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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.

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.

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.

© 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...

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.

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.

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.

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.

The aim of this paper is to argue for an interdisciplinary research agenda to the study of reading. We discuss the methodological and educational/practical challenges and opportunities that an embodied cognitive and distributed language perspective entails for literacy and education research. Although an increasing body of research pivots on the embodiment of reading, reading still tends to be theorised as a sequence of internal processes used to interpret texts. A distributed perspective replaces this code view with an embodied and multi-scalar description of the activity. This ‘embodied turn’ generates valuable results that involve not only the whole body (as a multi-sensory organ), but a historical, skilled body that affects the reading ecology. Consequently, an embodied and distributed perspective is not only a matter of drawing on multiple sensory modalities in the here-and-now that conglomerate in the human sensorium, it also highlights the interconnected habits that enable readers to enact cultural practices based on writing systems. Skilled linguistic action allows readers to construe symbolizations, re-evoking parts of their individual life experience. Embodiment thus involves a perspective that links multiple timescales, thereby moving beyond local coordination of body and artefact. While the sensorial richness of our body is a prerequisite for engaging with a text, the reading activity becomes even more complex than interconnecting the many bodily modalities, when we think of the body in terms of lived experience. Building on this multi-scalar view, the paper seeks to demonstrate the integrative potential of a distributed approach to reading as well as some initial educational implications of such a distributed perspective.

Leaning on two fields of expertise (literary studies and film studies), this chapter discusses two particular scenarios of the shared imagination of neoliberalism, which allow the unfolding of different considerations regarding the Pacific. In the first scenario, I go to the question of history and the erasure of the Pacific, and discuss the book La casa del dolor ajeno by the Mexican writer Julian Herbert. The second scenario is the Latin American connection in the work of the Hong Kong filmmaker Wong Kar-Wai, addressing the question of imagination and sensorium, or the way in which neoliberal aesthetics and affects connect across the Pacific. In doing so, I propose to think the transpacific relations as a shared history and contemporaneity of affective experience. This, in turn, seeks to argue for the need to think transpacific cultural flows and circulations beyond topics of representation, identity and Otherness.

Recent studies on plant-environment and plant-human relationships reveal the need to reassess thescales of perception, sensitiveness and cognition of living systems. The complexity of plant's emergingbehaviors in interaction with the environment is supported by the signature of the electrome and theplant sensorium, a strong argument to establish the singularity of the living and weights its consequencesin evolutionary, ecological or socioeconomic terms. This paper highlights the cognitive value of access tothe experience of plants and its fundamentally mesological or ecoplastic nature, that is to say in directconnection with a singular milieu. This dynamic coupling makes it possible to explain the co-construction ofan intelligible and sensible world without the use of a brain, principle that reframes the concept of intelligentbehavior while revealing both the frontiers in cognition and the strong transdisciplinary challenges of anacute awareness of the man's fragility as of the planetary ecosystem at the era of the Antropocene.

If we’re alive, awake and aware, then something is going on in our brain which produces in us the sensation of being present and engaged with the world. Our sensations are usually fairly specific, and seem to bring us information about conditions in our immediate environment or in our bodies. The information they bring us is not couched in any language, but is made known to us directly. Spontaneously and without instruction, an infant or small animal knows that a certain feeling is a pain in its toe, another is a feeling of heat or cold, another is a sensation of the color red in a red object.

Ronak K. Kapadia’s deeply conversant and well researched 'Insurgent Aesthetics: Security and the Queer Life of the Forever War' brings queer, affect-oriented methodologies to bear on an analysis of Arab, Muslim, and South Asian diasporic art. It is these communities after all, Kapadia points out, who undergo increased scrutiny in the United States and Europe after September 11, 2001. According to the author, these diasporic artists engage in an insurgent aesthetic “against empire’s built sensorium,” which is a visual cultural practice that offers an alternative embodied critique of “US empire’s perverse logics of carcerality, security, and war” (10).

This chapter points to the presence of a tactile politics of perception that might help us understand the intersections between human subjectivity and the social collectivity. A long tradition of Western philosophical reflection on the senses has identified touch as the lowest sense, the most animal, servile, and unconscious of the resources of the human sensorium. At the same time touch was conceptualized as the most fundamental sense and the basis of all sensory perception. In American history, an acutely developed tactile understanding of sacred energy has often been invoked as a defining feature of religion and politics. This tactile understanding is sensitive both to the transgressive and punitive qualities of heat and to its vitalizing properties. Among the many evocations of “sacred fire” to be found in American culture, one seemingly marginal ritual, firewalking, had gained a considerable following by the end of the 1990s.

Sovint, els nostres intents de connectar-nos amb les escales espacials i temporals de la fisica fonamental, des de la subatomica fins al multivers, provoquen una forma de vertigen perceptiu, especialment per als no cientifics. Quan abordem idees d’abstraccio paralitzant per mitja del rang perceptual dels nostres cossos sensorials, es pot dir que s’invoca una «dissonancia fenomenologica» entre la presencia material i la llunyania radical. Aquesta dinamica relacional entre la materialitat i la llunyania representa el trampoli conceptual de «Material Sight» (2016-2018), un projecte de recerca realitzat en tres dels principals centres internacionals de fisica fonamental, que presenta un corpus d’objectes fotografics, treballs audiovisuals i un paisatge sonor immersiu que representa els espais de la fisica fonamental com a llocs de trobada material. La recerca es basa en el desig paradoxal de crear un sensorium per a la fisica fonamental, preguntant-se si la fotografia, el cinema i el so poden encarnar els espais de la ciencia experimental i presentar-los a cientifics i no cientifics de la mateixa manera, no com a il·lustracions del sublim tecnic sino com a llocs de trobada fenomenologica. Aquest article traca les coordenades conceptuals clau de «Material Sight» i analitza com el disseny metodologic del projecte –basicament la produccio de coneixement per mitja de l’«acte de mirar»– ha resistit emfaticament l’atraccio gravitacional de l’art per ser instrumentalitzat com un dispositiu il·lustratiu dins d’un context cientific.

The historiography of theatre/performance embraces complicated culturally contingent circulation of different forms and manifestations of repertoires accounted for as Critical Media History. This argument is based on two principles: first, performance and theatre are not categorically opposed to each other but rather closely related (there is no theatre without performance, so theatre history exists within performance practice and performance history can likewise be nested within theatre practice). Second, theatre/performance are historically and culturally contingent media ecologies, interdependent with various media representations yet offering specific perspectives. This privileges materiality linked with the sensorium, location in time and space (or across times and spaces in manifestations of situatedness), historicising, and scaling (zooming in to examine specific phenomena while also describing related developments), emphasising social production and reception.

This chapter challenges approaches to reading that rely on “scopic dominance” (here referred to as Cyclopean) and suggests that Ulysses, in particular, rewards readers who feel with, through, and about bodies—human and textual. The chapter proposes an approach to reading that produces an affective: one that moves us and that we move, one that we encounter with our living bodies. The sense modalities of sight and touch are used to illustrate Joyce’s broader approach to senses, perception, and epistemological questions more broadly. To read Ulysses “feelingly” is to engage the senses together with the emotions in the act of reading. Such readings cultivate a multi-perspectival proximity to the content, context, and language of the work. Affect theory provides a useful way of reconceiving the reading self: as porous, responsive, and part of an ever-unfolding process of being in relation with the world. This essay stages an encounter between text and reader that is designed to show readers how to feel their way through the text in a way that allows reading to become more reciprocal or mutual. The value of such an approach is that it makes it easier for a reader to be touched, and perhaps altered, in return.

Sensory experiences have generated a diverse sociological, anthropological and psychological literature. This paper illustrates an approach to the idea of lost sensoria and their social and cultural manifestations. Images of sensory expe­rience, postulated synchronicity of sensory processes and the concept of ethno­poetics constitute a theoretical basis for the concept of lost sensory experience., Tematem niniejszego studium jest doświadczenie sensoryczne oraz jego spo­łeczne manifestacje. Wychodząc od klasycznego porządku pięciu zmysłów, przedstawione zostaną alternatywne porządki sensoryczne oraz ich spo­łeczne i kulturowe umocowanie. Językowe obrazy doświadczenia zmysło­wego, postulowana synchroniczność procesów sensorycznych oraz koncep­cja etnopoetyki stanowią podstawę prezentowanej koncepcji zagubionych sensoriów.

The ‘supreme fiction’ of the absent beholder becomes – in colonial India – a mark of Western ‘distinction’ and a marker of distance from Hindu idols. The convention of single-point perspective was seen as the key which would unravel an Indian resistance to the ‘powers of observation’. The European art whose shadow was cast over India had passed through engagements with vanishing points that incarnated corporeal viewers to a practice that in Norman Bryson’s words implied a ‘transcendent point of vision that has discarded the body’. In India, the reawakening of the human sensorium went hand in hand with the insertion of mass-produced images into spaces of Hindu worship. A recurrent refrain in the analysis of popular art traditions concerns the ways in which consumers of images are either unable or unwilling to speak about their form. The glass mirrored image depicts Samvaliyaji, Avari Mata and Bhadva Mata who are the subject of a recently flourishing cult in Mandsaur District.

This article examines how sensation and affect make different kinds of resilience meaningful to communities. Through a case study, we analyze public deliberation about a proposal to expand interstates in Tampa, Florida. We describe how evidence introduced by opposing sides foregrounded conflicting sensory experiences. The resulting sensoriums upheld different aspects of the city’s identity as worth maintaining. Drawing from recent scholarship defining resilience as something that can always be done otherwise, we suggest that resilience is better understood as entangled with public affect. We argue that a key point for rhetorical intervention in city planning is considering which futures and visions of resilience are being imagined for publics.

At the turn of the twenty-first century, the spectre of the Muslim, inexorably bound up with the figure of the Islamist terrorist, triggers a diversity of cinematic engagements in Bombay cinema. In the aftermath of 9/11, the Islamist terrorist is seen to possess a commanding global presence, transnational mobility and the capacity to unleash spectacular violence. The anxiety, dread, horror and fascination set in motion by terror-related violence and death-dealing become the vectors along which cinematic affect begins to travel. The Islamist terrorist, both visible and spectral, not only haunts and transfigures the diegetic world of Bombay cinema but inaugurates a new constellation of films whose affective registers reanimate the cinematic image. This emergent constellation is born when the “war film” becomes liberated from the confines of the combat zone and is catapulted onto a transnational arena. The soldier and spy merge into a singular figuration fusing the violent impulse of the former with the itinerant impulse of the latter inaugurating thereby a “new” cinema of action and sensation. Therefore, the soldier-spy films of Sunny Deol (Maa Tujhe Salaam, Verma in Maa Tujhe Salaam. Indian Movies, 2002, The Hero: A Love Story of a Spy, Sharma in The Hero: Love Story of a Spy. Time Magnetics, 2003, Jaal: The Trap, Dhanoa in Jaal: The Trap. Parth Productions, 2003) become early cinematic experiments in speed, movement and sensation. Running parallel to the soldier-spy films, another set of chronologically overlapping films produce a new force field of affects. The terrorist, who was thus far the hero’s antagonist, becomes the protagonist when the body of the star collides with that of the terrorist. Hrithik Roshan, in his early films Fiza (Mohammed in Fiza. UTV Motion Pictures et al. 2000) and Mission Kashmir, (Chopra in Mission Kashmir. Vidhu Vinod Chopra Productions, 2000) is arguably the first star on whose body these aspirations come to be inscribed. As the body of the star fuses with that of the terrorist, new possibilities in the realm of affect and signification are inaugurated. This essay argues that Hrithik Roshan’s stardom is inextricable from the movement and sensation of the new action cinema whose kinetic and affective energies have been unleashed by the spectre of the terrorist. Conversely, the kinesis of the new action cinema is driven by a star body that finds full and spectacular display through not just films but ads and campaigns for global brands. The emergence of Hrithik as a star also marks a significant moment in the history of Bollywood action cinema. Driven by the balletic athleticism of Hrithik’s star body and the pioneering innovations in action choreography, Bollywood witnesses the arrival of “wire-fu” films like Krrish (Roshan in Krrish. Filmkraft Productions, 2006), Dhoom 2 (Gadhvi in Dhoom 2. Yash Raj Films, 2006) and Krrish 3 (Roshan in Krrish 3. Filmkraft Productions, 2013) that allow action choreography to become spectacularly airborne. Central to the stardom of Hrithik Roshan is the sensational allure of kinetic and aerial mobility. It is through this sensorium that this essay contemplates the first decade of Hrithik Roshan’s stardom.

“Tate Sensorium” was a project by creative partnership Flying Object at Tate Britain in 2015 that explored experimentally the scope for enhancing the experience of visual art by the addition of sou...

This paper explores the perception of inaccessibility as it reflects the cultural education of the sensorium. Following Gilroy, sensorium is taken here to mean the dense weave of historical experience that organizes the relations among the senses and perception itself. With this concept, I examine texts related to accessibility management at a large Canadian University. These texts include a 2017–18 email exchange regarding accessibility between a subway station and a university building, as well as the first policy statement on ‘The University and Accessibility for Disabled Persons’ from 1981. Through these texts, I show how people, now as then, are taught to sense disability as excludable. The paper demonstrates how the sensorium is educated to exclude a concern for the history, responsibility, as well as the touch of the actual physical environment. In pursuit of a re-education of the sensorium, this paper reveals how disabled people are sensed as potentially includable in the future while excludable in the present.

Mansaram is an Indo-Canadian artist who immigrated to Canada in 1966 with a prior interest in the media ideas of Marshall McLuhan, sparked by reading about him in LIFE Magazine. In Toronto the media guru soon introduced him to Av Isaacs at his Yonge Street gallery, which led to a 1967 Happening there called East-West Intersect, influenced by McLuhan’s ideas. Between 1966 and 1972 Mansaram worked on his Rear View Mirror series of paintings and collages, to one of which McLuhan contributed several items of textual content. Collage with its mosaic structures appealed to McLuhan because he thought it better represented the post-literate “allatonceness” of electronic media and acoustic space, which better integrated the full human sensorium and called for pattern recognition for comprehension. McLuhan had a high regard for artists for their integral awareness and sensitivity to changes in sense perception, enabling them to act as a distant early warning (DEW) line against potentially harmful effects of technology. He viewed their art as anti-environments to the electronic media maelstrom. Mansaram has enjoyed increasing recognition through recent exhibitions, but some of Canada’s premier art galleries have yet to acquire or recognize his art, although the Royal Ontario Museum is planning to do so. Résumé | Mansaram est un artiste indo-canadien qui a immigré au Canada en 1966 possédant un intérêt antérieur pour les idées médiatiques de Marshall McLuhan, suscité par la lecture d’articles à son sujet dans LIFE Magazine. À Toronto, le gourou des médias l’a rapidement présenté à Av Isaacs à sa galerie de Yonge Street, ce qui a mené à un « happening » en 1967 appelé East-West Intersect influencé par les idées de McLuhan. Entre 1966 et 1972, Mansaram a travaillé sur sa série de peintures et de collages Rear View Mirror, dont une à laquelle McLuhan a apporté plusieurs éléments textuels. Le collage, avec ses structures en mosaïque, plaisait à McLuhan parce qu’il trouvait qu’il représentait mieux la « concordance » postlittéraire des médias électroniques et de l’espace acoustique, qui intégrait mieux l’ensemble du sensorium humain et appelait à la reconnaissance des formes pour la compréhension. McLuhan avait un grand respect pour les artistes en raison de leur conscience intégrale et leur sensibilité aux changements dans la perception des sens, leur permettant d’agir en tant que réseau d’alerte avancé (DEW, pour « Distant Early Warning ») contre les effets potentiellement néfastes de la technologie. Il considérait leur art comme des antienvironnements au tourbillon des médias électroniques. Mansaram est de plus en plus reconnu à travers les expositions récentes, mais certaines des plus grandes galeries d’art du Canada n’ont pas encore acquis ou reconnu son art, bien que le Musée royal de l’Ontario ait l’intention de le faire.

Gilles Deleuze assumes that the source of creativity/the new (as opposed to just the development of what already is implicit in existing things) lies outside conscious thinking. Deleuze argues that film mimics our automatic processing of visual input and therefore is able to intervene in this processing in ways that conscious thought cannot, at the level of the most basic sensory experience. Since computers can and already offer input to multiple senses, can they do similar work? The authors discuss Deleuze's approach to finding the difference between development and creativity via the analysis of film technology and ask whether anyone is using computers the way Deleuze conceives of those film-makers who are philosophic using film? The focus of this article is on creativity in the domain of art making.

This article considers the nationalizing practices of everyday life among Palestinian refugees in Jordan. Concerned with what some scholars call banal or everyday nationhood, it examines how particular objects within the ordinary lives of Palestinian refugees articulate conceptions of national belonging and difference. Attending to the discursive and the material, this article argues that understanding Palestinian national practice among refugees in Jordan requires specific attention to the material objects consumed and displayed within the homes and institutions of Palestinian life. As icons productive of a national sensorium, these objects are critical for understanding the constitution of nationhood and what I call a national visualscape. Embedded within the routine spaces of ordinary life, this paper argues that national practice is often visible yet unseen, articulated yet unheard. Palestinian nationhood in Jordan is thus an ordinary affair; it is the practical accomplishment of ordinary people engaged in the production of nationhood without a nationalist movement.

What can be seen within this universe? Since humans are not instinctively aware of the limitations of their sensorium, what is being missed is not immediately obvious. Aiming to explore with our imagination the invisible elements in the universe, we created an interactive cosmic art project in collaboration with the Gunma Astronomical Observatory, and the Polytech Festival in Moscow. In this paper, we firstly address the topic of dark matter, from the physics point of view, the concept in our project touching upon the invisible beauty in the universe, and then discuss the practical methodology for the process of making the installation. This installation was laid out based on a map of constellations from where people were able to see the antipode of Moscow, an opposite point from the venue where the installation was set, in analogy to illustrating what exists, but can not be seen. Using origami flowers - made in the course of a workshop by the visitors of the festival - as a metaphor of the beauty and transience of life, the installation seeks to deepen the awareness of participants about the numerous invisible structures in the universe. Placing them within reflective structures underlines both our reliance on technology to make the invisible visible, and the influence of the point of view on how we perceive and interpret the resulting representations. In their various forms and colors, these flowers can be seen as metaphorical mirror images of that which lies at the antipodes of our awareness: of colorful gas glowing in radio waves, supernovas in their many x-ray hues, dark matter, neutrinos, gravitational waves, dark energy. Considering both the invisible scenery of the sky and the invisible elements of beauty in the universe as lying behind the ‘back’ of the universe, hidden to our senses, this project explores a new way of communication between humans and the ubiquitous invisible in an artistic manner. Finally, the whole process of this project is summarized in order to suggest future directions for our transdisciplinary collaboration.

This introduction contextualizes this special issue of Women & Performance by examining surface as an object of inquiry across a variety of fields, including psychoanalysis, literary studies, sensa...

Rhetorical scholarship has recently made significant contributions to an emerging “meta-field” that we might loosely call “shit studies.” In this essay, we review scholarship pertaining to the study of “shit” in communication. Specifically, we review current trends in the theoretical orientation of shit studies by advancing the ideas of points de sensorium and/as the stank of rhetoric. Drawing on theories of the point de capiton (quilting point), we are able to note some commonalities in the study of shit in communication scholarship. The stank and the points de sensorium speak to a theorization of affect and bullshit-texts.

A 9-year-old girl from North India presented with poor intellect and behavioural abnormalities noticed since early childhood and two episodes of generalised seizures during the past 6 months. There was no history of alteration in sensorium, vision or hearing impairment, waxing and waning, or

"Ethnographic film is the documentary's avant-garde. Who is more self-conscious than an anthropologist with a movie camera?"-J. Hoberman"Film language is the language of moving, seeing, and hearing. More than any other medium or art form, film uses experience to express experience."-Ilsa Barbash and Lucien Taylor (1)The term "experimental documentary," at first glance, can be considered an oxymoron at worst or a hybrid category at best that in either case illuminates the assumed dialectical tensions between formal experimentation and cultural representation.1 Experimental documentary filmmaking conflates this dichotomy at the level of aesthetics, or as Stella Bruzzi puts it, "aestheticization" of a given reality (9). The use of expressive, cinematic techniques, often celebrated in fictional filmmaking as an imaginative means for the filmmaker to engage and enhance the emotional involvement of the viewer with the filmmaker's stories and characters, often meets critical resistance when applied to documentary forms, including those whose origins are not necessarily related to their cinematic incarnations. Erik Barnouw, for example, in his seminal book Documentary: A History of the Non-Fiction Film (1993), categorizes documentaries into nonfiction conventions or trends that existed before the advent of documentary filmmaking with terms such as "explorer," "reporter," "advocate," "poet," and "observer," among others. Barnouw's classification relates closer to "the essay, diary, autobiography, notebook, editorial, evocation, eulogy, exhortation, description or report" (Nichols, Introduction 72). These conceptual, and largely literary, nonfiction templates provide a reference point for how experimentation in the popular imagination can be preconceived as counterintuitive to nonfiction's enterprise for verifiable knowledge. Elsewhere, John Corner points out that the application of documentary aesthetics "has not been surprisingly framed by an interest in cognition, in how documentaries construct and project knowledge and the use of this by viewers" (20-21). Rather, in the documentary's quest to capture visible evidence of its social subject, the use of expressive cinematic techniques in nonfictional modes-such as dynamic dolly camera movement in Alain Resnais's Nuit et Brouillard [Night and Fog] (1955); stylized, noir-like cinematography and reenactments in Errol Morris's The Thin Blue Line (1988); and kinetic music video editing with staged musical numbers in Alma Har'el's Bombay Beach (2011)-short-circuits this supposed link to unmediated knowledge. In more extreme visual measures, experimental documentary bypasses it altogether.The use of formal experimentation with cultural representation does more than just dismantle the universal impulse toward the discourse of objectivity in mainstream documentary filmmaking-it is also a discourse that itself has lost creditability with the wider acceptance, or at least the acknowledgment, that any form of documentary filmmaking is inherently subjective. Theorists such as Trinh T. Minh-ha notably refute definitions of the documentary as a filmic form or approach altogether, despite its cinematic tradition, due to its untenable conflation of fixed notions of truth with meaning. She argues that "[t]ruth, even when 'caught on the run,' does not yield itself either in names or in (filmic) frames; and meaning should be prevented from coming to closure at what is said and what is shown" (92). What documentaries can offer, at best in her estimation, is a visual representation of a meaning that is already once removed from what it purports to signify. She provocatively asks: "What is one to do with films which set out to determine truth from falsity while the visibility of this truth lies precisely in the fact that it is false?" (92). Although this debate continues, experimental documentary offers recourse in its acknowledgment of the fluctuation of both truth and meaning in a nonfiction filmic form. …

This article takes an imagined, transnational living room as its setting, examining jazz's place in representations of the ‘modern’ middle-class home across the post-war West, and exploring the domestic uses that listeners both casual and committed made of the music in recorded form. In magazines as apparently diverse asIdeal Homein the UK andPlayboyin the US, a certain kind of jazz helped mark a new middlebrow connoisseurship in the 1950s and 60s. Yet rather than simply locating the style in a historical sociology of taste, this piece attempts to describe jazz's role in what was an emergent middle-class sensorium. The music's sonic characteristics were frequently called upon to complement the newly sleek visual and tactile experiences – of furniture, fabrics, plastics, the light and space of modern domestic architecture – then coming to define the aspirational bourgeois home; an international modern visual aesthetic was reflected back in jazz album cover art. But to describe experience or ambience represents a challenge to historical method. As much as history proper, then, it's through a kind of experimental criticism of both music and visual culture that this piece attempts to capture the textures and moods that jazz brought to the postwar home.