Sensory Arts and Design

Ian Heywood

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9781474280198
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000180510
• Topic: Scienze sociali
• Subtopic: Psicologia sociale

Artists, designers and researchers are increasingly seeking new ways to understand and explore the creative and practical significance of the senses. This ground-breaking book brings art and design into the field of sensory studies providing a clear introduction to the field and outlining important developments and new directions. A compelling exploration of both theory and practice, Sensory Arts and Design brings together a wide variety of examples from contemporary art and design which share a sensory dimension in their development or user experience. Divided into three parts, the book examines the design applications of new technology with sensing capacities; the role of the senses in creating new imaginative environments; and the significance of the senses within different cultural practices. The thirteen chapters cover a highly diverse range of issues – from the urban environment, architecture and soundscapes to gustatory art, multisensory perception in painting, music and drawing, and the relationship between vision and smell. Initiated by Insight, a research group at Lancaster Institute for the Contemporary Arts –widely recognised as a center of research excellence – the project brings together a team of experts from Britain, Europe and North America. This timely book is destined to make a significant contribution to the scholarly development of this emerging field. An important read for students and scholars in sensory studies, design, art, and visual culture.

Part 1 Sensory Arts and Design, New Technologies and the Urban Environment

1 Shadowplay - Liberation and Exhilaration in Cities at Night

Nick Dunn

In wide arcs of wandering through the city
I saw to either side of what is seen,
and noticed treasures where it was thought there were none.
I passed through a more fluid city.
I broke up the imprint of familiar places,
shutting my eyes to the boredom of modern contours.

(A. A. Dun 1995: 9)

Introduction - Stepping into the Uncanny

Architecture is often understood to be the concrete facts of the built environment, material assemblages that enable us to approach the city as both subject and object of narrative and interpretation. It is at once personal, borne of lived and detailed experiences, yet also universal, sometimes shared by many over its lifespan. As Aiden Andrew Dun’s quote at the beginning of this chapter suggests, there is much that goes unnoticed in the city, especially in the interstitial and liminal spaces that are often overlooked. Our bodies easily conform to the familiar places of routine, and exploring the urban landscape outside of our regular patterns of movement means we can experience revelatory discoveries and create ‘spatial stories’ (de Certeau 1984: 115– 122). So as much as we inform it, architecture in turn shapes us, to paraphrase Jonathan Raban’s Soft City. However, this chapter will seek to explore a different and less familiar side of our cities, that is, during those hours when the daylight has gone. Over the last few years I have spent a considerable amount of time walking through and around various cities at night.¹ I wish to propose that perhaps the primacy of architecture is not its body in light but is to be found within the itinerant, fleeting shawl of darkness that recasts our built environment and senses away from the dominance of the visual towards a multisensory experience. For at night our visual abilities are attenuated, placing greater emphasis on what we hear, smell, taste and touch. During nocturnal hours the transition and time in our cities also becomes elastic and foggy, distinct in many ways from the space and place of everyday life. Behavioural patterns, regimented and routine, result in our movements inscribing various lines (Ingold 2007) upon our built environment, creating vectors (Gatt 2013) that may become residual in memory even if they are fleeting in terms of time. This chapter will draw on empirical data and personal experience in order to contribute to an understanding of the anthropology of the nocturnal city. It will seek to elucidate on the ongoing entanglement that occurs at the boundaries of body and urban landscape: day and night; space and materiality.

Journeys of the night have been the subject of contemporary depictions (Sandhu 2007), while walking as a methodology (Sinclair 1997; Careri 2001) has been recently reclaimed by various artists, writers and architects. As such, much romance has also been ascribed to nighttime peregrinations, the disclosure of clandestine operations and liminal actors, illicit encounters and the foreboding unknowns. Walking around the centres and hinterlands of cities at night, however, and the reality experienced may be far less spectacular and sensational than first assumed, at least initially. Instead of the gory ‘horrorshow’ of casual violence in the manner of A Clockwork Orange or the neon- lit carnal machine consummations of J. G. Ballard, urban landscapes at night provide intricate though frequently subdued sounds and sights. Unlike walking in the daytime, at night the city blends our different senses together into an often highly arresting quale. Indeed, to go out into the night, especially on one’s own, is a decisive act. Walking is a primary measure of the urban landscape since it reaffirms our relationship to place and movement through space. Therefore, to do so at night means that our footsteps assay the blurred boundaries between essences of place and their attributes distinct from the daylight hours. Before we examine the contemporary urban night further, it is worth at this point to retrace some of the steps of those before us to understand where some of our attitudes towards the night originate.

Nocturnal Palimpsest - Those That Came Before

The history of civilization may also be understood as the history of cities, played out across a very long timeframe. The story of our relationship with cities has become increasingly relevant as more and more of us live within urban landscapes. Certainly we know that during the last decade a profound shift occurred around the globe (UNFPA 2007) insomuch that more people now live in urbanized areas than at any previous time in human history, a pattern that seems likely to continue for the foreseeable future. Parallel to this account of our existence is an alternative history: the story of our relationship with the night, our fears, struggles and perceptions of the dark. Bound into this narrative are all our attempts to vanquish it and ultimately conquer our nocturnal environment through illumination, to exert artificial and manmade control over circadian rhythms. There is a long history of night travels as integral to cultures within darkness, the nocturnal hours sheltering the shady worlds of miscreants, shift workers and transgressors. Night by its very definition contrasts day, summoning notions of darkness and fear.

Indeed, in stark contrast to our contemporary view of it, in the past, rather than falling, night was understood to rise. As A. R. Ekirch (2005: xxxi) has noted, ‘[T]he d arkness of the night appears palpable. Evening does not arrive, it “thickens.” ’ This smothering of the landscape as the firmament of night condensed provides understanding as to perhaps why it has sometimes been referred to as man’s first necessary evil, our oldest and most haunting terror. In his 1757 treatise, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, Edmund Burke claimed that darkness remained, as always, ‘terrible in its own nature.’ Throughout history, the nocturnal accomplice of darkness has cast the shadowy hours of evening and early morning as a time and space during which our rational thought could be circumvented by fear, our understanding of routine and environment be skewered by transgressions, and our innermost sanctums be invaded by unwanted guests, imaginary or sometimes deadly real Locked doors, shuttered windows, rituals, prayers and protective charms worn to evade capture by the long claws of the night were just a few of the preventative interventions to secure one’s sleep and family.

Despite this proliferation, rather than because of such measures to counter the perceived impending nightly devastations, the night did not typically bring forth ominous, even fatal, clashes of uncompromising individuals or groups, but enabled more discretely clandestine histories: times, places, spaces where human expression was not as easily subjected to the scrutiny of daytime. It is well known that up until the late seventeenth century, most people had two sleeps, with a distinct interval. Modest but highly valued freedoms from the bonds and worries of daily life could be found here. This period within the sleeping pattern was typically used for prayer, writing, sex or visiting neighbours, but the practice quickly diminished with the industrialization of cities and attendant changes in working patterns and artificial illumination, which disrupted our natural behaviour and body rhythms. As Bryan D. Palmer (2000: 9) has observed, beliefs and concerns regarding the unsettling nature of night have been metaphorically entwined through the arts, further propagating the negative aspects of darkness alloyed to cultural and social practices throughout history:

peasant dissidents and witches in the moment of feudalism’s dissolution; pornographers, libertines, monsters and Jacobin conspirators in the Age of Revolution; pirates and slaves in the ascendency of mercantile capitalism; debased trades and dishonorable work, the sociability of the tavern and the fraternal order, the dangerous classes of the Industrial Revolution; . . . cultures of erotic, musical, cinematic and poetic disaffection, many of which consolidate in capitalism’s mid-twentieth-century epic of conformity’s success, Cold War America; and the ravages of the oppressed and dispossessed in the inner cities of late capitalism’s material and cultural chaos.

This leads us towards more familiar territory, the contemporary urban landscape at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Considerable attention has been given to the city and urbanism through a wide spectrum of analytical and critical lenses since issues and problems concerning these unwieldy subjects are highly complex.²

Digital Panopticon - What Is There Left to Feel?

The burgeoning interest in cities as places for happiness (Montgomery 2013); wealth (Glaeser 2011); social cohesion or fear (Minton 2009); or positive transformation (Hollis 2013), amongst many other perspectives, in recent years has cast them to the forefront of public consciousness through considerable debate and conjecture in the mainstream media. Cities have long been acknowledged as the confluence of human activity, especially commerce and capitalism, but more recently they have become the new ground for a different and frequently much more subtle type of exploitation. In this construct, venture capitalists, economists and politicians, among others, recalibrate the failing rhetoric of accelerated neoliberal capitalism into a more fluid, pervasive and insidious site for business. The message is clear if not explicitly tattooed across the built environment: without expenditure you are rarely welcome.

And this does not even account for how things change at night, which brings forth further and amplified issues of security and safety. Indeed, the threat of night has also been legislated against; as a cover it has been historically assailed by the intrusions of light (Schivelbusch 1995), and more recently the proliferation of technologies illuminating its dark corners and opening it up to the glare and stare of surveillance and scrutiny. Towards the end of the twentieth century, Jean Baudrillard (1993: 44) would summarize the disappearing qualities of the night in terms of universalizing loss, the bland homogenizing of humanity and history thus: ‘Ours is rather like the situation of the man who has lost his shadow: either he has become transparent, and the light passes right through him or, alternatively, he is lit from all angles, overexposed and defenceless against all sources of light.’

This loss is not simply personal as an infringement on privacy, but also has a huge environmental cost. Efforts to protect our night skies through official organizations and community groups and reclaim the wonder of the galaxies and the highly affective chiaroscuro of moonlight have become a significant and growing concern (Attlee 2011; Bogard 2013). The plight of tens of thousands of birds trapped in the 9/ 11 memorial, The Tribute in Light in New York, is a high profile and extreme example (Talanova 2015) of a situation caused by artificial lighting in cities replicated elsewhere around the globe. In the urban landscape after dark, the question may no longer be what spaces we wish to engage with, but when are they? Of course, most cities are rarely plunged into complete and utter darkness and when they are it is usually due to a huge power failure, which has strong negative associations from the critical, such as the impact on emergency services, to the perceived. Much more typical and familiar to us in an urban context are the ochre glow of streetlights and neon refractions of our cityscapes. Even in those parts of the city with the greatest light pollution, the absence of people can be a strange and exhilarating experience. However, to use artificial lighting to simply enable night to function in a similar manner to day is also to tamper greatly with distinctive characteristics. Schlör (2013: 242) points towards the fundamental essence thus: ‘The night tells one how the city really is, how “the whole” functions; and secondly, night, and only night, represents the presence of the past, the myth, in the city of the present.’ It is this conjuring of memory, presence and attention that nightwalking provides that makes it such a deep and multisensory experience.

Beyond the confines of daily tasks there is the emergence of a desire to claim back the night, away from the data deluge of email accounts, social-media prods and attention- leeching digital devices, towards the experiential qualities of the here and now rather than the tenuous and distant. It is this recent shift in our relationship with our immediate surroundings that has become highly mediated rather than attentive. This position is further supported by Patrick Keiller (2013: 135) who laments the loss of our important and interwoven relationships with ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part 1: Sensory Arts and Design, New Technologies and the Urban Environment
• Part 2: The Range of Sensory Arts and Design: Extensions, Realizations and Capacities
• Part 3: Vision, Touch and Technologies of Sense
• Index
• 1.1 Ghost urbanism, Hollywood;, Los Angeles, 9 April 2013
• 2.1 The initial design proposal of the xylophone artefact
• 3.1 A map showing a GPS trace of the route taken by the author in the Stage 1, Task 1, map-reading task, alongside the 'optimal' route
• 4.1 Chicago Powwow, 2009
• 7.1 Chicago Horizon, Ultramoderne, 2015
• 9.1 Edouard Manet, A Bar at the Folies-Bergère, 1882
• 10.1 Necker cube
• 11.1 John Ruskin, Study of Thistles
• 13.1 Window in an artist's Leeds studio