Multisensory Art Gallery (ROOM EV-6.720).The Gallery opens at 13h00 and will close at 15h00 on Wednesday

Room LB-322 Has the world become more triggering—or are people too sensitive these days? Over the past ten years, cultural controversy over trigger warnings has skyrocketed. Understandings of who trigger warnings are for, as well as what they may make possible, have become as ubiquitous as they are inconsistent in scholarly literature and popular discourses. Do trigger warnings help people to learn about that which is distressing, harmful, and injurious ...

2026 will mark the 20th anniversary of the launch of The Senses and Society and coining of the term ‘sensory studies.’ Senses and Society was founded by Michael Bull and David Howes (who have alternated in the role of Managing Editor every 3-4 years) and Doug Kahn and Paul Gilroy. The term sensory studies was selected (over e.g. ‘sensography’) and used in the title of the inaugural article, ‘Introducing Sensory Studies,’ in order to serve as an umbrella term for the multiple sub...

The sound, video, performative site-specific intervention Nous sommes au cinéma will be presented in Cinéma moderne’s projection room. In order to highlight the very sensorial sense of presence in this piece, the site-specific experience is necessary. The relationships between seeing, listening and touching are tightened by a confusing sense of what is real or not. In order to address the huge challenges that are linked to the environmental collapse, I strongly believe that it is not only o...

Gili Hammer √ (Anthropology, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel)The Intersensory Nature of Inclusiveness: Crip Utopian Politics in Contested Times and PlacesThis presentation explores social inclusion through a sensory lens, focusing on the tensions and successes of utopian crip politics, particularly when intersensory experiences are negotiated. Drawing from a decade of anthropological f...

Organizer: Maxime MichaudThis 15-minutes original performance, titled [HYPER]aesthesilatio, engages with the concepts of Umwelt (von Uexküll, 1934), enaction (Varela, Thompson, Rosch, 1991) and habituation (Thompson & Spencer, 1966; Rankin et al., 2009). Also drawing on Schwab’s notion of “transposition” (2018), it aims to transpose and isolate “harmonic” sensory characteristics – both musical and spatial frequencies – captured through field recordings in environments with/without...

Sofia Livi ∆ (Scuola Normale Superiore, Italy)Affective Perception and the Sense of the SelfIn my presentation, I explore how the sense of the self is shaped by olfactory experiences. The methods that I use are the ones of phenomenology and empirically informed philosophy of mind. First of all, I try to define what to mean with the term ‘self’, and the notion of personal identity that is at stake there. The problem that I want to tackle is the one usually labelled as bein...

Innovobot Labs is an innovation Design House, dedicated to tackling real-world problems through the development and application of cutting-edge technologies. Innovobot’s mission is to foster innovation across industries for the benefit of society. This event is of particular relevance to those interested in the development of haptic technologies. Places are limited. Pre-registration is required.Here is the link to register fo...

Silvina Katz (Open University, UK)Sensing to Translate: A Reading of Silvina Ocampo’s Short Story “La Calle Sarandi”Literary translators need to be able to sense or ‘feel’ a text in order to generate an emotionally resonant target text in translation, however, the ineffable nature of atmospheres in short stories can make this task difficult. This study explores the complex process of identifying sensory cues in literary works, focusing on Silvina Ocampo’s unsettling short...

Cassandra Jones ∆ (Department of Integrated Studies in Education, McGill University, Canada)Sensing Care: Poetic and Multisensory Approaches to Healthcare EnvironmentsThis paper explores the role of the sensory environment for people who are seriously ill or at end of life, using poetic inquiry as a rich, arts-based approach to sensory ethnography. Poetry offers a unique way to capture the essence of embodied experiences within healthcare environments.Poetry can he...

Organizer: Agustine Zegers ∆ (Santiago, Chile)Atmo-poiesis will be an olfactory workshop inviting an embodied awareness of how atmospheres reveal our embeddedness in systems of ecological collapse and emergence. The workshop will underscore Stacy Alaimo’s conception of Transcorporeality: inviting participants into a felt sense of the porosity of our bodies, and how much we are trans-touched by ecological shifts, material macrocosms, and a consortium of beings and animacies. Atmo-poiesi...

Clara Muller (Independent scholar)A Sense of Connection: Reclaiming Smell as a Medium for Multispecies Encounters in Contemporary ArtWithin “naturalist ontology” (Descola 2005), modern Westerners have lost touch with the knowledge and relationships that smell enables—not only with other humans but also with other- than-humans. Yet, given that smell constitutes a shared biological ground for almost all life on Earth, learning to make a conscious, informed and de-centered u...

The Gallery opens at 10h30 and will close at 13h30There will be an artist’s talk/happening in EV-6.720 at 12h30.Saturday’s featured artist is Vicky Sabourin∆

Alex Young and Lindsey French (Department of Art, University of Maine, USA)Olfactory Media Library: Atmospheres as Shared and Multispecies CommonsIn this presentation, we will give an overview of our project, the Olfactory Media Library (OML): a moveable expandable field research and creation station, equipped with modules containing DIY olfactory tools, technologies, and instructions for tuning our noses to our atmospheres. We will also introduce the project’s website (l...

Saadia Mirza∆ (Social Sciences Fellow, University of Chicago, USA)The Liminality of Sensing Environmental perception entails techniques of hearing, seeing and sensing unresolved natural processes in infinite variations of time and space. These techniques also reveal aesthetic and political imperatives that shape the discovery, imagination, and exploration of the natural world. How does someone listen to an 11,000-year old glacier? Or visualize the morphology of a...