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Article Excerpt
INTRODUCTION
The forming of the five senses is a labor of the entire history of the world down to the present. (1) --Karl Marx
Digital convergence and accelerated knowledge production are present realities in a networked world of distributed intelligence. In fact, we risk becoming so comfortable in this information stream that there is no longer any friction in our navigational systems, nothing that feels "artificial" about this intelligence. Our culture's construction of a networked collective memory, and our hive mind's googling for cached and streaming images off the web, feed a habit we can't break. But the rarefied virtuality of the "extra-" (supra, infra) human is prompting a rethinking of what 1980s cybertheorists denigrated as "meat machines"--those biopolitical processing units we call the body.
Oh yes, the mind-body problem. But not as Descartes could ever imagine it. Virtuality, and the everyday reality of body transcendence, presses us to think the corporal. We might choose Ernst Mach rather than Descartes to begin thinking with, celebrating Mach's relentlessly physical redaction of "sense-data" for the twentieth century--but we'd still need to process it further, through a Foucault still young enough to theorize "Le corps utopique" in 1996:
My head, for example, my head: what a strange cavern, that opens onto the world with two windows. Two openings--I am sure of it, because I see them in the mirror, and also because I can close one or the other separately. And yet, there is really only one opening--since what I see facing me is only one continuous landscape, without partition or gap. (2)
Foucault gave us the right questions, even if his "one continuous landscape" is increasingly punctured by multiple screens and messages from times and places other than where we nominal]y are. The question is, what kinds of subjects are we becoming, in these networked brains embedded in their fleshy, neuronal viscera? Now more than ever we need to embody out thoughts--now when that "cavern" and the thick, sensory envelope that provides it with consciousness is studded with earphones, zooming in psychopharmaceuticals, extended with prostheses, dazzled by odourless tastes and tasteless odours, transported by new media, and buzzing with ideas.
Art is the place we do some of our best thinking and feeling, and it's clear that the historicizing and aestheticizing of our sensory location is well underway. Histories of synaesthesia are being attempted, such as the 2005 show Visual Music: Synaesthesia in Art and Music since 1900 at the Los Angeles MoCA and at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, DC; see also New York Eyebeam's exhibition What Sound Does a Color Make? The Canadian Centre for Architecture recently offered a probing exhibition on "Sense of the City," where we learned that gradual modifications of asphalt in the twentieth century turned urban acoustics from a resonance machine into a more muffled roar of combustion (not incidentally changing urban smells, with petroleum outgassing on a hot summer's day). And the Biennale de Lyon provided a self-consciously hippie gloss on the embodied "experience of duration," with a room of green fog from Ann Veronica Janssens, nerve-stimulators from Carsten Holler, and a claustrophobic (and hairily static) installation of pink balloons from Martin Creed.
Sensorium, the exhibition planned for the Fall of 2006 at MIT'S List Gallery, joins this new tradition, but will probably convey a more conceptual, theoretical, "techie" feel. As the editor of the book project accompanying the exhibition and one of the (low-level) consulting curators, I can present here the skeleton of my historical argument about "The Mediated Sensorium," with aspects of the theoretical "Abecedarius" that locates some of out collective work on embodied experience, technology, and the contemporary artists who got us to the thinking point. Although our aim is dearly to take the measure of the moment, my own contributions insist on the modernist history of this present--a history that produced us as subjects and trained us to adapt to higher levels of mediation than ever before. Mid-century modernism, I argue, organized the body in particular ways (especially for U.S. subjects), ways that colonized different sensory and bodily functions--bureaucratically enhancing our aesthetic relations to those functions, and giving them a commodity address. (3) Contemporary artists have to deal with these traditions as they enter global art practice.
Dramatically complicating the white cube, refusing the phenomenological certainty it implied, and putting into question the whole Kantian concept of "sensus communis," twenty-first-century artists operate nonetheless within the flux of a past sensorium dependent on those notions. Unruly, multifocal, and populous, the nebulous field of "new media art" has one apparent commonality--a movement beyond the old genre categories "painting," "sculpture," and even "video art," (4) in favour of nebulous domains such as "sound art" and "tangible media." Other activities remain uncolonized by taxonomy, but may someday crystallize as "olfactivism" (here, in the work of Sissel Tolaas) or "gustibationist" (perhaps the taste of infusions from Francois Roche's proposed MITEA house).
Do these innovative art forms offer an escape from the channelled sensory portals codified at mid-century, or are we merely reinstating the hierarchies of that past in more comfortably prosthetic ways? Does "new media" question mediation itself, or merely add to the looming buzz? There is no monolithic response, no simple answer. Artists and others forge complex relations to technology that range from resistant to scruffily "DIY" to happily compliant; Sensorium suggests that no schema can capture the diversity in any present. Similarly, along with Clement Greenberg's legislated mainstream, the culture of the post-war period came to include silvered factories that commented, Popwise, on our techno-aspirations (Andy Warhol's desires "to be a machine," 1963), randy performance art that smelled like clean, dead flesh (Carolee Schneemann's Meat Joy, 1964), random-looking piles of dirt that pointed out of the white cube to an absent and inaccessible place (Robert Smithson's punning Nort-sites, 1970s), and even ice-cold snowballs in the street (David Hammons's Bliz-aard Ball Sale, 1983).
Hegemony could briefly enforce one extreme to occlude the potential of such sensorily diverse work. In the post-war apogee of the "American Century," purified and isolated senses were meant to be addressed by colour field abstract painting, hi-fidelity listening, and newly synthesized "Flavors and Fragrances" (Inc.). (5) These separated domains, and the genre purity enforced to protect them, constituted an anxious response to the mediated sensorium--a regime of "purification" that non-mainstream artists were among the first to contest. For those in the centre, formalism offered the user (painter and viewer) a set of positivist protocols that could produce isolated sensations abstracted from the bourgeois body (rather than participate in their reproduction)--always ordinated by sight. Yet the rule of ocularity needed constant maintenance. Its dominance was only part ofthe picture, ordy a component of indifferenfly coordinated larger systems that aspiring subjects had to navigate in modernism's several regimes. That larger experience is a sensorium--the subject's way of coordinating the body's perceptual and proprioceptive signals,...
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