Wearable sensory books bring words into your body, “Flow in Place” sound art opens at the Berkeley BART Plaza, why fun-scary experiences are so thrilling, and venues get on board with sensory inclusion solutions

“The Massachusetts Institute of Technology has taken the idea of sensory fiction several stages further and offers a Science Fiction to Science Fabrication course. Using a range of sensors and tools, part of the studies include building a wearable connected book contraption in the form of a strap-on vest. This allows the reader to get fully in contact with the character’s emotions and physical states for a genuinely immersive reading experience. Selected passages trigger vibrations to influence heart rate, and […]

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How “THOUGHT-FORMS” (1901) bridged synesthesia and mysticism, calendar synaesthetes map time in space, and a light sculpture that plays like a trigger instrument

“Thought-Forms, a strange, beguiling, frequently pretentious, utterly original book first published in 1901, emerged from this ferment of late-Victorian mysticism. It was written by Annie Besant and Charles Leadbeater, erstwhile members of the London Theosophical Society alongside Yeats, and it features a stunning sequence of images that illustrate the book’s central argument: emotions, sounds, ideas and events manifest as visual auras.” — Benjamin Breen, Victorian Occultism and the Art of Synesthesia Contents Selected Reads Sensory Entrancement Sensory Resources Chuckles + […]

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Author Kaite O’Reilly challenges normalcy with characters, the Steinhardt Museum of Natural History in Israel is a visually open design to gardens, and pottery wheel curlicues

“Instead of combusting, O’Reilly embarked on the D-monologues, which is made up of lots of conversations with disabled people. “I don’t take people’s stories, it feels too much like theft,” O’Reilly explains. “Instead I took people’s hopes, fears, thoughts, lived experiences, and used them to inform a fictional monologue. There are lots of different opinions: some people say ‘I’m not disabled, I don’t want to be called disabled’ because they may have a very different perspective from someone like me. […]

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