Sensory Environments
topic
Sensory environments as creative input encompasses the deliberate cultivation of rich, varied, non-screen sensory experience — the sounds of different acoustic environments, the textures of different materials, the visual richness of different lighting conditions, weather phenomena, and color environments, and the proprioceptive variety of different physical activities — producing the sensory vocabulary and attentional richness that creative work in all media draws from.
Role
The progressive replacement of sensory experience with screen experience is one of the most consequential and least noticed impoverishments of the contemporary creative environment — with the richness of full-spectrum sensory reality being replaced by the two-dimensional, screen-mediated, algorithmically curated experience of digital life. Writers, designers, musicians, and makers of all kinds draw from a sensory vocabulary built from embodied experience — and that vocabulary is being systematically impoverished by the reduction of creative practitioners' sensory diet to what can be transmitted through a screen.