March 10, 2017
Rice University

Dawn Nafus (Intel) and Patricia Alvarez Astacio (Brandeis)

Thank you to all who participated in our Sensorial Excess workshop on March 10, 2017! Special thanks to Dr. Dawn Nafus and Dr. Patricia Alvarez Astacio for leading the workshop with their thoughts and provocations on sensing ethnographically.

To start off the workshop, we spent the morning attending to sensoria around Rice University’s campus. Participants memorialized their experiences by gathering notes, pictures and artifacts, creating data for further analysis. Then participants convened over lunch to discuss their impressions and build sensorial maps of campus. We honed our sense of perception, pushing it beyond familiar ways of seeing and writing the spaces we inhabit. We also queried the meaning of data creation as an embodied practice, paying attention to how other senses beyond sight, and their interplay, could open up new worlds of inquiry. Participants furthermore discussed what was impossible to grasp through their senses, not forgetting about the limits of bodies as sensing machines.