The Sensory Terroir of Crossmodal Art

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Connecting the Senses through Wine and Sound

The Sensory Terroir of Crossmodal Art explores how our senses converge in making and experiencing art. It introduces crossmodal art as a new category of creative practice blending multiple senses. Drawing on the interconnectivity of wine terroir, the book provides a non-hierarchical framework for navigating multisensory aesthetic experience, from immersive art to wine tasting.

This innovative, interdisciplinary volume bridges the fertile experiential and theoretical fields of art and creative practice with contemporary scientific understandings of crossmodality in psychology, neuroscience, and sensory science. It focuses on crossmodal art created at the nexus of hearing with taste and smell – senses often excluded from definitions of art. Case studies reveal correspondences between sounds – from music to field recordings – and the culturally rich yet aesthetically contested sensory experience of wine. From these, the book develops practical and adaptable tools, which include sensory mapping systems and contemplative techniques that readers can use to both conceptualise multisensory experience and create crossmodally.

e Sensory Terroir of Crossmodal Art is relevant to scholars of sensory studies, art and aesthetics, sound studies and musicology, design, museology, anthropology, psychology, and neuroscience, as well as wine, food, and marketing researchers. It will also be of interest to artists and musicians, curators, experience designers, brand strategists, and drinks and hospitality professionals who wish to employ evidence-based, non-visual multisensory methods.

Upokohue: A Subaquatic Symphony for Whakaraupō

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The sea is not silent. Beneath the surface of Whakaraupō Lyttelton Harbour, there is symphony of sound. Endangered Upokohue Hector’s Dolphins and whales, fish and even crustaceans add their voice to its chorus, many relying on sound for feeding, finding mates, detecting predators and maintaining social bonds. With the globalisation of goods, Whakaraupō has become a busy port, increasing human noise pollution in this marine sanctuary that can stress, physically damage and mask the communication of the harbour’s aquatic inhabitants.

Upokohue: A Subaquatic Symphony for Whakaraupō invites its audience to experience the underwater soundscape in a 4-part sound work. All sounds were recorded underwater using hydrophones by the artist, marine researchers and Lyttelton Port Company. All the human noise was made there and all the species heard are currently found there. The audience listens to the work underwater for a fully embodied sensory immersion in a more-than-human world we rarely hear, and also viscerally experience the impact of human noise pollution. The work also features the reconstruction of a bubble curtain now used by the Lyttelton Port Company to dampen the noise of the building work that was found to make upokohue leave the area.

Presented as a series of immersive experiences in the Norman Kirk Lyttelton Pool and as a 4-channel above water installation at Rei Gallery as part of the Know Your Place Environmental Art Festival.