Panel Statement n.a.

Panel: Mediations of Sensation: Sensory Anthropology and the Futures of New Media Practice

• David Howes is Professor of Anthropology at Concordia University, Montreal and the Director of the Centre for Sensory Studies. He is the co-author of Ways of Sensing: Understanding the Senses in Society (2013, with Constance Classen), author of Sensual Relations: Engaging the Senses in Culture and Social Theory, (2003), and editor of  The Varieties of Sensory Experience (1991), Cross-Cultural Consumption (1996)  and Empire of the Senses (2005). He has carried out field research on the cultural life of the senses  in Argentina, Arizona, and Papua New Guinea. His other research interests revolve around medical anthropology, psychological anthropology, legal sociology, and cross-cultural jurisprudence.
• Jennifer Biddle is ARC Future Fellow and Senior Research Fellow at the National Institute for Experimental Arts (NIEA), UNSW.  She is founding Coordinator of the PhD program in Visual Anthropology/Visual Culture at COFA, a leading national program specializing in practice-led Indigenous and Asia Pacific research.  She is a visual anthropologist of Aboriginal art, language, emotion and culture.  Her interdisciplinary research and writing spans theories of embodiment, sensory formations and radical cultural aesthetics;  narrative, trauma, memory and predicaments of occupation;  language and poetics, translation, experimental ethnographic writing, anthropology and literature;  intercultural ontologies, glocal formations, postcolonialism. Her first book breasts, bodies canvas: Central Desert Art as Experience (UNSW Press) provides a groundbreaking analysis of the ‘feminisation of the Dreaming’ in the Papunya Tula Aboriginal art movement.   Her current ARC Future Fellowship Remote Avant-garde: Experimental Indigenous Art undertakes an ambitious, multifaceted comparative analysis to identify how experimentation is enabling art to communicate directly with global audiences and markets.  In 2012, in partnership with desArt, she co-convened the first national forum on experimental art practice in Desert arts Same but Different: experimentation and innovation in Desert Arts, a now annual event.