Mediations of Sensation: Sensory Anthropology
and the Creation/Evaluation of Multimodal Interactive Environments (2010-2013)
Team Members
Principal Investigator
Chris Salter, Design and Computation
Arts, Concordia University
Co-Researchers
David Howes, Sociology and Anthropology,
Concordia University
Brief Project Description
Mediations of Sensation is a research-creation
program bringing together artistic work in “multimodal” (many senses)
environments using new technologies with anthropological research into
the varieties of human sense experience across cultures. The main objective
is to explore techniques of the senses found in non-Western cultural
contexts and use these as creative, cross-cultural frameworks to inform
the design and evaluation of user experience in sensorially compelling
immersive environments with new digital media.
The
artistic design, development and ethnographic evaluation of the project
components will be informed by interdisciplinary collaboration with
Concordia anthropologist Dr. David Howes, an internationally recognized
expert in the emergent field of sensory anthropology and director of
the Concordia Sensoria Research Team (CONSERT).
Artistically,
Mediations of Sensation will produce a physically enclosed, portable
architectural chamber that houses a single visitor for a specific
duration of time. This chamber will play with a wide range of sensory
phenomena specifically bordering on the
just noticeable difference or threshold of human sense
perception including sound, smell, sight, taste, touch, temperature,
pressure and various kinesthetic (bodily) sensations such as proprioception
(the sense of the relative position of the neighboring parts of one’s
own body), balance and locomotion. Electronic sensor technologies that
monitor body movement, temperature, humidity, sound and light levels
in the chamber will continually modulate the intensity of extraordinarily
low levels of sensory phenomena between the visitor and the chamber’s
environment. These “threshold” levels of sensation will thus seek
to merge the visitors’ sense of vision, hearing, touch, smell and
space in diverse combinations, creating a powerful, immersive experience
that transforms the sensory experience of body and self.
In
order to inform the architectural and sensory programming of the chamber,
as well as the evaluation of visitor experience in the chamber, this
project will draw on ethnographic techniques in sensory anthropology.
Sensory anthropology is dedicated to charting the varieties of sensory
experience across cultures through in-depth investigation of the distinctive
ways in which the senses are socialized in different cultural settings.
Every culture has its own modes of distinguishing and combining the
senses. These “ways of sensing” give shape to the normative patterns
of experience in that culture. A typology of differing sensory formations
has been developed by members of the CONSERT team over the past two
decades. This research database will be extended and refined in the
course of this project, as well as mined for models that can serve as
templates for the modulation of sensation in the chamber. Following
their experience of the chamber, visitors will in turn be interviewed
by the anthropological members of the team to explore the intersensory,
intercultural ground of sense experience itself.
The
project cuts to the heart of research-creation by bringing together
the embodied practices of artistic production with research techniques
and methodologies from the social sciences for both creation and evaluation.
Outcomes will include: (1) the series of installations that will be
shown in both international fine and performing arts venues as well
as technological and social science/humanities-based research contexts,
(2) submission of journal articles conference papers and publications
between the areas of media art, perception, science studies and anthropology
(sensory studies), (3) ethnographic heuristics that benefit both the
development of new sensory-activated immersive environments and anthropologists
examining the senses, and (4) workshops with graduate and undergraduate
students that interweave sensory ethnography, anthropology, architecture
and the digital arts.
Objectives/Questions of Research/Creation
Mediations of Sensation will:
- Expand the possibilities of
sensory knowledge experience in the growing discipline and practice
of the new media arts.
- Create a dialogue between
sensory anthropology, neuropsychology and artistic research-creation.
- Directly inform the sensory
design of new technological environments through sensory knowledge that
derives from non-Western cultural perspectives on the senses and goes
beyond the conventional Western five senses model.
- Enable research into multi-modal,
interactive environments with humanities/social science-based research
rather than strictly engineering-based, technology research as is the
usual case with new media art projects.
- Expose future new media artists/technologists
to the research methods of the social sciences – particularly ethnographic
methods – and anthropologists to the practices of new media artists
working with sensory phenomena.
- Bring artists and anthropologists
together inside the context of the artistic studio-lab setting to explore
new settings for embodied knowledge production through the senses.
- Research and develop qualitative
methods for how to understand and evaluate user experience in complex,
multi-sensory environments that is not based on psychological measurements
but direct first person experience.
- Train a new generation of
artist researchers to negotiate between theory and practice, emerging
new art forms and emerging social science paradigms like the anthropology
of the senses.
The Mediations of Sensation project
is funded by a grant from the Fonds Quebecois de Recherche en Science
et Cultures..
