DCRC Seminar: Multi-sensoriality in Emergent Media with Susan Kozel, Muindi Fanuel Muindi & Tom Livingstone
Please join us for the first 2026/27 Digital Cultures Research Centre’s seminar on Multi-sensoriality in Emergent Media. We have a fantastic lineup: Susan Kozel, Muindi Fanuel Muindi and Tom Livingstone. The seminar will take place online 12:30 – 14:00 on Wed the 28th of Oct 2026.
For the Zoom link please email dcrc@uwe.ac.uk before 12pm on Tuesday 27th Oct.
Susan Kozel: Affective Choreographies: From a Phenomenology of the Senses to Phenomenologies of Affect
Abstract: This short talk will open methodological and ethical issues arising from artistic research using Mixed and Augmented Reality. Grounded in the collaborative research that produced CATALYSTS – Somatic Resonance (2022-2024), a mixed reality choreographic archive, I will chart a transition from a phenomenology of the senses to the more nuanced modes of reflection that contribute to phenomenologies of affect. The questions arising are ‘What can be gained by attuning to the relations between bodies and technologies that may live in the sensory or conceptual half-light?’ and ‘What might be sacrificed?’
Bio: Susan Kozel explores the convergence between dance, philosophy and responsive digital technologies. Her research takes the form of writing (https://mau.se/en/persons/susan.kozel) and artistic collaborations https://www.somaticarchiving.org/work/catalysts-somatic-resonance). She is a Professor with the School of Arts and Communication at Malmö University and a member of the Swedish Research Council’s Committee for Artistic Research.
Muindi Fanuel Muindi: Breaks, Blues, Shouts
Abstract: To quantise the world is to break it down into discrete bits that can be made to count—in both senses: rendered countable and thereby determined to matter. When the count runs to infinity, physicists perform a correction called renormalisation: they draw a cutoff, absorb the excess, and keep their books balanced. When the grain of the world runs finer than their instruments can account for, they set a noise floor, a threshold, and treat whatever falls beneath it as tolerable margin. What falls above the line and what falls below it are both discounted as noise. What happens when such quanta and data are not simply counted and analysed, but listened to? This talk turns to the breaks, blues, and shouts of Black music for other ways of handling quanta and data.
Bio: Muindi Fanuel Muindi is a social practice artist, philosopher, and poet. He is the founder and director of BADS_lab: The Black Arts and Decolonial Sciences Laboratory: a curatorial project, residency program, and cultural hub that redistributes creative energies and challenges colonial systems of knowledge and representation.
Tom Livingstone: Re-Experiencing the Familiar: Multisensory Storytelling and the utility of genre
Abstract: This talk will assess the usefulness of generic classification in the context of multisensory and immersive media. “Immersive” is becoming a genre of its own with experiential subcategories related to the technologies being used, meanwhile, at a textual level “Narrative/Cinematic VR” is often as nuanced as it gets. Drawing on a forthcoming chapter on XR and Auto/Biography this presentation will look at how multisensory storytelling interacts with genre and speculate on what this might mean for the cultural positioning of multisensory media more broadly. Does the implicit contract of genre classification – the offer to re-experience the familiar via genre codes – place unnecessary limits on cultural practice or might genre discourse be useful for Multisensory Storytelling?
Bio: Tom Livingstone is a Senior Research Fellow at UWE Bristol. He has published widely on emerging media technologies and was the recipient of UWE VC ECR funding to engage with Immersive Arts as well as the recipient of the British Academy Talent Development Award to investigate the role of game engines in visual media pipelines. As part of the UKRI funded MyWorld project he developed (with Mandy Rose) the Multisensory Storytelling research project, looking at the impact of multisensory media technologies on narrative formats.