Rennie Tang
Rennie Tang is a designer and educator based in Los Angeles. Her teaching includes design foundations and landscape design studios focused on co-designing with schools. Her research explores human movement as a shared language between all living beings and kinesthetic approaches to drawing and design. Her passion for sensory design projects involving sound and movement is marked by an ongoing collaborative project Sonic Kinesthetic Forest with Lisa Sandlos and Eleni-Ira Panourgia. Projects are often fueled by interdisciplinary collaborations with visual artists, choreographers and healthcare researchers. Her work draws from her background in architecture, urban design, landscape architecture and dance. Notable designers she has worked with include landscape architect Walter Hood and artist Mary Miss. She holds a bachelor’s degree in architecture from McGill University and a Master of Science in Architecture and Urban Design from Columbia University. She is currently a PhD candidate at the Versailles School of Landscape in France.
Sessions in which Rennie Tang attends
Wednesday 7 May, 2025
Room EV-11.705, Milieux Resource Room Bea Dieker (Frankfurt, Germany)Appealing or Disgusting? Atmospheres: The Most Powerful Game ChangersWhat makes an apartment, a city, an employer, or a means of transportation appealing or unappealing? Are the factors aesthetic, or are they social? Material or immaterial? And isn’t all of this highly subjective? When people wait together for the bus in the rain, we see how weather, architecture, and personal interact...
Room LB-205 Ehsan Akbari (Faculty of Education, University of New Brunswick, Canada)Sensing the Environmental through Art EducationIn this presentation, I will explore ways educators can integrate art and sensory education to sensitize learners to environmental issues. Bertling (2023) argued for the urgency of incorporating eco-pedagogy in art education to inspire a generation of ecologically aware citizens. Such teaching aims to nourish l...
Thursday 8 May, 2025
Kristian North (INDI, Concordia University, Canada)The Haptic Sound Field: Spatial aspects of Haptic Aurality in Acoustic and Electroacoustic DiffusionThis article explores the haptic dimension of acoustic fields, considering its influence on the perception and construction of actual and virtual spaces. A ‘haptic aurality’ (introduced in a recent article for Organised Sound (North 2024, Cambridge Press)) is developed, including sometimes contradictory accounts of ‘haptics...
Marko Zivkovic ∆ (Anthropology, University of Alberta, Canada)The Whispering hand-plane: Unifying Senses in a Woodworking WorkshopWoodworker-philosopher James Krenov paid minute attention to senses in the workshop: a simple handmade wooden plane is the “cabinetmaker’s Stradivarius.” Tuned perfectly, it gives you a “soft whispering sound” as it makes fine, thin shavings that shimmer in the light. What “confederates the senses,” say Michel Serres, is body in balance and mov...
Elisabeth Tangerner √ (History (Medieval History), University of Salzburg, Austria)Sensing the Divine: Sensory Experience and Space in the Late Medieval Benedictine Abbey of Lambach (Austria)In the cloistered worlds of late medieval monastic life, sensory perception had a decisive inpact on the spiritual experience and communal identity of conventuals. This paper explores how sensory worlds were created, experienced and discussed in the Benedictine Abbey of Lambach (Upper...
Hsuan Hsu √ (English, University of California, Davis, USA)Olfactory WorldmakingThis paper will argue that worldmaking—a concept that has been the focus of conversations in phenomenology, science fiction studies, critical ethnic studies, gender and sexuality studies, and environmental humanities—offers a generative framework for understanding aesthetic experiments that center the sense of smell. The presentation will develop, through close analysis of literary texts and m...
Organizer: Ayaka Yoshimizu ∆ (Department of Asian Studies, University of British Columbia, Canada)Reorienting ourselves to various multisensorial experiences, this panel brings together concepts, applications, and unintended consequences of sensory education from three different fields of intercultural learning: communication studies, language studies, and an international exchange program. To explore the ways of attuning to what is otherwise insensible or unintelligible, Sekimoto w...
Tamás Solymosi √ & Daishi Wakizono (Heritage Studies, University of Tsukuba, Japan)Sensory Cartographies: Multisensory Mapping as a Tool for Understanding Urban SpacesThis paper introduces a methodological approach to interpreting urban distinctiveness through multi-sensory experiences, addressing the challenges in an era of increasing placelessness and global homogenisation. Our study investigates how distinct sensory experiences give rise to place-specific networks...
Polina Dimova (Associate Professor of Russian at the University of Denver, Denver, Colorado, USA) ∆This keynote address investigates the aesthetic, cultural, and scientific discourses of synaesthesia that inspired the flourishing exchanges among the modern arts. It offers twenty theses on synaesthesia to trace the controversies surrounding the phenomenon: from the cooperation of the nineteenth-century arts and sciences in attempting to define synaesthesia to the present rift between th...
Friday 9 May, 2025
Organizer: Marcel Cobussen √ (Leiden University, Netherlands) Urban atmospheres are of course experienced through more than one sense: we use our eyes, ears, skin, and nose. Besides elements that can be experienced through the senses, many other agents are active in creating a specific atmosphere: cultural perspectives, sociopolitical and economic influences, ecological or commercial interests, etc. In short, all these agents (and many more) play a role in the ways place...
Aaron Benavidez (Sociology, Harvard University, USA)From Organ to Receptor? The Future of the Western Scientific SensoriumIt is not uncommon to fasten the “Western” sensorial system to Aristotle who imagined the human senses as a quintet comprising sound, sight, smell, taste, and touch (Aristotle [c. 350 BCE] 1957b:219; Classen 1993). By the first half of the 19th Century—at the time Auguste Comte attempted to organize the sciences—the five-part conceptualization would re...
Organizers: Tim Horvath ∆ with Matthew Kirtkpatrick ∆ (Warren Wilson MFA Program in Writing/Phillips Exeter English Department, Stratham, USA)In this creative writing workshop, the leaders–writers whose recent projects push the boundaries of how language can be used to describe and evoke the non–visual (sound, scent, and texture)--will share writing activities designed to guide participants into fresh linguistic and conceptual zones. After reading from their own work, workshop leaders ...
Abi Smith (Geography, University of Cambridge, UK)Fluvial Infrastructures, Embodied Evidence, and The Limits of Sensory GovernanceThe majority of England’s rivers are widely evidenced as toxic and harmful to health. The most recent ‘State of our Rivers’ report by The Rivers Trust (2024) found that no river or stretch of water in England can be categorised as in ‘good’ status. Whilst reports of slushy-coloured water and green algal blooms pervade descriptions of these spac...
Constance Classen ∆ (Centre for Sensory Studies, Concordia University, Canada)Green Museums: Narratives of Nature in English MuseumsIn recent years, growing attention has been paid to the interconnections between environmental issues and museums in England. Initially, much of this attention came from groups protesting the links between certain museums and the fossil fuel industry, most notably, the British Museum’s sponsorship by British Petroleum. The ‘Green Museums’ mov...
Saturday 10 May, 2025
Organisers: Dorit Kluge∆ & Isabelle Pichet∆The increasing opening of private collections and the establishment of public museums in the 18th century created a form of public sphere that had been unknown until then (Habermas, 1962). In the close interplay between architecture, exhibition and works of art, completely new individual and social mechanisms of perception were set in motion for the viewers. In this context, multisensory perception, in contrast to purely visual p...
Room MB-7.270Organizer: Carina Rose ∆ (carina rose design, Montreal, Canada) This workshop/ installation will be structured as a complement to my presentation “Skin, Somas and Scores: Experiential movement practices for the architectural process. The intention is to offer participants a somatic movement experience that encompasses some of the content from the presentation. Depending on the possible time and interest, the duration can be 1.5- 3 hours....