Sensi/able Spaces

Book excerpt: The book SENSI/ABLE SPACES focuses on the ways in which space, art and the environment interlace and interact, dealing with the perception and conception of spaces in the built as well as natural environment. The book brings together a wide range of academics, from the physical sciences, social sciences and humanities, as well as artists who have an interest in the way space is sensed, understood and reconfigured. Spaces today are continually being reconstituted and reformulated in various ways, often relying on notions of what is sensible, narrowly defined by groups with an ideological agenda of some kind or vested economic interests. These sensible factors often obscure and ignore notions of the sensable-that which people perceive through the senses while being-in spaces. Space is a topic equally of various academic fields, such as geography, philosophy, sociology, anthropology, physics, bilology, and many more. But space is also the subject of - or a frame for - any artist, whose work is neither academic, in any standard sense of the term, and yet heavily theoretical or speculative.