Inquiry

In spite of increasingly advanced tools for sensing and measuring, what remains ignored or overlooked? Even if forces like wind and weather, hydrologic currents and gyres, solar energy, and unseeable forms of wave radiation can be sensed in ways previous unimaginable—how can their effects be made meaningful and useful? If we often don’t perceive ourselves sensing, how do we separate signal from noise? How can entangled economic, social, political, and geographic webs be rendered accessible and sensible? Artists offer novel or interdisciplinary strategies, which often attend to sensation at the edge of perception: they attune us to micro-gestures, haptic vibrations, barely audible or visible frequencies which nevertheless bear immense effects on our world. These forces are brought into view using multimedia storytelling, durational performance, data visualization, architectural intervention, sound, and vibration. Accordingly, these tools reframe our conditions of looking and sensing: how can we move beyond the primacy of vision? How can our senses become more attuned to the world’s complexities?