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The Politics of Sensation. Part I. Theory
Language: English
How has the sensate body been co-constituted and reimagined through a combination of ‘hard’ technologies (hardware, interfaces), ‘soft’ or social technologies (disciplinary apparatus or sensorial regimes)? How is social science dealing with new modes of somatic address since the original ‘turn’ to embodiment in the 1990s? After Panagia’s project in The Political Life of Sensation (2009), how might we regard the motoric or sensory habits within everyday life, and their mediation through technologies, interfaces, prostheses? With the rise of the sciences of human management, and the Quantified Self, to what extent do such ‘soft’ and ‘hard’ technologies discipline or diminish embodied experience, motoric habits, spontaneity in sensation? In other words, what is at stake for the (bio)political life of sensation?
The panel invites theoretically-informed papers, and welcome those that bridge conceptual and empirical territories. Areas might include: sensory prostheses (for those with impairments); the place of digital recording in sensory ethnography; the intersensoriality of ‘aesthetic’ encounters; how interfaces, sensory prostheses, and technologies of sensory substitution are reconfiguring the ‘sensorium’; art-science collaborations, including digital installations; the ‘Quantized Self’ (QS) movement, and availability of biometric data collection for everyday exercise (e.g. FitBit, Nike+, Apple Health). What effective investigations are there of mashups, remixes, reconfigurations, of senses, habit, and affects? In other words, how are machine interfaces disciplining gesture, sensation, movement, affect?