Sensorium: Embodied Experience, Technology, and Contemporary Art

The relationship between the body and electronic technology, extensivelytheorized through the 1980s and 1990s, has reached a new technosensual comfort zonein the early twenty-first century. In Sensorium, contemporary artists and writersexplore the implications of the techno-human interface. Ten artists, chosen by aninternational team of curators, offer their own edgy inves

The relationship between the body and electronic technology, extensivelytheorized through the 1980s and 1990s, has reached a new technosensual comfort zonein the early twenty-first century. In Sensorium, contemporary artists and writersexplore the implications of the techno-human interface. Ten artists, chosen by aninternational team of curators, offer their own edgy investigations of embodiedtechnology and the technologized body. These range from Matthieu Briand's experimentin "controlled schizophrenia" and Janet Cardiff and Georges Bures Miller's uneasypsychological soundscapes to Bruce Nauman's uncanny night visions and Fran?oisRoche's destabilized architecture. The art in Sensorium--which accompanies anexhibition at the MIT List Visual Arts Center--captures the aesthetic attitude ofthis hybrid moment, when modernist segmentation of the senses is giving way todramatic multisensory mixes or transpositions. Artwork by each artist appears withan analytical essay by a curator, all of it prefaced by an anchoring essay on "TheMediated Sensorium" by Caroline Jones. In the second half of Sensorium, scholars, scientists, and writers contribute entries to an "Abecedarius of the New Sensorium."These short, playful pieces include Bruno Latour on "Air," Barbara Maria Stafford on"Hedonics," Michel Foucault (from a little-known 1966 radio lecture) on the "UtopianBody," Donna Haraway on "Compoundings," and Neal Stephenson on the "Viral."Sensorium is both forensic and diagnostic, viewing the culture of the technologizedbody from the inside, by means of contemporary artists' provocations, and from adistance, in essays that situate it historically and intellectually.Copublished withThe MIT List Visual Arts Center.