Sensory Seduction and Narrative Pull

User experience design is a process that has been defined, developed and refined over the last few decades. It is a process of shaping a user\u27s movements through a website or mobile application. It is user-focussed, prioritising utility, ease-of-use and efficiency. It is widely used and has helped advance the way in which users interact with websites and mobile applications, making it far less frustrating. User experience design is a key element in how the internet and mobile technology have become ubiquitous in our daily lives. Given this success, it would seem that continuing to use this process for new communication technologies would be the best way forward. However, it could limit the discovery of opportunities and uses for these new technologies. This paper looks at the importance of visual inquiry, experimentation and play for new technologies, particularly Augmented Reality (AR). AR is an emerging visual communication medium, and it is our contention that only through visual exploration and experimentation with the technology can a unique visual language emerge that will engage users in a manner befitting it. We explore the creative input that has helped shape the aesthetics of communication media at various points in history, from the humble poster to the internet aesthetic we know today, and look forward to the opportunities that lie waiting for the creation of new user experiences that have the sensory seduction and narrative pull that AR promises

The uncanny body: from medical to aesthetic abnormality

In this essay I explore a possibility of experiential synthesis of the medicalized abnormal body with its aesthetic images. A personal narrative about meeting extreme abnormality serves as an introduction into theorizing aesthetic abnormality. The essay builds its argument on the phenomenological grounds; I therefore approach corporeality with Edmund Husserl and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. In turn, Max Ernst introduces an aesthetic frame for the subsequent examination of uncanny surreality. Two exemplars of the surreal body, Joel Witkin’s “Satiro” and Don DeLillo’s “Body Artist,” intend to substantiate the preceding theoretic. The study shows how the encounter with the abnormal embodiment may suspend normalized modes of constitution to provoke uncanny experience

Ambient power: Berlin’s Potsdamer Platz and the seductive logic of public spaces

In privatised public spaces where people mill around and cross over one another's paths in largely unforeseen ways, one could be forgiven for thinking that power is largely about guards and gates or that it is present through surveillance techniques. This paper puts forward a rather different view of power in public spaces that highlights its unmarked presence. It argues that closure in some of the more recent privatised public spaces is achieved in decidedly modest ways through a logic of seduction. Using the example of a privatised public space at the heart of Berlin's Potsdamer Platz redevelopment, it is suggested that the layout and design of the complex represent a seductive presence that effectively closes down options, enticing visitors to circulate and interact in ways that they might not otherwise have chosen. The suggestive practices, experiences and spaces are laid out for temptation in such a way that closure is achieved by degree, through inclusion rather than exclusion. Power in this instance works through the ambient qualities of the space, where the experience of it is itself the expression of power

Tellings

http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/111676/1/mathm_1431546286.pd

Dark Looks: Sensory Contours of Racism in India

This chapter explores the intersections of caste, color, and class that become visible on the bodies of brown and black women moving through public spaces in India. The authors argue that a pervasive “haptic gaze,” that deploys staring as a prosthetic of touch, informs the varied registers of violence sensed and felt by different women. Drawing from Dalit and Black feminist theories, the authors draw a conceptual map of relations between caste-based patriarchy and anti-blackness, furthering an understanding of intersectional identities as shifting, fluid, and locational, specifically in relation to the global south

The Science of Error: Mesmerism and American Fiction, 1784-1890

Antebellum mesmerism posed a challenge to the prerogatives of self-mastering reason from within the scientific tradition itself. Though mesmerism is now most familiar as the sensational stage-practice and quack cure that drew criticism from Hawthorne and Henry James, its sympathizers considered it a theory of sensory error. Mesmerists claimed that the trance replicated the physiological effects of deception, allowing them to study swindling in laboratory conditions. Concluding that sensory error was ineradicable, they refuted Lockean pedagogy\u27s claims to reform the errant senses. One could at best manage delusion, through the self-doubt that liberalism had enjoined only its marginalized types—credulous women, laborers, racial inferiors—to practice. Mesmerism transvalued these figures, praising their powers of self-suspicion and condemning the ridiculous confidence of reason. Tracing the American mesmeric tradition from the science\u27s first appearance there as a falsehood, in 1784; through its limited practice in the 1790s; to its extensive popularity from the 1840s to the end of the century, I find in its performances an alternate sensory public capable of including among its knowing subjects hysterics, renegades, and castaways. Rather than thinking of American publics as being formed through agreement on the procedures of reason, then, my project proposes that we see them as forming around the procedures of sensation that mesmerism discloses. Through readings of The Coquette (1797), Edgar Huntly (1799), Moby-Dick (1851), The Blithedale Romance (1853), and other works of fiction, I argue that this tradition constitutes a resource for the novel in holding open the gates of the public sphere to a pluralistic range of knowledge-producers. Forming oxymoronic crosses between good liberals and strange, errant, but insightful mesmeric knowers, American fiction creates stereoscopic images of impossible subjects

I sing the body synaesthetic: cinema embodiment in Peter Greenaway's "Goltzius and the Pelican Company"

ABSTRACT - In 1911, Ricciotto Canudo labeled the cinema as the Seventh Art and claimed that it was superior to the other so-far existing art forms. In 2012, the British filmmaker Peter Greenaway directed yet another film that makes use of all these arts and media to convey an authorial discourse on the importance of cinema and its versatility: "Goltzius and the Pelican Company" (UK). I contend that this art house film, unemotional, filled with distancing effects and exhibiting nakedness throughout, is, in fact, an extremely sensorial piece of cinema where corporeality is not only the form but also the message, both literally and metaphorically. I advocate that this cerebral film can be sensual and sensuous, both through the use of the characters’ bodies and the materiality of the text. I also consider that this film generates two types of qualified immersion in the viewer: an artistic appreciation derived from coenasthesia and film textures; and a narrative appreciation caused by alignment with the characters, their non-psychological nature notwithstanding. Allegory, as both a structural device and a conveyor of meaning, is responsible for the combination of spectatorial detachment and immersion.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Archaeologies of Sound: Reconstructing Louis MacNeice’s Wartime Radio Publics

This article approaches the problem of reconstructing the culturally situated audience experience of radio programming through the example of Louis MacNeice's wartime radio broadcasts, notably "Alexander Nevsky" and "Christopher Columbus". The article draws on audience research reports, internal correspondence, and close analysis of the broadcasts themselves in order to triangulate a listening experience that, though it ultimately cannot be recovered, can be better understood through its proximate cultural traces