Come to your senses at the CCA this fall

By Karen Herland

As tourists, we visit “the sights” of a new city and return with photos, maps and postcards — all visual artifacts. Our other senses get left out.

“It’s time to abandon the viewfinder,” remarked anthropology professor David Howes, director of the Concordia Sensoria Research Team (CONSERT).

Sense of the City is a new exhibit at the Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA) that opens Oct. 26 and runs for nearly a year. It is not a conventional museum display, since it is interactive rather than presenting things in glass cases, and, in Howes’ words, “offers a feast of sensations.”

Sensory perception has become a popular focus for cultural, social and historical work in recent years and this is “spilling over into architecture.” Howes believes the exhibit will further stimulate architects and urban planners to think about design with other senses than sight in mind.

Howes and cultural historian Constance Classen contributed articles to the catalogue for the Sense of the City exhibition, which is curated by new CCA Director Mirko Zardini.

In addition, Howes is organizing a companion six-part lecture series called Sensing the City at the CCA this fall. The first lecture, on Oct. 20, features Concordia visiting composer R. Murray Schafer on “The Sounding City.”

Howes is enthusiastic about Schafer’s participation because of his pioneering work on soundscapes.

“He got us listening to the world instead of mapping it, he’s done so much to open our ears.”

The series continues with Constance Classen presenting an overview of how urban sensations have changed from the Middle Ages to the present (Oct. 27).

There will be a lecture focusing on the illumination of urban space by Concordia Theatre professor Mark Sussman (Nov. 3), and a talk by Jim Drobnick, another CONSERT associate, on “Art and Smell in the [cough] Metropolis.”

Many museums are moving from the purely visual towards the tactile and multi-sensory, Howes says. London’s Victoria and Albert Museum had an exhibit entitled “Touch Me” this summer, and this Friday (Oct. 14) Howes will speak at a conference on “Art Beyond Sight” at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art.

He feels that Montreal is the ideal place for such exploration: “Montreal is a sensory capital,” and he points to other leading initiatives in this field besides CONSERT and the CCA exhibition by way of illustration.

Erin Manning, a professor in Studio Arts and Cinema, runs the Sense Lab, which considers the body and movement in relation to art practice, culture and politics. Hexagram, the inter-university digital art facility, is also exploring diverse sensory stimuli in its projects.

The lecture series runs on Thursday nights at 7 p.m. at the CCA, 1920 Baile St. For more information and a full list of speakers, visit www.cca.qc.ca.