A Scent of Zeros and Ones: Artist Talk

TUE 07 MAY 2024 19:00 Czech Centre at the Czech Embassy Cinema, London

Czech artist and researcher Tereza Stehlikova will discuss her artistic practice which is concerned with the role our senses play in aesthetic experience. The talk will include a screening of a selected number of the artist’s short films and will be followed by a discussion with Sandra Gaudenzi, an internationally acknowledged authority in the field of interactive and immersive documentary practice and professor Charles Spence, an internationally renowned experimental psychologist with a specialization in neuroscience-inspired multisensory design.

Since 2005 Stehlikova’s work has been concerned with exploring the relationship between touch and audio-visual media which she uses in her film practice. Inspired by Czech artist Jan Švankmajer, she embarked on a practice-based PhD at the Royal College of Art (2008-12). She subsequently expanded her interest to also include smell and taste. Her work has led her to a number of cross-disciplinary collaborations with chefs, experimental psychologists and philosophers of perception, resulting in immersive, multi-sensory performances and short films.

The Covid pandemic became a catalyst for Stehlikova to start to question more deeply the increasingly more complex relationship between the digital technologies which now extend our perception and mediate our relationship to the outside world and others. In 2020 she launched her cross-disciplinary Tangible Territory journal, where she invites artists, philosophers and scientists to discuss the above-mentioned themes.

Stehlikova is also engaged in developing interactive performances which help to return participants to the here and now, into their own body, as a counter balance to the screen-based lives. The latest one of these was The Infra-Ordinary Lab, which was developed specifically for Prague Quadrennial 2023 and explored Holešovicka Tržnice, a market in Prague.

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Tereza Stehlikova is a Czech artist and educator. Her practice spans moving image, video installation and participatory performance. Her research is driven by cross-disciplinary collaboration and artistic investigation of multi-sensory perception, embodiment and the importance of place. She is a founder and editor of a cross-disciplinary Tangible Territory journal, https://tangibleterritory.art/ and is currently writing a book Exiled from Our Bodies: And How to Come Back to Our Senses for Routledge’s Sensory Studies series. https://cinestheticfeasts.com/

Dr Sandra Gaudenzi is an internationally acknowledged authority in the field of interactive and immersive documentary practice. She has been consulting mentoring researching lecturing writing and speaking at international events for the last twenty years. Sandra is Senior Lecturer at University College London (UCL) and Research Co-ordinator at UAL’s AKO Storytelling Institute. She co-directed the series of i-Docs symposiums at Digital Cultures Research Center (UWE, UK). In 2015 she initiated the European training ideation programme !F Lab and acted as Head of Studies and mentor till 2018.

Professor Charles Spence is the world expert in multisensory perception and experience design having spent over twenty years researching how people perceive the world around them at the Crossmodal Research Laboratory at Oxford University. He has published over 1000 academic articles and edited or authored 15 books including in 2014 the Prose prize-winning “The perfect meal” and the international bestseller “Gastrophysics: The new science of eating” (2017; Penguin Viking) – winner of the 2019 Le Grand Prix de la Culture Gastronomique from Académie Internationale de la Gastronomie, and in 2021 book Sensehacking: How to use the power of your senses for happier healthier living published by Viking Penguin. https://www.psy.ox.ac.uk/people/charles-spence