Sensory Environments
Aesthetic Futures
Sensory Environments & Aesthetic Futures is about the richness of human experience in and with the world.
What makes it rich? How does it change? What can it become?
Sensed through the body,
inhabited in movement,
felt in atmosphere, deepened
through attention,
extended by imagination, and
aesthetically encountered.
AE CONCEPT
Aesthetic Vulnerability
To be reachable by the world is also to be changeable by it.
AESTHETIC SENSITIVITY
The body senses first.
AESTHETIC SENSIBILITY
Sensibility enables experiential depth.
Sensitivity and sensibility share an underlying openness and responsiveness to the world.
CHANGE OVER TIME
AESTHETIC PLASTICITY
Experience can adapt. What it adapts to matters.
RELATIONAL DIMENSIONS OF ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE
Anthropogenic Sensory
Change and Pollution
Human activity is reshaping the sensory worlds in which embodied life perceives, moves, responds and develops. Anthropogenic sensory change and pollution can alter the conditions of encounter themselves: what becomes perceptually available, how attention is oriented, how bodies move through environments, and what kinds of experiential and aesthetic relations remain possible.
- NOISE POLLUTION
- LIGHT POLLUTION
- ECOLOGICAL AND LANDSCAPE HOMOGENIZATION
- ATMOSPHERIC ALTERATION
- VISUAL CONSTRICTION
- ABSENCE OF NATURAL QUALITIES
A changing sensory environment affects human and more-than-human life alike.
Technologies contributing to sensory change are already woven into everyday life, reshaping human-nature relations through practices of maintenance, management, and care.
EXPERIENCE SENSE 02
What does Heidegger have to do
with leaf blowers?
How everyday maintenance technologies mediate and alter embodied relations with green spaces.
AE Research Product forthcoming.
LIVED HEAT AND ENVIRONMENTAL EXTREMES
Under the Heat Dome in Germany
Extreme weather is not only measured in degrees, anomalies, warnings, or records. It becomes lived through body and senses, through space and place, and through the altered rhythms of everyday life.
A first-person account of the heat of June 2026 in Potsdam.