DESCRIPTION

“The sensorium is a fascinating focus for cultural studies,” wrote Walter J. Ong in “The Shifting Sensorium” (1991). Ong’s words heralded the arrival of sensory studies, an interdisciplinary field of inquiry which takes a cultural approach to the study of the senses and a sensory approach to the study of culture. Sensory Studies has galvanized much exciting and provocative research and experimentation in the humanities and social sciences and visual and performing arts over the past three decades. Uncommon Senses 2 aims to take stock of the many advances in sensuous scholarship and art practice since the first Uncommon Senses conference at Montreal’s Concordia University in 2000.

The conference is organized around three broad topic areas:

• Crossing Sensory Borders in the Arts: The Rise of Multisensory Aesthetics and New Media Art
• Alternative Pedagogies: The Education of the Senses
• Law and the Regulation of the Senses

Plenary speaker: Caroline A. Jones (MIT), author of The Global Work of Art: World’s Fairs, Biennials, and the Aesthetics of Experience (2016) and Eysesight Alone: Clement Greenberg’s Modernism and the Bureaucratization of the Senses (2005), and editor of Sensorium: Embodied Experience, Technology and Contemporary Art (2006) among other works.

Uncommon Senses II is hosted by the Centre for Interdisciplinary Studies in Society and Culture. It is co-sponsored by the Centre for Sensory Studies (CSS), Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Department of Art Education, Milieux Institute, Concordia University Research Chair in New Media, Technology and the Senses, and the Hexagram Network for Research-Creation in Media Art, Design, Digital Culture and Technology, with additional financial support from the Office of the Dean, Arts and Science. The organizers also gratefully acknowledge the collaboration of the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts (MMFA) and the Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA).

For registration and other information see the page dedicated to the conference at www.lawandthesenses.org

Inquiries may be addressed to senses@concordia.ca

Immersed in the Theatre: Environments and Sites

A talk by Arnold Aronson

Thursday, March 15, 5:00-6:00 PM

Milieux Institute, EV Building, Resource Room 11.705

Concordia University SGW, 1515 Sainte-Catherine St. W.

Fifty years ago, Dionysus in 69, an adaptation of The Bacchae by Richard Schechner and The Performance Group, introduced the theatre world to something Schechner called “environmental theatre.” That term has been all but forgotten, replaced almost indiscriminately by “site-specific” and “immersive.” But are these more recent descriptors accurate, and has anything new really emerged? This talk examines the use of performance space and the agency of the spectator within these spaces then and now, and suggests that immersive theatre may be an instance of “old wine in new bottles.”

Arnold Aronson is a professor of theatre at Columbia University in New York City. He writes on scenography and contemporary theatre. Books include The Routledge Companion to Scenography (editor); Ming Cho Lee: A Life in Design; Looking into the Abyss: Essays on Scenography; and American Avant-Garde Theatre: A History. He is a former editor of Theatre Design & Technology, and currently co-editor of Theatre and Performance Design. He has a long history with the Prague Quadrennial of Performance Space and Design, serving as President of the Jury in 1991 and 1999, curator of the U.S. exhibit in 1995, and General Commissioner in 2007.

EXPLORING VENICE’S ‘GARDEN OF EDEN: An ongoing feminist, sensory, collaborative art project

Friday, November 17, 2017 • 1:45 to 2:45 p.m. - EV 1.605

Giardino dell’Eden is an ongoing multidisciplinary artistic collaboration by Cynthia Hammond, Kelly Thompson and Kathleen Vaughan that uses sensory engagement, digital images in projection, textile installations and imagination to explore the meanings and metaphoric potential of Venice’s lost ‘Garden of Eden’ or Giardino dell’Eden.

Created in 1884 by the English expatriates Caroline and Frederic Eden as a welcoming private space, through the 20th century the Garden passed through hands of magnates and lesser royals before being bought by Austrian artist, Freidensreich Hundertwasser, who let nature reclaim what had been cultivated and tilled. Since Hundertwasser’s death in 2000, this largest private garden in Venice has been locked away, accessible only through archival photographs and texts, literary tales of gay cruising and high society romance, and transgressive acts of guerrilla photography.

Our presentation will explore our May 2017 artistic activities in the public lands and canals adjacent to the Garden, describing both work to date and that to be done. We engaged locals, offered past images and heard current stories, and gestured towards the possibility of opening the Garden to Venetians in the future. giardinodelleden.wordpress.com

BIOS

Dr. Cynthia Imogen Hammond is Associate Professor and, previously, Chair of Concordia’s Department of Art History. A feminist, interdisciplinary artist and historian of the built environment, Hammond’s research-creation explores the relationships between women, gender, urban and biological landscapes. She has published one book and numerous essays on art, architecture, gender, and the city. Hammond is Lead Co-Director of Concordia’s Centre for Oral History and Digital Storytelling. cynthiahammond.org.

Kelly Thompson is an Associate Professor in Studio Arts, teaching in the Fibres and Material Practices programs and is the Graduate Program Director for MFA Studio Arts at Concordia. She is active in the Milieux Institutes’ Textiles and Materiality Research Cluster, where her current research-creation project is Material codes: ephemeral threads funded by FRQSC, which questions the digital realm, big data and its fallibility, aiming to make the ephemeral visible and tactile in jacquard woven textiles. kellythompson.org

Kathleen Vaughan is an artist and educator with a trans-disciplinary orientation to questions of place and belonging, and often uses walking and mapping as method and form. She has developed studio-based and collaborative ‘place-based’ projects in Montreal and abroad. Kathleen is the Concordia University Research Chair in Socially Engaged Art and Public Pedagogies, Co-director for the Centre for Oral History and Digital Storytelling and Associate Professor of Art Education. akaredhanded.com and re-imagine.ca

Talk by Dr. Claire Jean Kim

Thursday November 16, 2017, 7–9 p.m. Henry F. Hall Building, H-431, 1455 De Maisonneuve Blvd. West

Abstract: This talk approaches the controversy over the killing of the gorilla Harambe in the Cincinnati Zoo in May 2016 as a unique window onto the making of animalness and blackness in the contemporary U.S. The construction of the “human” in relation to both the “animal” and the “black” is explored.

Bio: Claire Jean Kim is a Professor of Political Science and Asian American Studies at the University of California, Irvine. An influential scholar in animal studies, her work is at the vanguard of theorizing the intersections of racialization, animality and nonhuman life. Her most recent book, Dangerous Crossings: Race, Species, and Nature in a Multicultural Age (Cambridge University Press, 2015), won the Best Book Award from the American Political Science Association’s Section on Race, Ethnicity, and Politics.

Reading seminar is from 3 – 4:30 p.m. in room H-1252

Please email Jesse Arseneault or Rosemary Collard to sign up and obtain the readings.

A discussion led by Dr. Kim, on her forthcoming chapter, Abolition, in the publication, Critical Terms for Animal Studies (ed. Lori Gruen, University of Chicago Press), and a text by Jared Sexton (2010), People-of-Color-Blindness: Notes on the Afterlife of Slavery.

Lecture Details

Consider this an engaged meditation on the state of the field of sensory history. I ponder what, collectively, sensory historians are doing with their field and suggest what else they could be doing with it. This is a modest manifesto, a call to practitioners to think about how their field—now well over two decades old--needs to evolve if the real interpretive dividends of the approach are to be realized.The lecture highlights ways both to help the field flourish and avoid pitfalls which can deprive us of the dialectic necessary for robust interpretive growth.

Open to the public. All are welcome. 

Seminar Details: 

Based on two pre-circulated readings—one published, the other as yet unpublished—this seminar introduces graduate students to the underdeveloped but important connection between sensory history and natural disasters. The seminar focuses on tsunamis, hurricanes, and earthquakes in the Atlantic World during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It explores how such disasters were processed and experienced sensorially and how they functioned to destabilize established sensory hierarchies. The importance of context is stressed and the seminar examines ways in which the sensory history of natural disasters grants us access to questions not only of immediate experience but also questions concerning diplomacy and politics. 

Bio

Mark M. Smith, Carolina Distinguished Professor of History, University of South Carolina is the most prominent historian of the senses in the United States. He is the author of Listening to Nineteenth Century America (2001), How Race is Made: Slavery, Segregation and the Senses (2006), Sensing the Past (2007) and, most recently, The Smell of Battle, The Taste of Siege: A Sensory History of the Civil War (2014, 2017). He is also the co-author of Hurrican Katrina and the Forgotten Coast of Mississippi (2014).

This event is co-sponsored by the Centre for Sensory Studies and the Department of History.

ABSTRACT 

This presentation explores the experimental, public, Warlpiri ceremony Milpirri as an art of necessity and survival. Milpirri began in 2005 as the result of one of the first youth suicides in the community of Lajamanu in the Northern Territory. Directed and conceived by Wanta Steve Patrick Jampijinpa, in intercultural partnership with TRACKS Dance Company, Milipirri combines Jardi-Warnpa with hip-hop, break-dance and high theatrical design. Radically embedded and embodied, Milpirri strategically mobilises what are highly subjugated, barely legible and deeply vulnerable place-based energetics that bind people to place through practice. Orchestrating perceptual experiences and qualities of attachment that are themselves under occupation, Milpirri activates ecological and physiological memories of the senses in new trajectories of tradition that do not yet exist. As Jampijinpa writes of Milpirri: It was an unseen thing and now it is a seen thing. This paper explores the vital material revelations of Milpirri as remote avant-garde in settler colonial Australia today.

SPEAKER BIO 

Jennifer Biddle is Director of Visual Anthropology, Senior Research Fellow at the National Institute for Experimental Arts (NIEA), University of New South Wales (UNSW) in Sydney, and a Visiting Professor at Concortdia University for the Fall term 2017. She has worked with northern Warlpiri for over two decades, and more recently, artists and art centres across the Central and Western Desert of Australia. Her interdisciplinary research spans Indigenous languages and vernacular literacies; translation; theories of embodiment; sensory formations and radical cultural aesthetics; trauma, memory and predicaments of occupation and experimental ethnography. Her recent book Remote Avant-garde: Aboriginal Art under Occupation (Duke UP 2016) models new and emergent desert aesthetics as an art of survival. 

This public lecture is co-sponsored by the Centre for Sensory Studies and the University Research Chair in Computational Media & Indigenous Future Imaginary 

Open to the public. All are welcome.

IMAGINING ICELAND:

Wednesday, September 20, 2017 • 6:30 to 8:30 p.m. 

Visual Arts Building. 1395 René Lévesque W, VA 323, Montreal, QC 

From Concordia to the North 

ABSTRACT 

Imagining Iceland is an interdisciplinary roundtable on the influence and impact of Iceland – as place and as imaginary. Iceland is huge these days: from images of its jawdropping terrain in the mega-hit Game of Thrones, to the export of music stars such as Björk and Sigur Rós; from the country’s recovery from the 2008 economic crash (and withdrawal from the EU) via a deliberately targeted tourist push, to its need to institute a ‘responsible tourist pledge’ as visitor numbers skyrocket to 1.6 million so far in 2017 – and this to a country of just 323,000 inhabitants. Historic, beautiful, clean, safe and Englishspeaking, Iceland seems destined to be an ideal visitor destination in our era of global strife and displacements. How can serious artists and scholars engage with Iceland and its people against this cultural backdrop? Four Concordia University scholars and artists suggest how they have approached these issues. Matthew Anderson (Theological Studies), Jessica Auer (Photography), G. Scott MacLeod (MA, Art Education) and Kathleen Vaughan (Art Education) will present their own work and then together take up questions of the complexities and joys of working in Iceland. Group discussion and reception to follow. 

SPEAKER BIOS 

Jessica Auer (Photography) creates photography and video work that is broadly concerned with the study of landscapes as cultural sites, focusing on themes that connect place, journey and cultural experience. She lives and works part of the year in East Iceland, where she co-founded Ströndin Studio.

Matthew Anderson (Theological Studies) is professor at Concordia University, a documentary filmmaker and cleric with a special interest in pilgrimage, particularly the ‘dark pilgrimage’ undertaken by descendants of settlers under the guidance of First Peoples. In 2016 he walked a pilgrimage in Iceland.

G. Scott MacLeod (MA, Art Education) is a multimedia artist and filmmaker with a special interest in peoples and histories — Montreal’s, Canada’s, the Scottish Highlands’, and the Vikings’. His work has been exhibited, screened and collected by cultural institutions and individuals around the world. In June of 2017 Scott attended the SIM Residency in Reykjavik, Iceland.

Kathleen Vaughan (Art Education) has an artist’s interest in ‘place’ in our globalized and mobile world. She has strong ties to the Icelandic Textile Centre in Blönduós, where she will lead a field school in June 2018, and is completing a textile walking map about June’s 24-hour daylight near the Arctic Circle. 

Open to the public. All are welcome. 

This event is co-sponsored by the Centre for Interdisciplinary Studies in Society and Culture, and Studio Re-Imagine. 

CULTURAL TOPOLOGIES OF EXPERIENCE

Rob Shields, University of Alberta
Tuesday, November 1, 2016   6 to 8 p.m.
Henry F. Hall Building, H-763

Everyday interweavings of different temporalities and spatialities challenge our modes of recollection, representation, and complicate practice. This has implications for our understanding of bodies, causality, agency and power, and engagements with the wider environment. This discussion will explore the continuities and disruptions in the sense of social totality as a global condition of contemporary urban life. It seeks the sites and moments where aesthetic experience and ethical situations collide with with political and moral institutions and norms as a way of linking the ethical with the political.

Dr. Shields will also give a graduate seminar on "Virtuality and the Urban" on Monday, October 31 at 10 a.m. in EV 11.655.

Rob Shields is the Henry Marshall Tory Chair, Professor in Sociology and in Art and Design at the University of Alberta and Director of the City-Regions Studies Centre. Rob Shields is an award-winning author and co-editor of numerous books including: Spatial Questions, The Virtual, Lifestyle Shopping, Cultures of Internet, Lefebvre Love and Struggle, & Places on the Margin. Dr. Shields was past Director of the Institute of Interdisciplinary Studies at Carleton University, Ottawa. A Commonwealth Scholar at University of Sussex, he founded Space and Culture, an international peer-refereed journal, and Curb Canadian planning magazine. He was 2014 City of Vienna Visiting Professor in Architecture and Planning at TUWien and is currently completing research on nanotechnology as a space of concern.

ADMISSON IS FREE.  ALL ARE WELCOME.

Download poster of the event