EHL guests hosted workshop on Sensing the Environment
Published Jun 03, 2025
On May 9, two EHL visiting researchers, Noemi Quagliati and Malin Graesse, held a one-day workshop titled Sensing the Environment at KTH. The event brought together an interdisciplinary group of scholars, practitioners, curators, and artists to explore modes of sensing beyond the ocular. Participants examined a range of practices and traditions in which tools, technologies, or the activation of different senses offer new ways of engaging with and understanding the environment.
What new modes of sensing and experiencing the environment emerge when distance and clarity are no longer the dominant frameworks of perception? How do digital sensors and sensing technologies reconfigure the body—human, non-human, and planetary—as a site of perception, computation, and environmental entanglement? In what ways do toxic or polluted landscapes disrupt the traditional hierarchy of the senses, which has historically marginalized senses of proximity—those that resist representation—as inadequate for producing objective knowledge? And how might sensory experience become shared, distributed, and collectively mediated?
These are just some of the questions explored at Sensing the Environment, a one-day workshop held at the KTH Environmental Humanities Laboratory and co-organized by two of its spring guests:
Noemi Quagliati
, an MSCA fellow at the Ca’ Foscari University in Venice, and
Malin Graesse
, a Chanse postdoctoral fellow at the University of Stavanger.
Coming from the fields of art and visual studies, with a background in the environmental humanities, the two organizers aimed to challenge the ocularcentrism of Western culture and to explore how embodied and situated forms of knowledge, as well as emerging approaches to the non-human world, might open up new ways of perceiving, feeling, computing, recording and experiencing the environment. In this vein, the workshop featured four thematic sessions that emphasized interdisciplinarity beyond conventional classifications of the senses and sensing: 1. Distance and Clarity; 2. Sensors, and the Question of Bodies; 3. Proximity/Toxicity; 4. (re)cycle.
The event featured ten presentations by international scholars and practitioners from Germany, Italy, Norway, Portugal, Sweden, Spain, the United Kingdom, and the United States. By bringing together a group of experts from the arts, humanities, natural and applied sciences, the workshop also sought to move beyond the rigid boundaries of individual disciplines and to foster collaborative thinking. The event’s fruitful outcomes have led the organizers and the KTH Environmental Humanities Laboratory to further develop these initial reflections through a second workshop planned for 2026, which will culminate in a publication.
