Rebecca Uchill

MIT Press blurb:

Experience offers a reading experience like no other. A heat-sensitive cover by Olafur Eliasson reveals words, colors, and a drawing when touched by human hands. Endpapers designed by Carsten Höller are printed in ink containing carefully calibrated quantities of the synthesized human pheromones estratetraenol and androstadienone, evoking the suggestibility of human desire. The margins and edges of the book are designed by Tauba Auerbach in complementary colors that create a dynamically shifting effect when the book is shifted or closed. When the book is opened, bookmarks cascade from the center, emerging from spider web prints by Tomás Saraceno. Experience produces experience while bringing the concept itself into relief as an object of contemplation. The sensory experience of the book as a physical object resonates with the intellectual experience of the book as a container of ideas.

Experience convenes a conversation with artists, musicians, philosophers, anthropologists, historians, and neuroscientists, each of whom explores aspects of sensorial and cultural realms of experience. The texts include new essays written for this volume and classic texts by such figures as William James and Michel Foucault. The first publication from MIT’s Center for Art, Science, & Technology, Experience approaches its subject through multiple modes.

The book is designed by Kimberly Varella of Content Object Design Studio.

Contributors
Tauba Auerbach, Bevil Conway, John Dewey, Olafur Eliasson, Michel Foucault, Adam Frank, Vittorio Gallese, Renée Green, Stefan Helmreich, Carsten Höller, Edmund Husserl, William James, Caroline A. Jones, Douglas Kahn, Brian Kane, Leah Kelly, Bruno Latour, Alvin Lucier, David Mather, Mara Mills, Alva Noë, Jacques Rancière, Michael Rossi, Tomás Saraceno, Natasha Schüll, Joan W.Scott, Tino Sehgal, Alma Steingart, Josh Tenenbaum, Rebecca Uchill

What is landscape? How to define landscape in relation to the territory on which we live or which we own? What does it mean to own land, together with its natural resources and their localization? And what grounds do we refer to when we talk about, our “own” land? How to properly grasp that living on Earth means also living of its vast resources that accumulated millions of years ago? Last but not least, how can the questions of spatiality— of land and of the territory—be grasped in relation to the notion of time, a grant scale of deep, geological time, and the time of transitions and entropy? What are the conditions of identity of landscape?
          Etymologically, “land-scape” relates to “shape,” used in the physical sense of shaping, which implies bodily engagement. We work the grounds on which and of which we live. We shape them. The effects of the human activity manifest in the environmental changes, climate crisis and hyperobejcts that surpass human comprehension. We even conceived of a new era that acknowledges the impact of humans on the environment. But, from another perspective, the landscape and its accompanying environmental aspects are also shaped by our perceptual apparatus and vision, our always situated knowledge, education, and culture.
          This symposium takes up some of these and related questions as starting points of exchanges and dialogues between scholars, researchers, art makers, and educators that present different perspectives on landscape.

Speakers include: Annemarie Bucher , Emily Eliza Scott, Rebecca Uchill, Ryan Dewey, Chris Taylor, Bill Fox, Richard Saxon, Tara Lasrado, Dharmendra, Michael Hiltbrunner, Sally de Kunst, Karin Winzer, Joanna Lesnierowska, Hanna Hölling, Johannes Hedinger and others. Organized by Hanna Hölling and Johannes Hedinger.

A thematic issue on the architecture exhibition as environment, edited by Alex Brown and Léa-Catherine Szacka, and with contributions by Manuel Rodrigo de la O Cabrera, Jordan Kaufdman, Ross Elfline, Samuel Korn, Christophe Van Gerrewey, Rebecca Uchill, and Maarten Liefhooghe.

We knew that Michael Heizer’s installation City would be impossible to visit when we made our way through the Nevada desert in the summer of 2016 with a field trip investigating “technical lands” of the American desert for students in history and practice of art, architecture, and science. As our chartered bus departed the Center for Land Use Interpretation, Wendover, on the morning of August 22, we cued up a complicated satellite compass/phone system that the Massachusetts Institute of Technology provided to our group as a safety measure, preparing to announce the moment when we passed near to City (we had already abandoned the idea of trying to enter).

Published in a volume celebrating the centennial of the establishment of the Barnes Foundation, the essay ponders the role of the global and folk art collected by Albert C. Barnes in dialogue with European modernism, which formed the thrust of his collection.