Sound atmospheres and tactile experiences: Embodied processes and multisensory aestheics

Abstract

This article explores multisensory, haptic and motor gestures as ways of inhabiting atmospheres. It contributes to a developing body of ecological epistemologies on the embodied dimension by addressing the lived embodied experience coupled with air, material aspects and social life, rather than focusing on conceptual and semantic meaning for the description. The conceptual framework for this research is based on affordance theory, enactive cognitive sciences, and phenomenology, which offer a pathway for understanding skin-atmosphere interaction. It considers the organism-environment link and what is identified in the literature with the concept of sound ambiance. The article introduces the notion of multisensory and haptic affordances as a sensuous and attentional encounter of presence and argues that both contemporary approaches to the haptic and gestural body that stress affective and movement possibilities as well as the aesthetic and ecological-social perspective on performativity, though analytically useful, overlook the existence of a haptic phenomenology of the sensual realm of moods. Thus, the intertwining of sensory and aesthetic experiences with inhabited sound spaces is described from the tactile experience. How sound and matter are used to live particular experiences of space is discussed within a specific one, the arpa de fricción (friction harp) installation. Finally, based on the distinction between sensitivity and consciousness, the article turns towards a pedagogy of haptic-sound experiences during learning processes, used in contexts of embodied, aesthetic and critical education. And this offers a place to imagine and stage these types of learning environments in a deliberate way, with permeable, immersive, affective and collective qualities, to share in the co-creation of alternative worlds.