Animated Spaces

ABSTRACT

Recent exhibitions of interaction design have sought, and often struggled, to capture within the space of a traditional gallery the multisensorial, often performative nature of the user experience and the richness of the contexts within which that experience takes place. Similarly, many architecture exhibitions have attempted to reinvent the place of architecture in the modern museum—to portray architecture as a multimodal, multisensory shaper of the material landscape that impacts people's everyday lives. Yet, again, the “white cube” complicates curators' and exhibition designers' efforts to go beyond traditional materials—blueprints, renderings, models, and photographs—to convey the dimensionality and material richness of built space. This article will examine how interaction design and architecture, both experiential fields, present unique challenges to the exhibition designer. It will also consider how these fields, by virtue of the distinctive qualities of their designed objects, offer unique opportunities for us to rethink the relationships between the contexts and contents of exhibition. It will conclude with specific recommendations for ascertaining the limitations and affordances of—and critically negotiating between—the exhibition space, the exhibition's publics, and exhibition modes and media.     

Sensing Cittàslow: Slow Living and the Constitution of the Sensory City

ABSTRACT

In 2004 Aylsham, Norfolk, became Britain's second Cittàslow Town (Slow City). Embedded within the slow living ideology of Cittàslow is the assumption that the “better” life it advocates involves heightened sensory experience and concomitant pleasure. In contrast to contemporary fast life, it wishes that “suitable doses of guaranteed sensual pleasure and slow, long-lasting enjoyment [may] preserve us from the contagion of the multitude who mistake frenzy for efficiency” (The Slow Food Companion 2005: 6). In the first part of the paper I analyze how the sensory elements of slow living are represented in the Cittàslow and related Slow Food movement's literature. Then, based on my ethnographic fieldwork centered on Aylsham's Cittàslow events and projects, I examine how the routine and creative sensory practices of the individuals who produce and participate in Cittàslow policies and activities are constitutive of a “sensory city.”     

Embracing Sculptural Ceramics: A Lived Experience of Touch in Art

ABSTRACT

Sculptural ceramic objects created by and for the body were made within the context of art-based research, in which theoretical explorations and studio practice were integrally interwoven. Studio explorations developed from theoretical knowledge gained from human physiology, and from the development of an understanding of the “lived experience” as expressed by Maurice Merleau-Ponty, through the experiences of the artist in making, and comments from visitors at exhibitions. The artworks challenge the visual hegemony of the art gallery by more fully engaging the body's sense of touch through the embrace. The sculptures, which were made by “casting hugs,” instinctively invite interaction, with soft curves that echo the human body, textures to visually entice individuals to touch, and a pleasurable weight that slows down responses. In public exhibition the artworks are enthusiastically embraced and held, broadening and articulating a tactile aesthetic for sculpture, and shifting focus from the sculptural objects themselves to one's physical and emotional experience of those objects.     

A touch of luck and a “real taste of Vegas”: a sensory ethnography of the Montreal Casino

ABSTRACT

In recent years, there has been an explosion of “experiential design” in casinos, driven in part by research suggesting that curating gambling sensescapes can lure patrons to spend more time – and money – inside the casino. Building on the promise of existing casino ethnographies, this paper argues that a sensory ethnographic approach to the study of gambling environments can offer valuable insight into the experiential design and mood management of the casino. We use sensory ethnography to explore the ambiance of the Montreal Casino, particularly during the casino’s “Vegas Nights” promotion. How does the casino feel (and how does it touch back)? What rhythms flow through its neon labyrinth? What does “getting a real taste of Vegas,” well … taste like? Moreover, we position this ambiance at the center of the casino’s “push-and-pull” approach to problem gambling – where this government-affiliated sensory extravaganza must toe a tenuous line between attraction and responsibilisation. In addition, we examine how the ambiance of the casino is co-produced by patrons and employees. Ultimately, we argue that the casino floor is unlike a sensory research laboratory – for here, sensations mix and mingle, and it takes a sensory ethnographer to quite literally “make sense” of the casino ambiance and its impact on visitor experience.     

The Sale of Two Cities: A Semiotic Comparison of Disneyland with Marriott's Great America

Much is revealed through the contrast of two related but divergent forms. In this essay, Elizabeth Mechlingand Jay Mechlingcontrast Disneyland with a later but more loosely themed park, Marriott's Great America in Santa Clara, California. Using the perspectives and methods of semiotics in Louis Marin's Marxist reading, this essay asks, “What are the stories that Disneyland and Marriott's Great America tell?…the ways in which popular culture both teaches and evokes stories that ‘think themselves’ in our minds.” These two parks, though allied in the theme format and rooted in a common bourgeois capitalist culture, are found to promote very different attitudes and values.     

Learning by doing: the case of administrative policy transfer in China

This article explores of the role of policy transfer in facilitating the rise and consolidation of the ‘Reform and Open Door Policy' in China. It builds upon the seminal Dolowitz and Marsh [Dolowitz, D., and D. Marsh. 1996. “Who Learns What From Whom: A Review of the Policy Transfer Literature.” Political Studies 44: 343–357; Dolowitz, D., and D. Marsh. 2000. “Learning from Abroad: The Role of Policy Transfer in Contemporary Policy-Making.” Governance 13 (1): 5–23] framework to provide an examination of processes of administrative policy transfer which it argues are broadly indicative of the dynamics of change underpinning the incremental process of reform. It is observed that the reforms under study have not been characterized by rational policy design underpinned by evidence-based policy-making in which issues of cultural assimilation were emphasized. Rather, the implementation process itself has been used to affect processes of adaptation. Policy transfer in China can best be described as learning by doing.     

Coming of age in Samoa…in 1997

Abstract

A psychodynamically trained clinical social worker living in Samoa since 1995 examines some of the questions that the situation of rapid cultural change exposes. What effects does culture have on individual adolescent development? How are “healthy"/"adaptive” developmental outcomes shaped by the historical moment in which an adolescent lives? What does it mean for a clinician to be an “outsider” in a dominant culture of “insiders”? This paper attempts to address some of these questions from a very personal perspective.     

The Roots of Community Development in Colonial Office Policy and Practice in Africa

This paper looks at the origins of ideas about community development as they emerged during Britain's administration of its African colonies from the 1920s to the 1950s. Significant influences on development policy and practice include changing ideas about state intervention within the British government, international scrutiny from international organizations, US interest in Africa, ideas and activities of missionary societies, technological developments, great leaps forward by key individuals, examples of state‐sponsored mass education schemes in Russia, colonial disturbances, and cataclysmic events such as the Great Depression, the rise of Hitler, and pre‐eminently, the Second World War itself. The evolution of community development ideas in Colonial Office practice will chiefly be illustrated through instructional films. Those which illustrate the argument are a striking example of community development in action because they are a visual medium in a visual age; they were seen as having a pivotal role in mass education schemes; they illustrate through their topics and scenarios what were seen as the hot development issues of the day; they capture the flavour of the period; and because they are a concrete illustration of the continuity of community development schemes in Africa in the colonial and post‐colonial eras.     

A body passes by: the flâneur and the senses in nineteenth-century London and Paris

Abstract

The flâneur is well-known for being the most emblematic nineteenth-century observer of urban life. Critics have often compared the flâneur to a camera eye which records everything and insisted on the predominance of sight over other senses in the cognitive process. This article emphasises the embodiedness of the flâneur’s vision, which is an experience of all the senses. Urban public space can be envisaged as a ‘metabolic space,’ in which “the links between background and figures are very unstable” (Augoyard 1991). The moving body of the flâneur, which can adapt to this changing space, seems to be in an ideal position to apprehend the metabolic body of the city. The flâneur is not only a “transparent eye-ball” (Emerson 2003), he is “a living eye” which communicates with all the other senses and captures the whole experience of moving through the city. By looking at texts by Balzac, Baudelaire, Dickens and Charlotte Brontë, the article shows that flânerie is a sensory activity that shapes our perception of the city as much as the city shapes our own flâneries by transforming our bodies into scribes who write the “thicks and thins of the urban text” (de Certeau, 1984).     

A Transversal Lineage

ABSTRACT

This article proposes the term “perceptual abstraction” to describe the methods of artists who take bodily contingency as their medium. It focuses on the low-frequency drone work of an anonymous figure called Eleh. Like others in the Minimalist tradition, Eleh follows a processual ethic that begins from a minimum of structural elements and asks how they might reshape one another over time. What sets Eleh apart, however, is its singular focus on frequencies within, and sometimes beyond, the lowest reaches of human hearing. These tones play strangely on the sensorium because they can evade cochlear audition even while haunting other registers. This is bass as an agent of bodily mystification, and in Eleh's hands it becomes a sonic strategy for modulating felt space and fleshy thought. If Eleh diverges from most Minimalists in these ways, then liner notes and cover art point to another, more like-minded body of work. Might Op(tical) Art—with its interest in “charging fields” and rhythmically unraveling retinal perception—share at least as much with Eleh, at the level of affective strategy? If so, could we posit an alternate, transversal lineage of artistic practices defined not by form or tradition, but by a desire to confound perception, by whatever aesthetic and sensory routes?     

Manchester through the Ears

ABSTRACT

As part of a wider sensory ethnography on the development of place attachments and situated knowledge amongst international newcomers to a city (Manchester, England), this article tells the story of my collaboration with Phoebe, a student of acoustics from bandung, Indonesia. Using a participatory sensory ethnographic method, Phoebe was encouraged to devise her own contribution to my project, which was modeled around her own sensory preferences and technological expertise. Our work together took place over a period of 4–5 months and yielded a series of soundscape compositions and accompanying narrative texts, all of which conveyed Phoebe's newly acquired sound-based knowledge, or acoustemology, of Manchester. Using narrative textual accompaniments to her recordings, Phoebe ascribes qualities to her surroundings that overlap with her own personal qualities, in effect showing how much she blends with her new city. As Phoebe and I subsequently listened to and “talked over” her soundscape compositions, they evoked sound marks, or sensory memories, of the landscape, sounds and music that Phoebe left behind in Indonesia. these sound-elicited interviews added further layers of emplaced knowledge to both of our constructions of the city.     

LOUD silence: Turning Up the Volume on Deaf Voice

Abstract

From 2014 to 2015, I curated an exhibition entitled LOUD silence, which was held in two different venues in California: Grand Central Arts Center at California State University Fullerton, followed by gallery@Calit2 at the University of California, San Diego. The exhibition offered the opportunity for viewers to consider definitions of sound, voice, and notions of silence at the intersection of both deaf and hearing experiences. The exhibition displayed prints, drawings, sculptures, videos, and several film installations, and featured work by four artists who have different relationships to deafness and hearing, including Shary Boyle, Christine Sun Kim, Darrin Martin and Alison O’Daniel. These four artists explored how the binary of loudness and silence might be transformed in politicized ways through their own specificities, similarities and differences in relationship to communication and language. The stereotypical view of the deaf experience is that they live a life of total silence, where they retain little to no concept of sound. But on the contrary, deaf studies scholars Carol Padden and Tom Humphries state that deaf people actually know a lot about sound, and sound informs and inhabits their world just as much as the next person (Padden and Humphries 1998: 91).Through these artworks, the artists aimed to loudly explode the myth of a silent deaf world, and they troubled just how “inaudible” sound really is through their own visceral experiences of it. Ultimately, I argue that the work in LOUD silence offers an avenue for eradicating deaf oppression.     

Book Reviews

Through the Window, Out the Door: Women's Narratives of Departure, from Austin and Cather, to Tyler, Morrison, and Didion. Janis P. Stout. A Century of Women: The History of Women in Britain and the United States. Sheila Rowbotham. Ghost Dancing the Law: The Wounded Knee Trials. John William Sayer. A West Texas Soapbox. Jim Sanderson. A Guide to American Crime Films of the Thirties. Larry Langman and Daniel Finn. A Guide to American Silent Crime Films. Larry Langman and Daniel Finn. All Things Herriot: James Herriot and His Peaceable Kingdom. Sanford Sternlicht. Arab Comic Strips: Politics of an Emerging Class Culture. Allen Douglas and Fedwa Matli-Douglas. Bing Crosby: A Bio-Bibliography. J. Roger Osterholm. Drawing the Dream of the Wolves: Homosexuality, Interpretation, and Freud's “Wolf Man.” Whitney Davis. Culture and Comfort: Parlor Making and Middle-Class Identity, 1850–1930. Katherine C. Grier. Inventing New England: Regional Tourism in the Nineteenth Century. Dona Brown. American Popular Culture at Home and Abroad. Ed. Lewis H. Carlson and Kevin B. Vichcales. Encyclopedia of Pop Culture: An A to Z of Who's Who and What's What, from Aerobics and Bubble Gum to Valley of the Dolls and Moon Unit Zappa. Jane and Michael Stern.     

Community Empowerment and Democracy in Zimbabwe: A Case Study from Binga District

The development of an “informed and alert electorate” is essential for the establishment of democratic governance in Africa and for the continent's future economic growth. This need is particularly evident in Zimbabwe, which is currently in the midst of an acute political and economic crisis. This paper tells the story of a small community‐based organization in a remote part of Zimbabwe, which helped to raise political awareness and consciousness among a dis‐advantaged rural population. Because of the threat that it posed to the Mugabe government, the organization was forced to close in October 2002. However, its experience has important lessons for the future development of Zimbabwe—and of Africa as a whole.     

Introducing Sensory Studies

ABSTRACT

Color serves a variety of purposes in society from identifying groups to conveying symbolic meanings to providing aesthetic pleasure. More subtle effects of color can be found in the environments that human communities construct around themselves. At Doon School, an elite boys' boarding school in northern India, color is intimately associated with the students' activities, social relationships and sensory experiences. It defines their status and shapes their everyday lives. The uses of color at the school are consistent with a wider social aesthetic emphasizing restraint, logical thought and the training and presentation of the body. Many of these values can be seen to have their origins in the school's colonial history and postcolonial aspirations.     

Where Publics May Touch

ABSTRACT

In response to the unique sensory modes of blind and partially sighted communities, tactile and multisensory tours and exhibition components of museum collections are gradually becoming more common in North America and Europe. Such initiatives are often intended to give equal forms of access for diverse participating publics. This article provides an auto-ethnographic report on the tactile tours offered by The National Gallery of Canada (Ottawa) program “Stimulating the Senses,” and gives context for sensorial models at play in Western museums today. Museum strategies that encourage intersensorial awareness and access are also discussed. Attention is given to the performative properties of these tours, and the variety of encounter they encourage between publics. This article also includes accounts of the program by its supervisor and coordinator, as well as from a participant. Key questions this article explores are: do such tours in fact give equal access; what motivates the development of such programs in Canadian institutions; and what outcomes are realized through these programs?     

Knowledge,power and the city since 1700

Between the mid-nineteenth century and the early twentieth century the trend of recorded violence in New Zealand broadly paralleled that of Britain. This review appraises critically two local interpretations of social attitudes and behaviour seen to be reflected in the colonial trend. Both provide 'frontier-type' theses in viewing disorder as a by-product of either colonial masculinity or the social atomization of migrants. Accordingly the decline in recorded violence is viewed as the outcome of either a local civilizing process or the emergence of social networks. However, the parallelism of the colonial and British trends suggest that there could be common processes at work. In this context, the nature of colonial violence, patterns of colonial litigiousness and the applicability of V. A. C. Gatrell's interpretation of the development of a disciplinary 'policeman-state' are considered. The need for further comparative research in both the colonial and British context is suggested, so as to test the extent to which the colonial experience of violence may be explained by 'frontier' and/or 'cultural fragment' explanations.     

More present than absent: Men who use domestic violence and their fathering

An earlier article referred to the “absent presence” of the perpetrator in the lives of children and their mothers who have lived with domestic violence. It identified the ways in which the shadow of the perpetrator continued and was evidenced in the “symptoms of abuse” that both women and children experienced in spite of his absence. The current article argues that fathers who use violence are actually more present than absent in the lives of children (and women), even following separation. A mixed method approach surveyed men in Men's Behaviour Change Programs (N = 101), and interviewed women who had experienced violence (N = 50). The studies reported that the majority of men in both the quantitative men's study (80%) and the qualitative women's study (77%) had substantial contact with children. The women's interviews highlight the problematic fathering that many of their children experienced, both before and after separation. They reported very high levels of child abuse and poor attitudes to both women and children. The article concludes that the family violence and child welfare systems are poorly configured to address fathers who use violence and continue to hold substantial parenting roles, including following separation.     

Book Reviews

The Guide to United States Popular Culture. Edited by Ray B. Browne and Pat Browne. The Detective as Historian: History and Art in Historical Crime Fiction. Edited by Ray B. Browne and Lawrence A. Kreiser, Jr. Preface by Robin W. Winks. Materialist Feminism: A Reader in Class, Difference, and Women's Lives. Rosemary Hennessy and Chrys Ingraham, eds. Popular Culture: Cavespace to Cyberspace. Marshall W. Fishwick. Great Cars of the Great Plains. Curt McConnell. Golden Arches East: McDonald's in East Asia. Ed. James L. Watson. The History of Jazz. Ted Gioia. Puppets and “Popular” Culture. Scott Cutler Shershow. Theater and Society: An Anthology of Contemporary Chinese Drama. Haiping Yan, ed. Armonk Teenage Nervous Breakdown: Music and Politics in the Post‐Elvis Age. David Walley. The Ignorance Explosion: Understanding Industrial Civilization. Julius Lukasiewicz. The Unofficial Encyclopedia of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Nick Talevski. Graphic Novels: A Bibliographic Guide to Book‐Length Comics. D. Aviva Rothschild. Elvis, Hank, and Me: Making Musical History on the Louisiana Hayride. Horace Logan with Bill Sloan. Women Imagine Change: A Global Anthology of Women's Resistance from 600 B.C.E. to Present. Eugenia DeLamotte, Natania Meeker, and Jean O'Barr, eds. We Mean to Be Counted: White Women and Politics in Antebellum Virginia. Elizabeth R. Varon. Gender and American Culture series. Subject to Change: Guerrilla Television Revisited. Deirdre Boyle. What Evil Means to Us. C. Fred Alford. A Sense of Place: Michigan's Upper Peninsula. Essays in Honor of William and Margery Vandament. Edited by Russell M. Magnaghi and Michael T. Marsden.