Sensorium: Embodied Experience, Technology, and Contemporary Art

The relationship between the body and electronic technology, extensively theorized through the 1980s and 1990s, has reached a new technosensual comfort zone in the early twenty-first century. In Sensorium, contemporary artists and writers explore the implications of the techno-human interface. Ten artists, chosen by an international team of curators, offer their own edgy investigations of embodied technology and the technologized body. These range from Matthieu Briand’s experiment in “controlled schizophrenia” and Janet Cardiff and Georges Bures Miller’s uneasy psychological soundscapes to Bruce Nauman’s uncanny night visions and François Roche’s destabilized architecture. A 260-page catalogue contains a main essay by Caroline A. Jones; essays on the artists by Bill Arning, Jane Farver, Yuko Hasegawa, and Marjory Jacobson; and an Abecedarius (from “Air” to “Zoon”) that offers an extensive rethinking of the body’s relations with technology. Abecedarius entries are by Bill Arning, Caroline Bassett, Michael Bull, Zeynep Çelik, Constance Classen, Jonathan Crary, Chris Csikszentmihàlyi, Mark Doty, Joseph Dumit, Michel Foucault, Peter Galison, Donna Haraway , Martin Jay, Amelia Jones, , Hiroko Kikuchi, Stephen M. Kosslyn, Bruno Latour, Thomas Y. Levin, Peter Lunenfeld, William J. Mitchell, Yvonne Rainer, Barbara Maria Stafford, Neal Stephenson, Michael Swanwick /William Gibson, Sherry Turkle, and Stephen Wilson.