Sensorium: Embodied Experience, Technology, and Contemporary Art. * Caroline A. Jones (ed.).

Science/Art/Culture Through an Oceanic Lens

“…Anthropologists had been attending to the "implosion" of nature and culture (Haraway 1997) as they tracked how genetics were reconfiguring dominant idioms of inheritance, family, gender, race, species, and more (Strathern 1992, Franklin 2003, Goodman et al 2003. Along with other humanistic social scientists, particularly in STS, anthropologists saw bio art as promising a "tactical biopolitics" (da Costa & Philip 2008), a set of tools through which the facts of life might be denaturalized and rewritten in dialogue with science, culture, and art (Heon & Ackerman 2000, Bureaud 2002, Thompson 2005, Jones 2006, Kac & Ronell 2007, Terranova & Tromble 2016. Anthropologists working in "multispecies ethnography" (Kirksey & Helmreich 2010) and in feminist ethnography animated by "cyborg anthropology" (Downey et al 1995) were drawn to the work of such artists as Caitlin Berrigan, the Bioart Kitchen, Natalie Jeremijenko, Claire Pentecost, and others, whose art made use of laboratory rhetoric and techniques.…”

“…Anthropological attention to contemporary art since 2000 has responded primarily to practices involving biological and ecological sciences, perhaps because of anthropology's enduring preoccupation with culture and nature, where "nature" has referred primarily to the organic, biotic world (see Ingold & Palsson 2013). At the same time, newer anthropological curiosities attend to science-art that grapples with the politics of engineered sensing-intimate, digital, remote, machine mediated ( Jones 2006, Jones et al 2016.…”

Im/Materiality in Renaissance Arts

“…This turn to the sensorium is especially challenging for art history, particularly when studying the Renaissance (though studies of contemporary art have been more nimble; see, for example, (Jones 2008). Art history has deep roots in museums and auction houses, where art objects have ostensibly been kept for posterity or changed hands in frankly economic transactions.…”