Overview

In an era where digital devices increasingly mediate our perception of reality, this book explores the tension between the richness of direct sensory experience and the allure of the screen. It examines how our growing dependence on virtual spaces and visually dominant media has led to a disconnect from our bodies and environment, contributing to a sense of alienation — both personal and ecological. Drawing on an autoethnographic approach, artistic research methods and ethnographic interviews with experts across numerous disciplines, this book argues for the continuing importance of lived, embodied, multi-sensory experience. It considers how the arts, rather than merely reinforcing technological mediation, can actively subvert the passivity imposed on our subjectivity by the latter — offering creative strategies to re-engage with the world through all our senses. By using artistic processes to navigate the tension between the virtual and the real, the book explores how creative practices can generate new ways of seeing, feeling and understanding. At its core, this work suggests that to even begin to address the current environmental crisis, we must first return to our bodies and come back to our senses — literally and figuratively. Through artistic experimentation, philosophical inquiry and sensory exploration, it proposes a reawakening to the reciprocity between body, technology and environment, offering a pathway towards a more conscious, engaged and aesth-ethical way of inhabiting the world.

Full Product Details

9781032864044

Table of Contents

Reviews

“Effortlessly synthesizing the most interesting research currently underway in the study of sensory perception, while exploring the blunting influence of various technologies, Stehlíková uses her own life and artistic practice as a throughline connecting a splendid panoply of embodied insights. An intersensory and interdisciplinary feast, the book will likely induce a fine derangement of the reader’s senses”. - David Abram, author of The Spell of the Sensuous and Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology “This book represents a fascinating account of the artist’s sensuous journey. It is intriguing to see how the author incorporates concepts such as embodied cognition, sensory dominance, synaesthesia and so on as part of her own very personal journey as a film-maker. There is plenty of food for thought, quite literally in her discussion of the Icelandic Journey experiential multisensory dining event, for the interdisciplinary sensory scientist to come away enriched by”. – Charles Spence, University of Oxford “Exiled from our Bodies is a strongly and clearly argued reminder that the arts continue to be grounded in our deep sense of being and the activation and interplay of all our senses. All arts express and mediate our relations with the world and the critical views of this writer apply in the entire realm of the arts. The argumentation is rooted in the author’s personal convictions in the cultural and human values of art, wide reading of relevant literature and her personal exchange through years with thinkers, scholars and artists in the cultural and human meanings of art”. - Juhani Pallasmaa, architect and former professor, Helsinki University of Technology

“Effortlessly synthesizing the most interesting research currently underway in the study of sensory perception, while exploring the blunting influence of various technologies, Stehlikova uses her own life and artistic practice as a throughline connecting a splendid panoply of embodied insights. An intersensory and interdisciplinary feast, the book will likely induce a fine derangement of the reader’s senses.” - David Abram, author of The Spell of the Sensuous and Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology “This book represents a fascinating account of the artist’s sensuous journey. It is intriguing to see how the author incorporates concepts such as embodied cognition, sensory dominance, synaesthesia and so on as part of her own very personal journey as a film-maker. There is plenty of food for thought, quite literally in her discussion of the Icelandic Journey experiential multisensory dining event, for the interdisciplinary sensory scientist to come away enriched by.” – Charles Spence, University of Oxford “Exiled from our Bodies is a strongly and clearly argued reminder that the arts continue to be grounded in our deep sense of being and the activation and interplay of all our senses. All arts express and mediate our relations with the world and the critical views of this writer apply in the entire realm of the arts. The argumentation is rooted in the author’s personal convictions in the cultural and human values of art, wide reading of relevant literature, and her personal exchange through years with thinkers, scholars and artists in the cultural and human meanings of art.” - Juhani Pallasmaa, architect and former professor, Helsinki University of Technology

Author Information

Tereza Stehlíková is a Czech/British artist, researcher and educator working across moving image, installation and performance. Her artistic research explores sensory perception and embodiment. She leads the Visual Arts department at Vysoká škola kreativní komunikace and PhD seminars at the Academy of Performing Arts and the Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design, in Prague. She is also the founder and editor of Tangible Territory, an online journal on art and the senses.

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