The IK Senses, Technology, Mise-en-Scene: Media and Perception aims to generate PhD-theses analysing interrelations between sensory perception, technology, and media mise-en-scenes. Three research areas form the interdisciplinary framework for the theoretical and historical analyses of media-constructed perception processes.

(1) Transformation of the senses: The cognitive process of perception is closely linked with the specific situation and context of what is perceived and the perceivers physiological conditions, their experience, biographical, historical, and cultural situatedness, and emotional constitution. In cultural studies, perception becomes an important phenomenon when it goes beyond the everyday processing of sensory inputs, for example, when we focus on the reception of cultural artifacts. Thus, congruent to analyzing modes of perception, a study of the senses is necessary, of the relationship between embodiment, cognition, and technologies and the historical embeddedness of cultural acts and artistic production. Reception hereby becomes a main focus of cultural research.  Our aim is to construct a framework that enables investigating simultaneities arising in media transformations and transformations of the senses. Research projects will concentrate on historical and theoretical aspects of these transformations, as well as the status of technical apparatus and the sensory experience.

(2) Technology and the arts: Technical tools to focalize perception (or the production of artificial sensory impressions) have been developed throughout history. However, these tools have attained great importance especially in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries in close conjunction with social processes of modernization. The aesthetic realm is closely linked with available and chosen production techniques and reproduction technologies. Historical interdependency of technical innovation and artistic representation, the characteristics of media perception, shifting of borders between human and machine, and producing the spectacular are all aspects that will be analyzed within the framework of the PhD program. Analysis will comprise approaches from cultural studies and art history, and also rely on insight from the theory of cognition, history of technology, and media philosophy.

(3) Constructed perception: A consideration of media must necessarily include their audiences, their immediate and virtual presences, and their perception. The audiences perception is shaped, staged, framed, mediated, and constructed within a specifically medialized mise-en-scene. Communication through the arts and media has the potential to alienate, open up, and sharpen everyday perception and thus contribute to producing a surplus of meaning. The tense relationships of automation and de-automation, technical and corporeal sensuality, social dynamics and ruptured perception processes, and of political performativity and artistic alienation present key challenges for society and for science. Tackling these issues demands an integrated perspective and the innovative potential of young researchers.