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• 1 2024-11-30T15:06:56-08:00 At the Crossroads of the Senses – Digital Companion 80 plain 857839 2024-12-17T11:21:10-08:00

  About this Project:

  
  The standalone media-rich Digital Humanities Companion to At the Crossroads of the Senses (Dimova, Penn State University Press, 2024) offers multisensory images, videos, and music to complement the first book on modernist synaesthesia in art and science. Built on the Scalar platform and designed to appeal to general audiences, the DH companion enhances the book’s argument with additional illustrations and audiovisual examples that could not be included in the traditional print book. In this way, the digital companion viscerally embodies the text by offering images, videos, and visualizations for a non-linear reading of synaesthesia. By tagging artists, scientists, senses, colors, and sounds, it reveals new linkages between the modern senses and the arts to conjure the synaesthetic dimension of the book.
  
  Polina Dimova’s At the Crossroads of the Senses: The Synaesthetic Metaphor Across the Arts in European Modernism comes out in the Perspectives on Sensory History Series of Penn State University Press on 10 December 2024. The book explores the integral relationship between modernist art, science, and technology, tracing not only how modernist artists perceptually internalized and absorbed technology and its effects but also how they appropriated it to achieve their own aesthetic, metaphysical, and social goals. Inspired by Richard Wagner’s idea of the total artwork, European modernist artists began to pursue multimedia projects that mixed colors, sounds, and shapes. At the Crossroads of the Senses traces this new sensory experience of synaesthesia―the physiological or figurative blending of senses―as a modernist phenomenon that emerged out of the interplay of scientific and philosophical discourses, poetic texts, multimedia art, and felt multisensory experiences. By weaving together literary, musical, and visual works with scientific theories of synaesthesia, At the Crossroads of the Senses contends that synaesthesia promotes future artistic adaptations across mediums. Through case studies of prominent multimodal artists―Oscar Wilde, Aubrey Beardsley, Richard Strauss, Aleksandr Scriabin, Wassily Kandinsky, František Kupka, Andrei Bely, and Rainer Maria Rilke―the book reveals the color-forms and color-sounds that, for these artists, laid the foundations of the world and served as the catalyst for the flourishing exchanges among the arts at the fin de siècle.
  
  All illustrations and music examples discussed in the book are available in the Digital Companion. On the companion site, each illustration is keyed to the corresponding book chapter by number and follows the order in which images appear in the book. Companion images are marked as (DH [chapter number].[figure]) in the print text. For instance, the image DH 8.10 appears in chapter 8 of the book and refers to “DH 8.10. Auguste Rodin, Meditation, 1890s” in the DH companion. The music examples in the companion are playable to help familiarize nonspecialists with the music. The author has annotated YouTube videos of Richard Strauss’s Salome (Vision: Chapter 3) and Aleksandr Skriabin’s Prometheus (Music: Chapter 4), and you can find the examples by clicking on the Annotation button under each video and then clicking on the example you would like to listen to. There is also a separate Sibelius sound file of the Scriabin music examples that allows readers to experience the consonances or dissonances of Scriabin’s music in a more focused way.
  
  The DH companion’s structure roughly follows the chapters of the print book but also adds a predominant sense or notion to describe each: synaesthesia science and art, vision, music, color-sounds and visual music, color-forms and motion, touch, scent, and taste. To view the Table of Contents of the digital companion, click the three bars on the top left or right of the site or view the Contents at the bottom of this page. Each subject heading is a path that leads you through the images and music discussed in the corresponding chapter. The opening visualizations give a synoptic view of synaesthesia as a tree visualization of the table of contents, a colorful constellation of all connections in the book, and a synaesthesia timeline mapping out main events in the intellectual history of synaesthesia. In the Epilogue, an additional visualization path offers several visualizations of synaesthesia as a constellation of artworks, ideas, and sensory experiences. Most images provided are public domain or are freely available on the respective museum sites. Others come from the author’s personal archive but may be low definition and are meant only as study images. 
  
  The DH companion is a work-in-progress and will continue to grow after the publication of the print book. It will supply further visualizations, brief descriptions of images, music, and multimedia, texts in the original by synaesthetic authors and artists, and revealing word clouds. Readers and viewers are encouraged to offer suggestions for additional material to be included on the site at CrossroadsOfTheSenses@gmail.com.
  
  Acknowledgements: Work on the Digital Humanities Companion to At the Crossroads of the Senses began at the 2018 Digital Humanities Bootcamp at Vanderbilt University and developed at the 2019 University of Victoria Digital Humanities Summer Institute. The DH Companion was further supported by the 2023 ACLS Summer Institute for the Study of East Central and Southeastern Europe in Blagoevgrad, Bulgaria and a 2023 University of Denver Sie-Maglione Travel Grant to Italy.