Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

A book that produces sensory experiences while bringing the concept of experience itself into relief as a subject of criticism and an object of contemplation.

Experience offers a reading experience like no other. A heat-sensitive cover by Olafur Eliasson reveals words, colors, and a drawing when touched by human hands. Endpapers designed by Carsten Höller are printed in ink containing carefully calibrated quantities of the synthesized human pheromones estratetraenol and androstadienone, evoking the suggestibility of human desire. The margins and edges of the book are designed by Tauba Auerbach in complementary colors that create a dynamically shifting effect when the book is shifted or closed. When the book is opened, bookmarks cascade from the center, emerging from spider web prints by Tomás Saraceno. Experience produces experience while bringing the concept itself into relief as an object of contemplation. The sensory experience of the book as a physical object resonates with the intellectual experience of the book as a container of ideas.

Experience convenes a conversation with artists, musicians, philosophers, anthropologists, historians, and neuroscientists, each of whom explores aspects of sensorial and cultural realms of experience. The texts include new essays written for this volume and classic texts by such figures as William James and Michel Foucault. The first publication from MIT's Center for Art, Science, & Technology, Experience approaches its subject through multiple modes.

Publication design by Kimberly Varella with Becca Lofchie, Content Object Design Studio.
Cover concept by Olafur Eliasson in collaboration with Kimberly Varella (Content Object).

Contributors
Tauba Auerbach, Bevil Conway, John Dewey, Olafur Eliasson, Michel Foucault, Adam Frank, Vittorio Gallese, Renée Green, Stefan Helmreich, Carsten Höller, Edmund Husserl, William James, Caroline A. Jones, Douglas Kahn, Brian Kane, Leah Kelly, Bruno Latour, Alvin Lucier, David Mather, Mara Mills, Alva Noë, Jacques Rancière, Michael Rossi, Tomás Saraceno, Natasha Schüll, Joan W.Scott, Tino Sehgal, Alma Steingart, Josh Tenenbaum, Rebecca Uchill

Reviews provided by Syndetics

CHOICE Review

Experience is both an experience and an experiment: deploying a dynamic between the concrete and the theoretical, the book's editors and designers engage in what they term "speculative aesthetics." Several contemporary artists contributed to the book's design: notably, Tomas Saraceno inserts elements from his web-like installations into the act of reading. Artistic interventions such as this promote an awareness of reading as "enactive" and are operative in uniting the book's diverse, even disorienting, contents. The volume emerges from the Center for Art, Science, and Technology at MIT and is decidedly interdisciplinary, comprising new and historical writings by artists, scientists, philosophers, and historians of art and science, interspersed with interviews and performance transcripts (a set of contributor biographies would have been useful). The editors (all art historians) open the discussion by introducing three methodologies of experience: modeling (Jones), mediating (Uchill), and analogy (Mather). These essays establish a "common sense" framework for more experimental sections on seeing, sounding, and sensing that follow. A final section reprints key texts in the philosophy of experience along with contemporary artistic responses. Ultimately, this is not a book to be read from front to back; it is a book to be, as the title indicates, experienced. Summing Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty; general readers. --Dawna L. Schuld, Texas A&M University