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Paper short abstract:

A collective comprised of Indigenous and non-Indigenous artists, activists and academics, Sensory Entanglements explores radical potentialities of sensory perception in the making of contemporary life world - Indigenous, colonial, under occupation - through practice-led research in digital technologies and immersive new media.

Paper long abstract:

This session presents work in discussion by members of Sensory Entanglements, an experimental, transnational SSHRC (Social Sciences and Humanities Council Canada) funded laboratory, that began in 2014. A collective comprised of Indigenous and non-Indigenous artists, activists and academics, Sensory Entanglements explores radical potentialities of sensory perception in the making of contemporary life world - Indigenous, colonial, under occupation - through practice-led research in digital technologies and immersive new media. The lab has held meetings, readings, and research-creation workshops in Montreal, Sydney and Bundeena in order to test ideas, trial protypes and write the project. Between 2018 and 2020, collaborative teams led by Indigenous artists, drew from emerging technologies to create three immersive sensory environments which, due to Covid-19, will be on virtual display exhibition for AAS 2021.

Sensory Entanglements Members:

Professor Jennifer L. Biddle is Associate Dean of Engagement and Impact UNSW Art, Design and Architecture. Founding Director of Visual Anthropology & Visual Culture [VisANTH], NIEA, she leads an international program specializing in Indigenous and Asia Pacific research, one of only a few programs in Australia to support ethnographic and practice-led research as a basis for creative and critical research innovation in the arts.

David Garneau (Métis) is Professor of Visual Arts at the University of Regina. His practice includes painting, curation, and critical writing.

David Howes is Professor of Anthropology and the Director of the Centre for Sensory Studies at Concordia University, Montreal. He has conducted field research on the cultural life of the senses in the Massim and Middle Sepik River regions of Papua New Guinea, Northwestern Argentina, and the Southwestern United States.

Kite aka Suzanne Kite is an Oglála Lakȟóta performance artist, visual artist, and composer raised in Southern California, with a BFA from CalArts in music composition, an MFA from Bard College's Milton Avery Graduate School, and is a PhD candidate at Concordia University.

Florencia Marchetti is a multimedia ethnographer and documentarian who’s been working as coordinator for the Sensory Entanglements project for the past two years and as research and communications assistant since the laboratory began in 2014. She is currently writing her doctoral dissertation, at the Humanities Interdisciplinary program in Concordia University, on the atmospherics of terror as lived through the military dictatorship that ruled Argentina, her home country, during the first few years of her life.

r e a - is an artist / curator / activist / academic / cultural educator / creative thinker; from the Gamilaraay / Wailwan / Biripi (NSW) people of Indigenous Australia. r e a’s ongoing practise-led research takes its development from new and critical discourses exploring intersectionality and positionality, through the cultural convergence of Aboriginality; within the creative arts and technology, history and colonialism, the body and identity, gender and queer politics.

Chris Salter is an artist, Full Professor of Computation Arts at Concordia University and Co-Director of the Hexagram network for Research-Creation in Media Arts and Technology in Montreal.