarding the function of moral things: manifesting, anchoring and conserving moral relations to describe how time, morality and the sensory are entwined.

The article examines the primacy of vision and the work of the sensorium: the permanently under-construction seat of the senses, that absorbs and interprets information endlessly to make associations that influence food and eating. It discusses how the internet’s social media photo sharing platform Instagram plays a pivotal role in food choices as part of our taste apparatus. The article’s focus, situated in middle to high-income countries, concludes that Instagram – as a particularly visual example of social media’s attention economy is potentially part of the transformation to more sustainable and ecological eating.

© 2020 International Visual Sociology Association. Brake and Aitken present artistic work, photography and speculative poetics, which explore the emerging sensorium of the vertical city and its tentative subjects. With reference to the case study of Anaconda Cut, Salford UK, the article considers the development of the housing commodity through its participation in aesthetic capitalism and the role of atmospheres and design in the staging of vertical lifestyles. The research considers photographs and other marketing materials related to Anaconda Cut as they evidence the deployment of atmospheres and the production of affective sensory spaces, highlighting the way renting an apartment is framed within contemporary notions of positional and hedonistic consumption.

This paper provides a close narratological and comparative analysis of Rachel Carson’s short story “A Fable for Tomorrow” (1962) and Susanne Antonetta’s memoir Body Toxic: An Environmental Memoir (2001), which both highlight the pragmatic and ecocritical potential of literature as a source of cultural responses to the Anthropocene challenge. Engaging in a critical dialogue with Brian Massumi’s concept of speculative pragmatism as presented in his Semblance and Event: Activist Philosophy and the Occurrent Arts (2011) and, more precisely, its aesthetic-political approach, the literary readings in this article build on other notions such as the unnarrated and the toxic sublime which complicate and enrich the literary discourse on environmental disruption. The literary works of environmental (non)fiction studied offer examples of how literature negotiates the (in)visibility, (un)representability, and (non)narratability of forms of environmental pollution through the use of the trope of the sublime as well as of olfactory and gustatory perception while they both portray the authors’ evident rhetorical intention to foster ecological awareness and responsibility. Article received: April 23, 2020; Article accepted: May 30, 2020; Published online: October 15, 2020; Original scholarly paper How to cite this article: Lombard, David. "Toward a Speculative-Pragmatic Sublime: A Narratological Analysis of the Toxic Sublime and the Unnarrated in Contemporary U.S. Literature." AM Journal of Art and Media Studies 23 (2020): 121-132. doi: 10.25038/am.v0i23.401

The article contributes to the literature on the political use of hashtags. We argue that hashtag assemblages could be understood in the tradition of representing public opinion through datafication in the context of democratic politics. While traditional data-based epistemic practices like polls lead to the ‘passivation’ of citizens, in the digital constellation this tendency is currently challenged. In media like Twitter, hashtags serve as a technical operator to order the discursive fabrication of diverse publicly articulated opinions that manifest in the assemblage of tweets, algorithms and criticisms. We conceptualize such a critical public as an epistemic sensorium for dislocations based on the expression of experienced social imbalances and its political amplification. On the level of opinion formation, this constitutes a process of democratization, allowing for the expression of diverse opinions and issues even under singular hashtags. Despite this diversity, we see a strong tendency of publicly relevant actors such as news outlets to represent digital forms of opinion expression as unified movements. We argue that this tendency can partly be explained by the affordances of networked media, relating the process of objectification to the network position of the observer. We make this argument empirically plausible by applying methods of network analysis and topic modelling to a dataset of 196,987 tweets sampled via the hashtag #metwo that emerged in the German Twittersphere in the summer of 2018 and united a discourse concerned with racism and identity. In light of this data, we not only demonstrate the hashtag assemblage’s heterogeneity and potential for subaltern agency; we also make visible how hashtag assemblages as epistemic practices are inherently dynamic, distinguishing it from opinion polling through the limited observational capacities and active participation of the actors representing its claims within the hybrid media system.

This article considers the ways in which sensory perception underlies the aesthetic appreciation of the Middle English Pearl. In particular it focuses on how sensory description and perception is u...

Proponents of present-day Science and Technology Studies (STS) tend to disregard classical phenomenological research by considering it incompatible with the performative turn in STS. The paper counters this tendency by exploring the case of so-called epistemic things and how this particular notion can be used to extend Heideggerian phenomenology. Heidegger is well-known for drawing a distinction between things that are ready-to-hand (i.e. handy) and things that are present-at-hand (i.e. unhandy). Although these two categories delineate many everyday objects, there are also instances where things cannot simply be considered as involving either handiness or unhandiness. One such example is that of drones used for detecting leakages in heat pipes. In being epistemic, these drones form part of a technical assemblage that can be used for uncovering and exploring suspected leakages – or knowledge objects – thus rendering the hidden visible.

In an attempt to escape the presentist and pro-innovation biases that sometimes taint (digital) journalism studies scholarship, this article proposes an oral history of newsroom computerization bef...

When religious institutions engage the secular emotively and publicly, they can foster an affective atmosphere of religiosity, which potentially has motivational power, even for non-believers, because it shapes the sensorium of those who circulate in public space. When individuals appeal to “places animated with prayer” for the transformative energy that resides there through ritualized practices, they reaffirm an affective atmosphere of religiosity. In Orthodox Eastern Europe and elsewhere, a confessional tradition is allied with state borders, further normativizing this affective atmosphere and giving it pronounced political implications. When an affective atmosphere of religiosity inspires practices that are intentionally designed to prompt experiences rendered meaningful in otherworldly terms, over time such performativity can create mimetic instincts that become second nature. This is an essential step to religion becoming an expedient political resource and to the emergence of religious nationalism or a confessional state.

An extended definition of “observation” is developed in order to account for the usage in the physical sciences and in neuropsychology. An observation is initially defined as a perception that has a focus of attention and is guided by theoretical considerations. Since the focus may change, one adopts a pluralist position according to which the object of perception may involve any stage of the causal chain that leads to perception, such as the source of light or sound, the obstructions, the medium or even the receptor. The “neutral” observations of the empiricists are seen as involving only low-level or medium-level theorization. Examples are examined, such as a lunar eclipse, the rainbow, and observations mediated by instruments, whose “artifacts” are considered observations of the instrument itself. One also defines null-effect observations. Observations of photographs and drawings may be considered either the observation of a printed sheet of paper or the observation of the pictured object or people. This causal-pluralist metatheory of observation also accepts that one may “observe light”, observe the retina, and observe parts of the brain which are outside the region of the “sensorium”. Illusions and hallucinations are analyzed within this “observational materialism”, which considers that qualia are self-observations of the brain. Criticisms that the approach is too wide in scope are analyzed in the conclusion.

The article is devoted to the scientific problem of theoretical elaboration and contextualization of immersive environment realized in the physical space of a gallery or museum, in VR and on the new virtual platforms on the Internet, as well as in hybrid space, in the augmented and mixed reality of the 21st century. The aim of the research is to identify the peculiarities of the formation of the immersive environment and of the practices of VR and AR projects creation in Ukrainian contemporary art in recent years. The task is to elaborate the theoretical bases of the development of immersive environments and VR, review and analysis of projects that use the digital technologies in order to create an immersion and AR. The methodology of the study consists in theoretical and field research of immersivity and in the author’s experiments development. The main method is a comprehensive and systematic approach to the development of the theory of virtuality, visual and photometric methods, analysis of concepts, spatial structure and technological features of online VR platforms and artistic realizations. The concept of sensorium is involved, which describes the feeling, perception and interpretation of information about the world around. The peculiarities of creating immersive environments in physical space in the projects «MetaPhysical Time-Space», «Refraction of Reality», «Living Energy» were explored (to be included into the national art discourse), as well as in VR in the frame of VR-festivals, such, as Carbon Media Art Festival, «Frontier» and «Virtuality» that serve as a testing ground for the development of new technological art. The possibilities of new online VR platforms, such as Mozilla Hubs, WebXR, AltspaceVR, artspaces.kunstmatrix, Cryptovoxels, Transmadatac Virtual Museum, are analyzed. The practice of creating VR projects on platforms on the Internet: Artefact Chornobyl 33 and Artefact Chornobyl + MADATAC, «VR Collider» and «Genesis» are considered as case study. Drift from immersive environments in physical space to virtual reality has been detected. The multi-vector nature of AR projects and different types of connection with book publishing, public art objects, contemporary sculpture and urban practice have been revealed., Розглянуто проблему теоретичного опрацювання та контекстуалізації імерсивного середовища, реалізованого у фізичному просторі галереї чи музею, у VR та на нових віртуальних платформах в Інтернеті, а також у гібридному просторі, у доповненій і змішаній реальності XXI століття. Виявлено особливості формування імерсивного середовища та практик створення проєктів VR та AR в українському сучасному мистецтві останніх років. Зроблено спробу опрацювання теоретичних засад розвитку імерсивних середовищ та VR, огляд і аналіз проєктів, що використовують дигітальні технології задля створення імерсії та AR. Як основний метод використано комплексний та системний підхід до висвітлення питань розвитку теорії віртуалістики, візуальні і фотометричні методи, аналіз концепцій, просторової структури і технологічних особливостей онлайнових VRплатформ та мистецьких реалізацій. Актуалізовано залучення поняття сенсоріуму, що включає відчуття, сприйняття й інтерпретацію інформації про навколишній світ. Розглянуто особливості створення імерсивного середовища у фізичному просторі у проєктах «Мета-Фізичний ЧасоПростір», «Рефракція реальності», «Жива енергія» (для їх залучення до національного мистецтвознавчого дискурсу) так само, як і у VR в рамках VR-фестивалів Carbon Media Art Festival, Frontier і «Віртуальність», що слугують полігоном для розвитку мистецтва новітніх технологій. Проаналізовано можливості нових онлайн-платформ VR, таких як Mozilla Hubs, WebXR, AltspaceVR, artspaces.kunstmatrix, Cryptovoxels, віртуальний музей Transmadatac. Розглянуто практики створення проєктів VR на платформах в Інтернеті, на прикладі Artefact Chernobyl 33 і Artefact Chornobyl + MADATAC, «VR Колайдер» та «Генезис». Зафіксовано дрейф від імерсивного середовища у фізичному просторі до віртуальної реальності. Виявлено мультивекторність AR-проєктів і різні типи зв’язку з книговидавництвом, об’єктами паблікарту, сучасної скульптури і урбаністичними практиками.

A través de la perspectiva y obra de las “Cinco pieles” del artista y arquitecto austríaco Hundertwasser, se invita a repensar la forma de permanecer en el mundo, lo que lleva a realizar una propuesta de análisis por medio de las interfaces, dejando a un lado el ámbito tecnológico y entendiéndose como lenguajes que derivan en ‘formas de interacción’ ambiental, artística y arquitectónica. Con esto se propone una visión más compleja con respecto de las “Cinco pieles” para la significación del universo, en la que se logre la convivencia equilibrada entre el animal humano, las especies no humanas y el entorno, como un todo de permanencia común. The perspective proposed in the work of the Austrian artist and architect Hundertwasser “Five skins”, invite us to rethink the way of staying in the world, which leads to an analysis through the interfaces, leaving aside the technological field, and being understood as languages that derive in environmental, artistic and architectural “forms of interaction”. This is a complex vision about to the artist and “Five skins” for the meaning of the universe, in which a balance between the human animal, non-human species and the environment as a whole coexiste.

This paper investigates the role technology and materials play in making meaningful connections between people, architectural space and the workplace. It indicates that design can synergize with responsive technology and material systems to leverage new power for future workplace interaction design. We have created a spatial prototype paired with a series of simulations that act as a proposal to stimulate workplace interaction. The project employs a responsive ceiling that combines a fluid computational pattern with temperature-responsive bi-material laminates with thermochromic coatings and electrically programmed micro-controllers. The project is then connected to a computer code that computes readings based upon ongoing interactions with humans wearing body sensors. The methodology categorizes the simulation results into aroused states and calm states. As the computational patterns and colors change, we are made aware of the relationships between space, technology, and the human sensorium. This conversation brings insight into how we can design more effectively for workplace interactions.

This chapter examines dress artefacts discovered in Period IVb burials at Hasanlu, Iran, as aesthetic, sensorial assemblages, and as agential phenomena in an era of political and military crisis at the site. The focus is a distinctive suite of dress items excavated in five female-identified, well-furnished burials. These dress assemblages include short and long metal pins at the shoulders, clustered finger-rings, beaded jewellery at the head, neck, and shoulders, and noisy, tintinnabular clusters of tubes and beads attached to armour scales worn on the upper chest. While such an ensemble would have provided a visual spectacle, its multisensory impact and potential for affectivity is not limited to its visuality. At the nexus of bodies, vibrant materials, environment, and society, this dress suite is constituted through myriad transcorporeal encounters. Not only would this assemblage have impressed itself on the senses of observers, but it would have provided dynamic synaesthetic, kinaesthetic, and cognitive feedback to wearers. In this chapter, dress is framed as a sensorial assemblage and investigated through the lens of agential realism to shed light on the role of the sensorium in the dynamic and deliberate generation of politically charged identities at Hasanlu.

In his Landmarks of Tomorrow Peter F. Drucker considers many of the new forms in modern production, management, and decision making. Just at the end of the nineteenth century Bernard Berenson had begun a crusade ‘to endow the retinal impression with tactile values.’ There was wide awareness that photography and other technological change had abstracted the retinal impression, as it were, from the rest of the sensorium. In his ‘Culture, Psychiatry, and the Written Word’, J.C. Carothers explains the strange effects of a small degree of literacy on African native sensory life. The African lives typically in the hyperesthetic mode of the ear in which everything is related to everything else in simultaneous relations. In a sense, the architect has always been close to the musician in his concern with sculptural contour and resonance, but today the architect or planner of corporation structures has become very conscious of the pressure of new media in creating new structural forms.

To offer some thoughts on the sensorial aspects of homelessness in North America, the author likes to draw upon ethnographic research that he conducted in a homeless shelter in downtown Boston, the main findings of which are noted in a book entitled Shelter Blues: Sanity and Selfhood among the Homeless. The point is not that psychiatric or political-economic approaches to the question of homelessness are necessarily misguided or incorrect. The shelter was set up by the Massachusetts Department of Mental Health, or DMH, in early 1981 to provide temporary housing for persons troubled by mental illness. Many shelter residents had spent a significant time on ‘the street,’ which most spoke of as if it was a single location with a singularly forced sensorium of fear, cold weather, isolation, and transience. Some of the otherness faced by residents involved commands and instructions asserted by staff.

Avant-garde artistic experiments are unquestionably recognized as relevant to the museum field in the context of art and museum studies. This paper aims to reconfirm their relevance in the architectural context as well, selecting crucial cases and protagonists whose final products were not artworks or exhibitions per se, but new (concepts of) space. These new concepts of space were all treated as democratic and participatory new media capable of training and modernizing the whole of our human sensorium. In this way, a curious partnership is discovered between this “experiential” art museum and the discourse on architectural modernity. Imaginary space, expressionist space, correlational space, multimedia space and situationist space – these are the principal categories that this paper recognizes as five distinct productive devices for modernist perceptual reorganization.

This chapter argues that heritage scholars, particularly archaeologists in the field of landscape archaeology, continue to reproduce the planter’s imagination. The heritage of plantations is embodied in daily cup of coffee, which arrived at the leisurely tables of industrialized societies through the labor of those who toiled in American coffee and sugar plantations between the sixteenth and the nineteenth centuries. In Brazil, heritage discourses about slavery have been historically constrained by the myth of “racial democracy” and only started to be systematically challenged in the public sphere. Heritage scholars have questioned the centrality of vision in the modern sensorium and how it continues to constrain the potential of heritage practices. Heritage production is trapped in the visual ecology of the Plantationocene. The Plantationocene is one of the most significant configurations of the contemporary world-ecology. Its social legitimacy is contingent on visuality to the extent that the inequality and violence generated in the plantation world are represented and embodied in visual objects.

The article discusses the relevance of sensor-technologies as media. Beyond technical affordances sensors act as agents of implementing and activating a more-than-human sensorium within encompassing technoecologies of sensation. Outlining the onto-epistemological implications of being ‘in touch with’ sensor-media, the contribution raises questions of what it means to be included in an infrastructure of sensorial interfaces - not only of tech-assisted human-to-human or human-to-machine communication, but of unmanageable processes of machine-to-machine exchange. Delineating sensors as media necessitates reflections on the temporal relations that define the ‘contemporary condition’ of intensified global computation, technological interconnectedness and the ontogenesis of sensor-media milieus, their respective temporalities and concomitant (an)aesthetics of experienced time.

ArgumentIt is argued that the sensorium of God was introduced into theQuaestionesadded to the end of Newton’sOptice(1706) as a way of answering objections that Newton had failed to provide a causal account of gravity in thePrincipia. The discussion of God’s sensorium indicated that gravity must be caused by God’s will. Newton did not leave it there, however, but went on to show how God’s will created active principles as secondary causes of gravity. There was nothing unusual in assuming that God, acting as the First Cause, operated in nature by means of secondary causes; but it was unusual to devote as much time to discussing God’s precise role as to discussing the secondary causes themselves. It is contended that Newton felt the need to do this to persuade readers that what might seem like a second cause that could not possibly work could be made to work by the omnipotent God.

Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in two different teaching hospitals that deployed the da Vinci surgical robot, this paper traces how the introduction of robotics reconfigures the sensory environment of surgery and how surgeons and their teams recalibrate their work in response. We explore the entangled and mutually supportive nature of sensing within and between individual actors and the broader world of people and things (with emphasis on vision and touch) and illustrate how such inter-sensory dependencies are challenged and sometimes extended under the conditions of robotic surgery. We illustrate how sensory (re)articulations and compensations allow the surgeon and surgical teams to adapt to a more-than-human sensorium and conclude by advocating new forms of sensory-aware design capable of enhancing and supporting embodied sensory conditions both individually and across teams.

While attention is widely recognised as central to perception, the term is often used to mean very different things. Prominent theories of attention - notably the premotor theory - relate it to planned or executed eye movements. This contrasts with the notion of attention as a gain control process that weights the information carried by different sensory channels. We draw upon recent advances in theoretical neurobiology to argue for a distinction between attentional gain mechanisms and salience attribution. The former depends upon estimating the precision of sensory data, while the latter is a consequence of the need to actively engage with the sensorium. Having established this distinction, we consider the intimate relationship between attention and salience.

This article draws on ethnographic and archival material to examine a contemporary, neuroscience informed politics of care focused on the child sensorium (understood as an embodied neurobiological endowment and material and political resource). I frame care-taking practices focused on children’s sensory endowment, responsivity, and difference as a form of biopolitical regulation in which children, parents, therapists, and educators are implicated. As such, I examine how such care intersects with political, economic, and educational forces and circumstances that differentiate North American childhoods and reconfigure expectations of children and parents. In the process, I relate medicalized sensory difference to shifting skill demands for children that emphasize emotional control in public and educational contexts. Moreover, I highlight how privileged parental engagements with scientific knowledge and practices of therapeutic care focused on children’s sensory endowments and difference articulate with these new skill demands but also deploy embodied sensorial–neurological difference/neurodiversity as a means to transform dynamics of stigma and control within children’s and families’ lives and educational contexts. At the same time, I show how attempts to cultivate sensory capacities and engagements with medicalized sensory difference are implicated in broader biopolitical dynamic of exclusion that unevenly recognizes difference/disability.

According to the colored-brain thesis (or qualitative physicalism), sense data or qualia are real physical-chemical qualities, located inside the brain, possibly at a specific locus. Our hypothesis is that the seats of phenomenal consciousness have a structure and a materiality. According to the proposed view, a chromatic quale emerges when a certain pixel of the visual sensorium (the hypothetical subjective visual “screen”, or Cartesian theater, with its specific materiality ω) is fed with a certain pattern Σ of spikes; a change in this pattern quickly changes the color that is subjectively generated. How could one manage to measure chromatic qualia? In principle, with nanoscopical techniques, one could capture all the patterns that fall on the sensorium, and transmit the information to other media. But this does not capture the qualia. However, if the patterns are made to fall on a tissue of the same kind, typically inside another person’s brain, this other person will have roughly the same subjective experience as the first person. The model is used to explore two different situations involving qualia inversion. The paper also explores Cartesian materialism, and the claim that phenomenal time and space are identical to a region of physical time and space.

This paper traces the sensory dimensions of nuclear imperialism focusing on the Cold War nuclear weapons tests conducted by the United States military in the Marshall Islands during the 1950s. Key to the formation of the “nuclear sensorium” were the interfaces between vibration, sound, and radioactive contamination, which were mobilized by scientists such as oceanographer Walter Munk as part of the US Nuclear Testing Program. While scientists occupied privileged points in technoscientific networks to sense the effects of nuclear weapons, a series of lawsuits filed by communities affected by the tests drew attention to military-scientific use of inhabitants’ bodies as repositories of data concerning the ecological impact of the bomb and the manner in which sensing practices used to extract this data extended the violence and trauma of nuclear weapons. Nuclear imperialism projected its power not only through weapons tests, the vaporization of land and the erosion of the rights of people who lived there, but also through the production of a “nuclear sensorium”—the differentiation of modes of sensing the bomb through legal, military, and scientific discourses and the attribution of varying degrees of epistemological value and legal weight to these sensory modes.

Sensory trademarks present a compelling case in which to explore the senses as “containers of possibility,” and this article explores the emergence and logic of sensory trademarks from a legal and marketers’ perspective. Using sensory trademark cases from the United States, I suggest that the current socio-legal environment opens a conversation about what I would call sensory capitalism—the monetization of the senses rather than the propertization of the senses—that requires intellectual property law to properly function. I argue that the sensory model espoused by the trademarking of the senses is one of the mass sensorium, whereby the “audience” universally recognizes marks as designating a particular source or origin of goods. The mass sensorium offers something quite novel, however, because embedded in it is the (corporate) promise of a lingua franca that valorizes all of the senses and generates a type of mediated affect that is shared.

How to cite this article: Singhal V. Clinical Approach to Acute Decline in Sensorium. Indian J Crit Care Med 2019;23(Suppl 2):S120–S123.

Proposing a radical vision of cinema’s queer globalism, this book explores how queer filmmaking intersects with international sexual cultures, geopolitics, and aesthetics to disrupt dominant modes of world making. Whether in its exploration of queer cinematic temporality, the paradox of the queer popular, or the deviant ecologies of the queer pastoral, the authors reimagine the scope of queer film studies. They move beyond the gay art cinema canon to consider a broad range of films from Chinese lesbian drama and Swedish genderqueer documentary to Bangladeshi melodrama and Bolivian activist video. The authors make a case for the centrality of queerness in cinema and trace how queer cinema circulates around the globe–institutionally via film festivals, online consumption, and human rights campaigns, but also affectively in the production of a queer sensorium. In this account, cinema creates a uniquely potent mode of queer worldliness, one that disrupts normative ways of being in the world and forges revised modes of belonging., 大﨑晴美(訳). 本稿は、Karl Schoonover and Rosalind Galt, “Introduction: Queer, World, Cinema” in Queer Cinema in the World (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016)の全訳である。ただし、本稿に合わせてわずかに省略または語句を変更した箇所がある。

Background This article takes a transdisciplinary view of the media sensorium by applying humanities, social science, and engineering perspectives to the relationships among sensory perception, cognition, and how people come to understand their worlds through the senses. Analysis The goal of this article is to engage with the provocation that the sensorium, a concept that Marshall McLuhan brought to media studies in the 1960s, provides the lens through which we observe that communication is the expression of cognition via the combined potentiality of physiology and technology. “Sensory technologies” are used as analytical vehicles in a technological journey from the Walkman to 21st-century telecommunications. Conclusion and implications The reader is given a call to action to use the full spectrum of the sensorium to locate and act on transformative contemporary processes underway. Contexte Cet article adopte une approche transdisciplinaire envers le sensorium mediatique en appliquant des perspectives provenant des sciences humaines, des lettres et de l’ingenierie aux rapports entre la perception sensorielle, la cognition et la maniere dont nous apprehendons notre monde par les sens. Analyse L’article a pour but d’examiner cette idee provocatrice que le sensorium—concept que Marshall McLuhan applique aux medias dans les annees 1960—nous permet d’observer comment la communication, en exploitant un potentiel a la fois physiologique et technologique, parvient a exprimer la pensee. Ainsi, les « technologies sensorielles » servent de vehicules analytiques dans un voyage technologique qui va du Walkman des annees 1970 jusqu’aux telecommunications du present siecle. Conclusions et implications Cet article invite le lecteur a maximiser le potentiel du sensorium afin de reperer les processus transformatifs en cours actuellement et d’agir sur eux .

If food is transient, so are the techniques, gestures, and know-how required to preserve it and extend its lifetime. “There is a life and death of gestures,” Luce Giard (1998: 202) suggests with a tinge of nostalgia. Casablanca-born and Marseille-based visual artist Ymane Fakhir (b. 1969) documents this transition with a sense of urgency. In Handmade (2011–12), a series of five minimalist videos titled Grains, Bread, Wheat, Vermicelli, and Sugar Loaf, Fakhir captures her Moroccan grandmother's technical gestures as she transforms raw ingredients into basic staples such as couscous. Documentary, memorandum, archive, narration, and video installation, her five films, like five fingers, record her grandmother's hands at work. The installation recreates her childhood sensorium and memories of her grandmother's nurturing preparations. Likewise, her films function as visual aide-mémoire and collective repository for a new generation of women, including Fakhir's own daughter, who do not (need to) know these techniques. In this article, I ask what type of aesthetic interventions her film segments propose, and which memorial and symbolic goals they achieve. More specifically, in light of Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia's 2018 common bid to have couscous recognized as UNESCO World Cultural Heritage, I focus on how Fakhir's video installation, compared to institutional projects of heritagization, works to restore the degraded cultural capital of this now transnational and industrialized dish, while speaking to contemporary anxieties about the industrialization of the food system in both Morocco and France.

A 54-year-old man presented with a 1-month history of generalised weakness and a 2-day history of altered sensorium with poor response to verbal commands and repetitive speech, along with headache and vomiting. Neurological examination did not reveal any focal motor, sensory, or cerebellar