Research Colloquium at SFU’s School of Interactive Arts and Technology in Surrey presents

Laura U Marks

Dena Wosk University Professor of Art and Culture Studies at SFU

Thinking Through the Nose, a performative lecture

Wednesday October 11, 2006 at 1:30 pm

Room 3875, SFU Surrey Campus, third floor Central City Tower in the Research Labs

abstract

The scholarly turn toward visual culture has left in place the sensory hierarchy that subtends Western philosophy, in which only the distance senses are vehicles of knowledge, and Western aesthetics, in which only vision and hearing can be vehicles of beauty. I suggest, and some non-Western aesthetics have long observed, that bodily senses, touch, taste, and smell, may also be senses of knowledge and vehicles of beauty. My examples will place special emphasis on the sense of smell.

Recently the body and its senses have been embraced in scholarship and art practice. However, the “bodily turn” is often uncritical, anti-epistemological, and essentialist. Moreover, an inversion of the sensory hierarchy with the bodily senses at the top is not necessarily any more conducive to knowledge or justice than the old hierarchy. Meanwhile, consumer capitalism is conquering the bodily senses from nose to toes, potentially alienating the very senses most resistant to mass communication. I attempt to show how the bodily senses can be sites of colonization, critique, and creativity, again focusing on the sense of smell.

bio

Dr. Laura U. Marks is a scholar and curator of independent and experimental media arts. Her current research interests are independent media in the Arab world, and Islamic genealogies of new media art. She is the author of The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the Senses (Duke University Press, 2000),Touch: Sensuous Theory and Multisensory Media (Minnesota University Press, 2002), and many essays. She has curated programs for numerous venues including the Oberhausen Film Festival (Germany), the Images Festival (Toronto), LA Freewaves (Los Angeles), Subtle Technologies (Toronto). Dr. Marks is the Dena Wosk University Professor of Art and Culture Studies at Simon Fraser University, Vancouver.

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