Sensory Encounter Research Articles

Sensory encounters with landscapes – atmospheres and the social construction of landscapes

This article links atmospheres with the social construction of landscapes. The examination of the social construction of landscapes is an important research perspective, especially in German-speaking geographical landscape research. However, the sensory encounter with landscapes as a moment in the construction of conceptions of landscape has so far been ignored. Nor has research on atmosphere yet systematically addressed the question of how the experience of atmospheres can be linked to the social construction of spaces. In a conceptual argumentation, this article shows two ways in which atmospheres can be relevant to the individual construction of landscape. On the one hand, the conscious experience of atmospheres is emphasised as a moment in which atmospheres can flow into constructions of landscape. On the other hand, it shows how atmospheres as a background phenomenon can influence situated perception and thus individual constructions of landscapes.

The Effect of Sensoric Marketing on McDonald's Consumer Repurchase Intention in Bandar Lampung City with Customer Satisfaction as Mediation Variable

People are eating differently now; they like quick and easy meals. Only in Indonesia are there a lot of fast food restaurants. One of the main fast food chains that has market dominance in Indonesia is McDonald's. In Indonesia, McDonald's built many locations, including Bandar Lampung. The findings of the Google review section reveal that many McDonald's patrons in Bandar Lampung are still not happy with their sensory encounter there. In this study, the mediating variable is satisfaction, which is used to explore how sensory marketing affects consumer repurchase intentions. Based on the questionnaire of 250 respondents, it has been shown that both customer satisfaction and sensory marketing have a favorable and considerable influence on consumers' intentions to make more purchases. Additionally, there is a positive and significant association between sensory marketing and repurchase intention, with satisfaction acting as a mediating component

Treharne, Elaine. Perceptions of Medieval Manuscripts: The Phenomenal Book

This monograph is both a study of medieval books as they were understood around the period of their creation, and an exploration of their meanings over time, culminating in reflections on the rapid digitization of old or rare books and manuscripts today. Treharne’s focus is on British books, and is aimed primarily at an academic readership. She links the medieval period and the internet age by concentrating on their differing approaches to the phenomenology of the book: its status as an object which can be accessed by all of the senses. For Treharne, following Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology (to which she returns frequently), understanding a physical manuscript book requires being able to ‘see it in its entirety – immanently and from all angles open to me’ (p. 5). Her focus is on recovering a range of perspectives on manuscripts through time, based on the ways in which they were produced and used. The phenomenology of the medieval book as viewed in a Special Collections reading room lies in the reader’s whole experience of it, from the texture of each page to the marginalia it has accrued over centuries, and from its physical weight to evidence of wear and tear. Where a twenty-first-century reader may tend to concentrate on the words or images contained within a text which is likely to be a copy or reproduction, Treharne seeks to celebrate the sensory pleasures that can be found in each unique and individual book. This leads to her reservations about digitization: what is lost when such a sensory encounter is transformed into a series of images on a screen? While the internet broadens the accessibility of a medieval book, and so in a sense democratizes the experience of it, the uniqueness of the original via its appeal to the non-visual senses is fundamentally diminished. The ‘aura’ of the object, to use Walter Benjamin’s term, is dampened, and the online viewer may ultimately be left longing for the heft and smell of the physical book. This is important for understanding function, as well as aesthetic experience: online resources can make it difficult to determine scale and weight, and it can therefore be unclear, for instance, whether a particular psalter is made to be carried around for private study or kept permanently in one ceremonial location. The tensions between accessibility, preservation and phenomenological experience are the subject of the later stages of this book, but perhaps the most rewarding sections are those in which Treharne uncovers the richness of the medieval book-as-object, from her discussion of the ways in which books were made to her exploration of their spiritual resonances and authority. It is in this context that she also explores ‘libricide’, the physical deconstruction of manuscript books, often for the rare book trade. After so convincingly and evocatively showing how books were once seen as ‘living objects […] extensive artefacts that are irreducible to their component parts’ (p. 168), the notion of their being filleted and resold in lots seems as shocking to this contemporary reader as it surely would have to the monks who first laboured prayerfully over them with quills and ink.

Dining in Prison: Sensory framing and performative perception in Rideout’s Past Time

This article examines the processes of sensory perception in Past Time (2018), Rideout’s project with prisoners at HMP Hewell (Tardebigge, Worcestershire, UK) that explored both the histories and contemporary experience of food and eating in prison. The article explores how we make sense of perceptual experience (in terms of reflection, meaning and significance), as well as how the sensory encounter itself is guided and framed. The article argues that, experientially, perception is always already framed in advance and that sensory perceptions are not neutral, apolitical information-gathering. The article focuses on a performance for an invited audience in the prison, which was a result of the research and development process conducted by the prisoners and the company. During the performance, the audience were served and ate portions of gruel, soup and bread made from historical recipes (notably manuals on cooking from the Prison Commission). The prison operated as a loaded site for guiding and framing the experience of eating. By exploring the intersection of taste, smell, touch, sight, sound and reflection as part of a performative model of perception, the article considers how language and thought operate as a key part of perceptual experience, while also examining the politics of the site of the prison as a framing device for perception.

Spirituality in Therapeutic Spaces: Perceptions of Spatiality, Trace, and past Rituals Manifesting Present Occupation

Spaces for therapy and counseling are spaces whose physical characteristics transform into metaphysically changed feelings of transcendental reality and meaningful, spiritual overtones. For individuals who self–harm, therapeutic processes and associated interior spaces can be contemplative spaces, where they might develop interconnectedness with oneself and a sense of self–actualization. Therapeutic spaces can address high levels of anxiety and mitigate potential dissociation, which is when the individual is removed from a sense of aliveness, a sense of presence and immersion in the realm of sensory experience. This paper examined the perceptions of spatiality of individuals who self–harm and the interior encounters for which they were exposed. The data collection involved a series of semistructured interviews with mental health service users who self–harm, their careers, therapists/counselors, architects, and design experts/researchers. Also included was an examination of existing built therapeutic spaces. A series of findings revealed relationships between perceptions of spatiality and the spiritual dimensions of therapeutic environments. Based upon qualitative data, how individuals who self–harm experience particular connections between physical and psychological spaces, and how their interior space encounter is overlaid with inhabitation of past service users are presented. A discussion of sensory encounter and dissociation and the relationship between trace and spatial perception leads to a series of research–derived design recommendations to be used to develop supportive, therapeutic spaces delivering mental health services.

Narrative Twists: Spiraling Time and Projected Identities in the Hair of Vertigo’s Madeleine

This article explores the ways in which hair entwines memory, identity and character to establish multiple modes of consuming Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958). As the female protagonist of Vertigo, the character of Madeleine Elster, with her recognizable, oft-cited icy white-blonde chignon, is a projected identity staged as fantasy. Threaded across a dizzying narrative, the twisted spiral of hair forms a lens for viewing and reading multiple identities, configurations, actions and endless interpretation. From Hitchcock’s misty, dreamy San Francisco to Vertigo’s origins as a Parisian detective novel, to Marcel Proust’s madeleine cake via the biblical Mary Magdalene by way of Kristevan literary analysis, and Chris Marker’s movie-homage, Madeleine’s hair is both portal and projection through which to fall into a complex sensory encounter that traces the moving image as transposed into written word.

Educated tastes

This paper explores taste in the context of phenomenology and outlines possibilities for situating a phenomenological approach to taste within the framework of educational theory. In such an approach, taste emerges as a complex interaction between all senses and as interplay between recollection and anticipation. In this respect, taste-experience is indicative of a privileged but hitherto relatively unexplored access to cognition. It is a sensory encounter that encompasses possibilities for learning, not only about taste but also about other subjects through taste.

Feeling and Form

In the wake of the linguistic turn, scholars have turned to affect and to aesthetics to account for textual experiences that exceed critical frameworks of representation and critique. Bringing formalist analysis and affect theory to bear on one another, recent works of literary, art, and film criticism by C. Namwali Serpell, renée c. hoogland, and Eugenie Brinkema develop methodologies for exploring how the arts move us — how they impress themselves upon our bodies and create effects in the world. Adding to the current conversation about postcritical reading, surface reading, distant reading, and other methodological developments, these works offer methods for illuminating the relationship between form and feeling: neo-phenomenology, retelling, and close reading. By analyzing the relationship between affect and aesthetics across genres of art, this essay argues, we can expand the category of reading to better understand the temporal, spatial, and sensory encounter between text and audience.

Figures of Feeling in Honoré de Balzac's La Peau de chagrin

In this article, I read Balzac's La Peau de chagrin as a novel of feeling, in which Raphael's act of telling his life story entails a sensory encounter with the narrative self. Beginning with the novel's emblematic epigraph, then following through a series of significant encounters within it, I show that Raphael, by putting his life into narrative, is forced to come upon himself as narrative object. Examining these encounters first through the vector of physiognomy, then through twentieth-century theories of play, and always paying particular attention to the visual aspects of touch and feeling, I read them as moments of corporeal mimesis which cast Raphael in a thing- or object-like state. This spectacle of mimesis, in which subject is cast as object, is aptly figured by the magical piece of skin at the novel's centre, the organ of touch, shrinking at the expression of desire and thus functioning as a visual measure for the compromised narrative life.

A78 Establishing the foundation for Age- and Disability-friendly Road Safety Policies in Sri Lanka

Abstract Background With increased motorization and hazards embedded in the built environment, elderly and people living with physical, sensory and mobility impairments encounter a variety of barriers in transportation, mobility and social participation. The Moneragala district in the Uva province of Sri Lanka provides an opportunistic study base in which to evaluate the context and inherent risks involved through linkage to an existing initiative developing an age- and disability-friendly community. The objective of the study was to identify risks relating to road traffic injury among older people and those living with disability and guide advocacy, community development, and policy change to address these risks in the Uva province in Sri Lanka. Methods This was a mixed methods participatory research study conducted in three randomly selected divisional secretariats in Moneragala district. The sources of data were collected included a household travel survey of the vulnerable road users of interest (i.e., older people aged 60 years and older, and people living with disabilities aged five year and older), focus groups, key informant interviews and photographic documentation of barriers and facilitators for road safety. Records of road traffic “accidents” (as defined in Police databases) for the past ten years were examined. Areas in the community deemed vulnerable were mapped and photographed. Results Barriers for travel identified by the vulnerable road users in this study included problems with public transport (inconvenient stops, high foot boards, delays), poor accessibility to roads and important institutions (e.g., hospitals, banks), economical and medical reasons and poor recognition or indifferent attitude of service providers and the public. Common hazards expected to influence injury risks included the state of the pavements or sidewalks (e.g., absent or poorly maintained, too narrow, obstructed by sign posts, light posts or parked vehicles), high speeds of vehicles, the state of the main roads (inadequate signage for crossings, bus stops; lack of tactile paving or other features assisting the visually impaired) and poorly constructed or absent culverts on all types of roads. Suggestions to reduce road traffic injury risks from both the participants and the stakeholders included the introduction of disable-friendly cost effective modes of transportation, improved road engineering designs and transportation infrastructure, public awareness programs for targeted groups (e.g., drivers of public buses and three wheelers, school children and teachers, policy makers and other stakeholders) and the implementation and monitoring of effective legislation. Conclusions This research highlights both the imperative and substantial potential for identifying and addressing priority needs among the most vulnerable populations as transportation and urban design plans are rolled-out in less-resourced settings.

The Sensory Experiencing of Urban Design: The Role of Walking and Perceptual Memory

Experience is conceptualised in both academic and policy circles as a more-or-less direct effect of the design of the built environment. Drawing on findings from a research project that investigated people’s everyday experiences of designed urban environments in two UK towns, this paper suggests at least two reasons why sensory encounters between individuals and built environments cannot in fact be understood entirely as a consequence of the design features of those environments. Drawing from empirical analysis based on surveys, ethnographic ‘walk-alongs’ and photo-elicitation interviews, we argue that distinct senses of place do depend on the sensory experiencing of built environments. However, that experiencing is significantly mediated in two ways. First, it is mediated by bodily mobility: in particular, the walking practices specific to a particular built environment. Secondly, sensory experiences are intimately intertwined with perceptual memories that mediate the present moment of experience in various ways: by multiplying, judging and dulling the sensory encounter. In conclusion, it is argued that work on sensory urban experiencing needs to address more fully the diversity and paradoxes produced by different forms of mobility through, and perceptual memories of, built environments.

“We Confound Knowledge with Knowledge”: Posthumanism and Sensory Encounter in John Webster's the White Devil

“We Confound Knowledge with Knowledge”: Posthumanism and Sensory Encounter in John Webster's <i>the White Devil</i>

Poetry and the Romantic Musical Aesthetic (review)

Donelan, James H. 2008. Poetry and the Romantic Musical Aesthetic. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. $93 he. xvi + 216 pp.James H. Donelan's Poetry and the Romantic Musical Aesthetic examines four cultural giants all born in 1770: Holderlin, Hegel, Wordsworth, and Beethoven. In each separate and largely self-contained study, Donelan elaborates interdisciplinary and erudite re-interpretation of Romanticism, offering original insight into ideas of the self-conscious mind emerging in early nineteenth-century Europe. He argues that because music connects sensory experience and spiritual significance it exemplifies the autonomous aesthetic creation of the Romantic self. To develop this argument, Donelan restricts the ambitions of German Romanticism, of Hegel and Holderlins ontological and historical claims for aesthetics, allowing only for the autonomous creation of artist's self-consciousness. Similarly, he insists on the autonomy of this aesthetic process, the independence of the individual self, and the continued relevance of this notion of Romantic selfhood, dismissing along the way efforts in recent theory to deconstruct or historicize or otherwise challenge the autonomy, independence, or contemporary relevance of the Romantic self. He fails to recognize, however, that the very concept of the musical aesthetic he rigorously unearths more readily serves the theory he dismisses.Crucial to Donelan's concept of the musical aesthetic is a reading of Tlte Phenomenology of Spirit. In Hegel's history of self-consciousness becoming objective and universal, Donelan highlights the sensory encounter with object as the ground for self-conscious human subjectivity, which emerges over time through reflection upon this sensory encounter. Music, or purely instrumental music, is special because it is between object and subject. Unlike other art objects, music has neither visible form nor any determinate physical place, yet exists for the subject's sensuous apprehension; at the same time, as aesthetic object produced by and for conscious contemplation, music powerfully affects human spirit. Donelan then contests Hegel's view that music is a lower art form, and that all art lies lower than religion or philosophy, because the higher forms of spirit are rich in conceptual content enabled by language. First, he argues that absolute music, though it uses no words, does indeed articulate ideas in its relation to its cultural and intellectual context. Second, Donelan argues that leaving music or art behind in spirit's development toward higher forms of self-consciousness elides what is essential element in the process of becoming self-conscious, that is, the connection to sensory experience and thus to the objective world. Unlike religion and philosophy, art takes place in paint and canvas, wood and stone, but especially for Donelan's purposes in the sound of musical notes or the structured sound of metered poetry. In its brevity and narrow focus on music, Donelan's critique is limited as a contribution to Hegel scholarship, especially since it doesn't address the implications of the critique for Hegel's ambitious ontological and historical claims for aesthetics and for self-consciousness. Nonetheless, through this reading of Hegel, Donelan defines the Romantic musical aesthetic as instance of self-consciousness that is both thing and idea, both a sensory object and act of a subject reflecting upon sensory experience.This sensory musical aesthetic is evident in Holderlin's poetry, but only, again, at the cost of reducing profound ontological and historical claims to the assertion of individual consciousness. In such poems as Brot und Wein and Patmos, Holderlin reflects within poetry on the ontological function of poetry, which for Donelan emphasizes how the poet brings himself into being as an autonomous subject who has acquired self-consciousness and whose words allow this self-consciousness to have real existence (58). …

Aesthetic Intelligence Assists Inclusive Design

Product preference is rarely an exercise in logic, and is a more complex process than selection through visual features, ease of use or physical fit alone. This paper argues that if the human factors dimensions of a product embraces only a narrow ‘norm’ then the product's features will only be perceived and be usable by a relatively narrow range of users: it will be ‘exclusive’. If the concept of ‘aesthetic intelligence’ is understood then products can be designed to be more inclusive in nature. By acknowledging personal responses and cultural values, in addition to physiological and psychological issues, a broader, more inclusive range of user preferences and responses can be accommodated. Using a ‘scenario of sensory encounter’ the author proposes a methodological approach to revealing our aesthetic intelligence which extends Dreyfuss' paradigm for an ‘environmental comfort zone’, to encompass a richer set of issues influencing usability and acceptability.

Language, Thought, and Logical Paradoxes

Concepts Our case, however, is still far from complete. We have said that concepts are built out of experience; yet certain concepts such as “atom” and “neutrino” denote events admittedly beyond all forms of direct sensory encounter. Additionally, concepts such as “virtue” and “reward” appear to defy imagery. How do we envisage atoms and neutrinos? The nuclear physicist will likely understand such particles in terms of complex mathematical descriptions, and considerations of mathematical understanding are presented later in this writing. Most of us, however, understand atoms, etc. by imagining tiny particles which adhere together and make up bigger things. Such particles may be composed of still smaller particles; some revolve around others; some have electromagnetic attraction and repulsion, and some travel in wavelike motions. While all of these features occur beyond the range of vision, we attempt to imagine them by borrowing from features of sensory experience. The images by which we try to understand atoms are images acquired through sensory encounters. On a different order of abstraction consider the sentence “Effort brings reward.” It would seem that the meaning defies imagery and hence would not fit the definitions of truth and understanding as presented above. However, we must recall that imagery as defined in this writing includes the portrayal of all modalities of experience—auditory, tactile, emotional, etc. The concept “effort” has an obvious experiential basis; it is akin to a feeling of tension which accompanies earnest voluntary activity. Having experienced such a feeling, we can remember it, and upon this our understanding is founded. In similar manner the concept “reward” covers a range of pleasurable experiences including gustatory enjoyment, aesthetic arousal, personal esteem, and companionship. “Virtue” is occasionally cited as a concept which defies both illustration and definition. The problem, however, is not that virtue is abstract; rather, it is complex and in some ways nonvisual. Virtue is sometimes judged by solely behavioral standards (i.e., physical actions) and thus falls exclusively within the range of sensory encounters. But virtue may also be measured by motivational qualities (such as love and compassion), and in these instances the concept is built out of emotional images. Furthermore, confusion arises from the numerous and conflicting personal and cultural standards of virtue. However, if one clearly delineates the essential behavioral and/or motivational components of the concept “virtue,” one finds this concept, too, can be understood by way of imagery as herein defined.