Sensorium Tests

New monograph

This monograph revolves around Daria Martin’s new film “Sensorium Tests,” 2011, which uses the recently recognized neurological condition of mirror-touch synaesthesia to explore how sensations are transmitted, shared, and created in film, raising the question: Can a spectator feel a bodily reaction to film? Exploring the spectrum that lies between sight and touch, the publication includes key texts selected by Martin into such pressing issues, which are also related to voyeurism and projection, artificial intelligence, and magic, from a host of leading writers and thinkers from Mary Shelley to Wayne Koestenbaum, via Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Rainer-Werner Fassbinder, and Laura Mulvey. Martin’s introduction to this section addresses subjects such as mirroring, paralysis, and animism, asking such far-reaching questions as how empathy and desire, identification and lust are related.

Daria Martin was born in San Francisco in 1973 and currently lives in London. Martin’s work has been presented in solo exhibitions at Der Kunstverein, seit 1817 in Hamburg, Kunsthalle Zürich, and The Showroom in London. She has participated in numerous group exhibitions including “Uncertain States of America,” which originated at the Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art in Oslo and traveled internationally; “Emblematic Display” at the ICA in London; “Beck’s Futures,” also at the ICA; and “The Moderns” at Castello di Rivoli in Turin, among many others. Her films have been screened in many international venues, including Tate Modern, Tate Britain, and the Royal College of Art in Lodon; the Secession in Vienna; and Arnolfini in Bristol.