Short abstract

The paper argues for cultivating sensory capacities as forms of resistance and resilience to the anaesthetizing—overwhelming and numbing—effects of the Anthropocene, proposing an aesthetic research practice enacted through participatory protocols that cultivate eco-emotionality and eco-sociality.

Long abstract

This paper presents a project that contributes to emerging interdisciplinary research on eco-emotions by examining how they are embedded in the specific environments where they occur. Developing an innovative methodology that combines multimodal Science and Technology Studies (STS) with artistic research, it investigates how emotional responses emerge through participants’ direct, multisensory engagement with sites of environmental disruption. Drawing on the original Greek meaning of aisthetikos—the capacity to perceive through the senses—the paper argues for cultivating sensory capacities as an active form of resistance and resilience to the anaesthetizing—overwhelming and numbing—effects of the Anthropocene. To this end, it proposes an aesthetic practice enacted through participatory protocols that cultivate eco-emotionality and eco-sociality as intentional sensibilities and critical tools for responding to ecological disruption and loss. These include protocols for documenting how ecological disruption is sensed, registered, or escapes registration through embodied perception; protocols for technosensing that extend the human sensorium through environmental sensors; protocols for expanded practices of collaborative sensing that foster forms of collective ecological attunement; and protocols for common-sensing ecological crisis through perceiving, interpreting, and responding to ecological disruption in materially grounded and socially meaningful ways.