Multi-sensory aesthetics and the environment

A Royal Society of Edinburgh Susan Manning Workshop
The Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities, The University of Edinburgh, Thursday 8 May 2014

If you have any questions or comments about the workshop, please contact Dr Jonathan Prior – jprior@staffmail.ed.ac.uk

Clicking on the titles below will take you to the abstracts.

Isis Brook (Writtle School of Design, Writtle College) Aesthetic experience of place and the mutable sensorium
Jonathan Prior (IASH, University of Edinburgh) Phonography and environmental aesthetics research
Emily Brady (Institute of Geography and the Lived Environment, University of Edinburgh) Smells and negative aesthetics
Nina Morris (Institute of Geography and the Lived Environment, University of Edinburgh) The textures of darkness
Timothy Collins and Reiko Goto Collins (independent artists/researchers) ARTOHTWOSEEOHTWO

Isis Brook
Aesthetic experience of place and the mutable sensorium

We tend to think of aesthetic experience of place primarily in visual terms and with judgmental categories such as pleasure and displeasure as if aesthetics begins and ends with scenic qualities as external display and our response as an uninvolved viewer. In this paper I want to explore – and it is no more than an initial exploration -both the role of the full sensorium in our engagement with place and the development of our aesthetic sensibilities through engagement with place. This journey will take us briefly through the concepts of synaesthesia and ocularcentrism then move on to experiencing place with the widest range of senses and the means by which we could develop greater perceptual nuance and acuity to properly respect place.

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Jonathan Prior
Phonography and environmental aesthetics research

Within the environmental aesthetics literature, there have been numerous calls for research to better account for the evidently multi-sensory qualities of environments, landscapes, and other objects and subjects under study. While this is to be commended, there has been little guidance as to how this may be achieved, particularly methodologically. In this paper, I want to forward phonographic methods as a means to access the sonic domain in such a way that complements more traditional verbal-textual and visual methods of environmental aesthetics research. Primarily covering audio recording, but also other methods such as soundwalking, I want to set out some of the benefits, but also technological constraints and conceptual problems, of phonography within environmental aesthetics.

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Emily Brady
Smells and negative aesthetics

Although interest in the nonvisual senses (and their objects) in aesthetics has been increasing, smells, considered apart from gustatory tastes, are still largely ignored in the literature. This paper explores smells in negative aesthetics, that is, smells in more difficult or negatively-valenced aesthetic experiences, from the sublime to the ugly, in everyday life and natural environments. Are smelly objects ugly, or just disgusting? Can stenches be sublime, as Burke contended? To answer these questions, I begin by establishing that smells can in fact be aesthetic objects, contrary to the claim that they are too unstable or transient for aesthetic attention. I then move on to examine the ways in which unpleasant smells are aesthetically appreciated, arguing that smells cannot be sublime because even overwhelming ones fail to exhibit the characteristics of paradigm cases of the sublime. I contend that bad smells are more fitted to the category of ugliness or to the neighboring category of disgust, and I consider the relationship between these two kinds of disvalue.

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Nina Morris
The textures of darkness

To be out at night in a forest, by a river, on a moor, in a field, or even in a city garden, is to know it differently. For diurnal humans, nightfall can bring great strangeness, even to the most familiar of landscapes. Nothing is solid in the dark: it is harder to judge depth and distance, details are obscured and colours muted. One is obliged to know the world by drawing on other senses such as touch, smell and hearing. Darkness also calls into question how the human body is in relation to that which surrounds and challenges the human sense of bodily presence and boundary. It fosters contradictory emotions; a feeling of liberation which can be uplifting, but also a sense of temporary dissolution or surrender which is unnerving. As the crepuscular night engulfs us, our capacity to know the landscape is determined by the flux and intensity of the light that we encounter. Our vision is not completely obliterated, nor do we see different things; we ‘see’ the same things differently. Drawing on previous work on two nocturnal landscape installations (one rural and one urban) this paper is designed to provide a starting point for discussion on the multi-sensory aesthetics of dark landscapes.

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Timothy Collins and Reiko Goto Collins
ARTOHTWOSEEOHTWO

Our presentation will focus upon a process of experimentation through art practice, that begins with unseen experience and natural phenomenon in place, then moves into an exploration of the morphology of a living organism, before moving into explorations of large scale ecosystems, then back to the unheard, the breath… of trees. In this presentation we bracket the intellectual to explore the relationship between ideas and images, coupled with the narrative of a creative inquiry that occurred over twenty years. We conclude this presentation with a quote from Monroe Beardsley that suggests that sense perceptions are like the ‘roar of the sea’, composed of a mass of sounds big and small, some of it below the threshold of hearing, some reliant upon focused attention to appreciate, some requiring the shift from dry land to water to fully appreciate them. This complex is what interests us; it is the focus of our art and aesthetic inquiry.

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This symposium has been made possible due to generous funding from the Royal Society of Edinburgh, in memory of Professor Susan Manning