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Sensorium Tests

A new 16mm film called Sensorium Tests was premiered in a monographic survey exhibition of Daria Martin's work at Milton Keynes Gallery, which comprised four pieces spanning nine years. Sensorium Tests investigates the phenomenon of mirror-touch synaesethesia, a rare neurological phenomenon in which visually observed touch registers as palpable touch on the synaesthete’s own body. The film was funded by the Wellcome Trust and Arts Council England. The other films in the exhibition - Closeup Gallery (2003) about closeup card magic, Soft Materials (2005) about embodied artificial intelligence, and Harpstrings and Lava (2008) about a Frankensteinian experiment - all play with notions of illusion, empathy and prostheses, asking questions about how the film medium itself might serve as an extension of our imaginative body map. The exhibition was accompanied by a specially commissioned 150-page catalogue, which included an essay by Melissa Gronlund, a sampling of conversations with mirror touch synaesthetes, and an anthology of relevant writings in art history, neuroscience and aesthetics (ISBN 3037642726). In addition, Martin selected for the Gallery a series of eight screenings of commercial and arthouse feature films that embodied, in an accessible way, notions of empathy and voyeurism in film viewing. These concerns and others elaborated in the exhibition and catalogue were unpacked in a public conversation between the artists and Catherine Wood, Curator of Performance at Tate Modern. Sensorium Tests has since gone on to be exhibited as part of a group show at MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge, MA (in the Holocene, 2012) and in a solo exhibition at Galerie Stadpark in Krems, Austria. It has also been screened at Maureen Paley Gallery, London where Martin gave a talk about her ongoing research into synaesthesia, which is currently funded by a Leverhulme International Network Grant and is continuing in an AHRC Fellowship.