Sensed Selves: The (expanded) Sensorium in Media Art History

Abstract

In his late work Technologies of the Self, the French philosopher Michel Foucault famously described four “technologies” that train, produce and regulate modern selves. For Foucault, technology or “techné” involves forms of “practical rationality governed by a conscious goal.” While Foucault identified four technologies (production, signs, discipline and technologies of the self), I would like to introduce a fifth one; namely, that of “technologies of sense,” defined as those constructed techniques, devices, procedures or strategies that aim to produce bodies and selves with other kinds of perceptions – perceptions that extend routine ways of seeing, hearing, feeling, touching and tasting the world. As art historian Caroline Jones’ has claimed, the “human sensorium has always been mediated. But over the past few decades that condition has greatly intensified. Amplified, shielded, channeled, prosthetized, simulated, irritated – our sensorium is more mediated than ever before” (Jones 2006). I propose to ask then not only how it is that historically artists have used media technologies to challenge long standing dichotomies between body and environment, self and other and interior and exterior forms of perception but also to understand the flip side of the coin: that is, how forms of sense and sensation have historically and presently been produced and measured by such technologies. What role does and can the aesthetic play in a historical (and contemporary) technical episteme in which the sensorium is both expanded and, simultaneously produced and shaped by new forms of technologized attention, control and sensorial/ self production/transformation?