| The exhibition “Sensorium: Embodied Experience, Technology and Contemporary Art” recently considered the current role of the senses in a time of transition—when it might be possible for technological advances in digital smell, haptic devices and embodied computing to begin to challenge vision’s long-held dominance over the other senses. The artists in “Sensorium” considered the ability of new technologies to modify their users’ behaviors and change the sensorium, or parts of the brain and the mind that are concerned with the reception and interpretation of sensory stimuli. |  |
Sensorium: Embodied Experience, Technology and Contemporary – Art Jane Farver
The exhibition “Sensorium: Embodied Experience, Technology and Contemporary Art” recently considered the current role of the senses in a time of transition—when it might be possible for technological advances in digital smell, haptic devices and embodied computing to begin to challenge vision’s long-held dominance over the other senses. The artists in “Sensorium” considered the ability of new technologies to modify their users’ behaviors and change the sensorium, or parts of the brain and the mind that are concerned with the reception and interpretation of sensory stimuli.
All of the artists in “Sensorium” engaged embodied technology and the technologized body. François Roche and R&Sie(n), a Paris-based architectural firm, offered a proposal for Mi(pi) Bar, an extension of I.M. Pei’s 1985 Wiesner Building at MIT that would become an intimate tearoom where visitors could imbibe tea prepared with modulated levels of their own urine, a contemporary take on an ancient medicinal therapy.
Other artists merged or confounded the senses to create a synesthetic effect. Mathieu Briand’s, UBIQ, A Mental Odyssey, based on Stanley Kubrick’s 2001 A Space Odyssey, featured helmets that allowed visitors to see through the eyes of others and a view of the earth from a space station. Natascha Sadr Haghighian’s Singing Microscope could only be experienced by swapping sense organs—from eye to ear, and was inspired by the essay “The Biological Gaze” by MIT Professor of History and Philosophy of Science Evelyn Fox Keller. Japanese sound artist and composer Ryoji Ikeda’s installation, Spectra II, installed strobe and laser lights and high frequency architectonic sound in a 100 foot, darkened corridor to create a disturbing synesthetic effect. Anri Sala’s Natural Mystic depicted a performer simulating the sound of a tomahawk missile to embody the trauma of war. Sala’s Now I See may have at first appeared to be a rock-concert video, but switched, mid-way through, to become a visual depiction of music as sound waves from the PA system’s woofer buoyed a dog-shaped balloon into the air.
Some works in “Sensorium” were, in effect, portraits of absent beings. Bruce Nauman’s Office Edit l (a single-channel work from his “Mapping the Studio” project) was filmed in absentia at night with an infrared camera and investigated the role the artist’s studio plays in producing a work of art. Christian Jankowski’s Let’s Get Physical/Digital was a humorous experiment in being simultaneously absent and present in internet chat rooms. Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller’s Opera for a Small Room, a monument to recorded sound, took place in a one-room cabin crammed with LP’s, speakers and turntables, accompanied by a soundtrack of arias, country-western and rock, and light and sound effects. For The FEAR of smell—the smell of FEAR, Sissel Tolaas chemically reproduced and microencapsulated, in white paint, the body odors of men who had experienced profound fear. Sections of the painted walls represented the individual men; visitors rubbed the walls to release their scents, leaving a residue of their own presence behind.
All left viewers much to consider.
