Notes
Ambiances, Alloaesthesia: Senses, Inventions, Worlds
The proceedings of the 4th International Congress on Ambiances are now available for download via the HAL open science platform here. Conference abstract as follows:
After the Congresses of Grenoble (Creating an Atmosphere, 2008), Montreal (Ambiances in Action, 2012) and Volos (Ambiances, Tomorrow: The Future of Ambiances, 2016), this 4th International Ambiances Network Congress, entitled “Ambiances, Alloaesthesia: Senses, Inventions, Worlds” questions the renewal of the forms of feeling in a world that is undergoing major changes. It aims to consider how the contemporary environmental, social, technological, political and ethical changes are likely to affect the sensitive worlds, their ambiances, and the ways of experiencing them.
This conference brings together more than a hundred scientific contributions coming from an international base of academics, practitioners, artists and PhD students working on ambiances and atmospheres. They offer an up-to-date account of the variety of themes and issues within this field, showcasing the latest research and methodological approaches. Organized in sixteen themed sessions, the presentations examine the ongoing preoccupations, debates, theories, politics and practices of this field, drawing on multidisciplinary expertise from areas as diverse as anthropology, architecture, computer science, cultural studies, design, engineering, geography, musicology, psychology, sociology, urban studies and so on.
→ Visit the E-conference website
→ Visit ambiances 2020 webpage on ambiances.net
Lockdown Wanderings as an Antidote to Habit
By James Horrox
We humans are nomadic creatures. For 99 percent of our existence as a species, anthropologists believe, we’ve been on the move. Some scientists have argued that a propensity for travel, novelty and adventure is actually encoded in our DNA. Either way, we don’t take well to confinement.
Confinement, however, is precisely what’s defined our shared experience of the last twelve months. For many, the sudden inability to travel much beyond our own neighborhoods brought with it a very real, very natural sense of claustrophobia. But being forced to stay close to home, while obviously limiting our experience in many respects, also opens up possibilities for experiencing the things around us in a new, perhaps more intense way, channeling our desire for novelty towards experiences that may be close at hand, but which we’ve never previously thought to explore.
Continue reading