THE SUBJECT


The main topic 2021-2022

SENSING THE FUTURE
A collective exploration through the senses into future materialisations in the public realm

Our current reality asks us to re-envision (the use of) the senses in defining our relation to objects and space, so what does that mean? Are we re-inventing our senses or losing them in new realities of digitalisation and technologies? From the technological starting point, through the analysis of our current relationship to materiality, how can we use our senses as activators to imagine the future of materialisation?

What if we address the senses as a maze (labyrinth) that asks for a topology rather than a geometry of ‘knowledge’?

INSPIRATIONS
Guided by the ideas and works of Jane Bennett’s ‘Vibrant Matter’, Graham Harman’s ‘Object Oriented Ontology’, Anna Tsing's ‘Mushroom at the End of the World’, ‘The three ecologies’ of Felix Guattari and Michel Serres’ ‘The Five Senses, a Philosophy of Mingled Bodies’.


From Guattari’s book “The Three Ecologies”

“IWC seeks to gain power over us by 'controlling and neutralizing  the maximum number of existential refrains', thereby determining the limits within which we think, feel and live; a process of 'existential contraction'. We don't get out much; we tend to think what everyone else thinks, feel the same as everyone else; a strange passivity haunts our lives.