Sensorium: Embodied Experience, Technology, and Contemporary Art (review)

This publication accompanied exhibitions of the same name. It is a convincing, much-needed update amidst accelerating technological influence on human perception. This Sensorium is also a statement of sorts: that our sensory apparatus and facilities are to be considered as a whole, and multi-sensorial art should be embraced. This is an attempt to counter modernist and reductionist tendencies of scientists and artists to bureaucratize and segment human senses into manageable units and give priority to vision over other sensorial input.

In the two-part show (not the subject of this review), curated by Bill Arning, Jane Farver, Yuko Hasegawa and Marjory Jacobson, 10 artists exhibited at MIT's List Visual Arts Center (October-December 2006 and February-April, 2007). MIT is an important context for these ideas, as it is a breeding ground for technologies that mediate how we sense our environment in ways that might be counter to our evolutionary upbringing.

The book, edited by MIT art historian Caroline A. Jones, contains superb curatorial essays and, under a section entitled "Abecedarius," a very readable and grounding group of essays by Bruno Latour, Mark Doty, Donna Haraway, Jonathon Crary and Michel Foucault, to name but a few. The curators, artists and essayists investigate the body's relations with technology and the artificial extension of our human senses. The inter-relations between art, science, technology and modernism are in the forefront of the discussion.

In the keynote essay, "The Mediated Sensorium" (an extension of Eyesight Alone: Clement Greenberg's Modernism and the Bureaucratization of the Senses), Jones argues that traditional visual art practice focuses exclusively on one sense, compartmentalizing human experience in a way that makes it manageable and therefore arguably controllable. These modernist tendencies partially came about on the back of Enlightenment and reductionist approaches to problem solving. Unfortunately, Jones seems only to consider the cataloging, organizing and measuring pragmatisms of science. These pragmatisms, out of context and misunderstood, can result in the unnerving conclusion that all science is deterministic. While Clement Greenberg may be dead and gone and his writings immutable, scientific endeavor should not be considered stagnant. Advances in our understanding of neurophysiology (to pick one example) show that neural hardwiring is dynamic and flexible, rather than deterministic. Moreover, any threat that this perceived limitation might pose for some could easily result from their failure to appreciate, and so be awed by, the complexity of such biological systems. These points aside, some consideration must also be given to the confines of our species. In order for humans to survive and reproduce they have evolved a set of efficient and essentially reductionist filters. Jones reminds us, referring to Foucault's technologies of the self, that our "bodies do not us to 'escape' from technological mediation—they are themselves mediating apparatuses, without which there can be no knowledge of the world." This mediation naturally involves filtering and sorting of very complex information into understandable and perhaps disembodied pieces. We identify the useful signal and so avoid being overwhelmed by distracting noise—our survival depends on it.

If this discussion were about some other species, such as dogs or bats, rather than the visually dominated human, we might find ourselves needing to defend vision against the hegemonic privilege of smell or sound. The senses that abide in the shadows of the dominant input seem to get dumbed down (if we do not use it, we lose it). Although technology has enhanced our lesser senses (from iPods to radar to household smoke detectors), Jones convincingly argues that these kinds of technologies usually contribute to the segmentation of our senses. In addition to being relevant, art needs to engage our senses as a whole and how they have been altered by technology.

Sensorium, the book, is excellently edited. The curatorial and "Abecedarius" essays cleverly capture some of the nuance and intimacy associated...