The Whispering hand-plane: Unifying Senses in a Woodworking Workshop

Woodworker-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 movement, its exquisite proprioceptivity. No “seated professor,” taught him any productive work, whereas his “gymnastics teachers and coaches inscribed its very conditions into his muscles and bones.” If our sciences and inventions all ultimately come from dance, craft training, or climbing mountains, as Serres claimed, are we losing something essentially human by offloading our bodily/sensorial skills to technologies we invented: memory lost to writing, hand writing skills to printing, face-to-face sociality to smartphone screens ... I want to examine the last iteration of these old laments through woodworking as a part of what is hailed as a contemporary craft renaissance. I propose that examining this movement to reengage senses in the microcosm of the contemporary maker’s workshop could help us think through the current moment of anxiety about AI, driverless cars, sociality in the age of smartphones or the bullshit job economy. Keywords: proprioception, sound, touch, craft, technology

Bar Efrati ∆ (School of Archaeology, University of Oxford, UK)

Material Sense: Exploring the Entanglement of Perception, Worldviews, and Material Choices Since Paleolithic Times

Perception is often defined as the awareness of elements within the environment through physical sensations, as a physical experience interpreted in light of one's past experiences, and as a quick, acute, and intuitive understanding and appreciation. Viewing perception as enactive highlights that it relies on a person's sensorimotor knowledge, making it an intentional action involving all senses. This plays a crucial role in exploring the environment and forming categories based on sensory experiences.
In a parallel disciplinary universe, the ontological turn explores diverse viewpoints on personhood, being, and relationships between humans and non-humans in ethnography and archaeology. This framework suggests that the choice of materials for object-making stems from deeper connections beyond functionality or symbolism. Materials are seen as active agents that influence human relationships. This study investigates the role of human perception in object-making, focusing on the process from material selection to the finished object.
In this study, I will explore the integration of studies from the philosophy of mind and the ontological turn to understand how perception, experiences, and memory are linked to object and tool-making from the Paleolithic period to the present. Through daily, ethnographic, and archaeological examples, I will suggest that key aspects of human behavior have deep prehistoric origins, indicating that prehistoric people consciously perceived their environment from early Paleolithic times.
Keywords: Enactive perception, Sensory experience, Materiality, Memory, Traditional ecological knowledge

Niharika Russell ∆ (Art History, University of Toronto, Canada)

Bottling Beauty & Distilling Desire: Perfume and Plasticity in the Ancient Greek World

Though the perfumes that suffused numerous social and spatial realms of the ancient Greek world no longer remain, we are left with a number of the vessels which once held this precious liquid. The playful, mimicking shapes of perfumed oil vessels which are categorized as plastic in form are especially evocative of their absent contents, having once dispensed scent directly from ceramic human figures and body parts, animals (both real and otherworldly), shells (both aquatic and agricultural), and more.
Despite growing interest in the interactive mechanics of ancient Greek ceramics, little scholarly attention has been paid to how these ceramic vessels provide a potent case study for considering the syn-aesthetics of ancient Greek aesthetics. This presentation will examine how the plastic perfume vessels produced from the Archaic period onward are constructed according to interrelated olfactory, haptic, and visual modes and repertoires of engagement with their forms and contents. In doing so, we may explore the manner in which these vessels and their sensory relationships index a perceptive slippage between animacy and inanimacy at play within the conceptual scope of kalos (beauty) in ancient Greek thought.
Keywords: Plasticity, synaesthesia, 'kalos,' ceramics, perfume