Theories of Sensory Implication for Public Art

Dylan Robinson
April 6, 2019. 10:00AM.

This discussion and the reading list below will focus on theories of sensory implication, and public art/activism that implicates viewers in a politics of accountability through its sensory, material and affective impacts. How do public art’s forms, materiality and modes of address act as strategies of interpellation? What roles do alienation and enchantment (among other affective registers) play in the sensory experience of public work?

Dylan Robinson

Dylan Robinson is a xwélméxw artist and writer of Stó:lō descent, and the Canada Research Chair in Indigenous Arts at Queen’s University. His current work focuses on the return of Indigenous songs to communities who were prohibited by law to sing them as part of the Indian Act from 1882‒1951. Robinson’s previous publications include the edited volumes Music and Modernity Among Indigenous Peoples of North America (2018); Arts of Engagement: Taking Aesthetic Action in and Beyond the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada (2016) and Opera Indigene (2011). His monograph, Hungry Listening, is forthcoming in 2019 with Minnesota University Press.