The first edition of the Art Senses Artist Insights series explores how contemporary artists translate imperceptible phenomena into embodied, multisensory experiences. Through sound, data, vibration, light, and movement, the featured practices invite audiences to sense environmental, atmospheric, and cosmic forces that usually remain beyond human perception.
In recent decades, art practitioners have increasingly turned toward multisensory approaches that challenge the long-standing primacy of vision. Rather than treating artworks as objects to be looked at, these perspectives emphasise how perception unfolds through the full sensorium. Sensory art emerges from this shift as an acknowledgment that seeing is always entangled with other sensory modalities.
The first edition of the Art Senses mentorship programme is situated within this evolving field. Grounded in three core principles—wellbeing, immersion, and expanded communities—the programme fosters practices that nurture mindfulness and environmental awareness, encourages artworks designed to envelop audiences through multisensory, spatial, or participatory elements, and extends cultural engagement beyond conventional art spaces.
Our Learning from Artists series of articles builds on this foundation, tracing key currents emerging from the Art Senses network. Throughout this series, we highlight artists who earned special recognition for their applications to the Art Senses open call. Spanning diverse media, their practices reflect a growing commitment to an approach that foregrounds a (re)turn to the senses. What connects many of their works is a shared investment in translating imperceptible phenomena into sensory experiences. Artists engage with forces, systems, and conditions that typically evade human perception, seeking new ways to render them accessible.
This article, the first in a four-part Learning from Artists series, situates those shared impulses within the broader landscape of sensory art today. Across practices highlighted here, the aim is not simply to represent hidden forces, but to experience them otherwise. In doing so, the artists shift perception from observation to participation, inviting audiences into embodied encounters with what would otherwise remain beyond reach.
Attuning to Hidden Phenomena
Sofia Boarino’s work, for instance, explores how invisible energies and fields translate into different forms and shape perception, physiology, and emotional states. In Vocal Photosynthesis, painting emerges through sound. Moulding physics and playing with forces, Boarino’s process involves singing into darkness, producing visual traces—“fossils” of sonic life—each linked to a melody. The resulting images are vivid, abstract, biological sound-paintings. Drawing on the psychophysics of energy and vitalist thought, the body is positioned as transmitter, receiver, and co-creator within a broader energetic continuum.
Further exploration unravels in Boarino’s Sounds of Etna, a sensorial pavilion and acoustic installation that renders the inaudible infrasonic voice of Mount Etna perceivable through resonance. Though seemingly dormant, the volcano continuously emits a broad spectrum of infrasounds. Developed with the support of the Istituto Nazionale di Geofisica e Vulcanologia, the installation uses precisely tuned metal sheets that resonate with these signals, acting as vocal strings. Embedded into the volcanic terrain, the spatial cavity becomes a resonant throat, amplifying and shaping the frequencies into a physical event. Across both works, Boarino creates conditions in which imperceptible forces are experienced or channelled through the body. Her practice reflects a current in sensory art that translates energetic and environmental phenomena into immersive, perceptual forms.
Similarly, in his artistic practice, Marc Vilanova explores the materialisation of signals and rhythms that shape our world, yet remain beyond human perception. As a sound artist, he is interested in listening—not as a passive act, but as an active mode of sensing; a way of approaching what escapes immediate recognition. His work extends listening into other sensory realms, engaging realities that unfold across scales, frequencies, and temporalities beyond perception. Through his immersive environments, deep listening becomes a form of environmental awareness, enabling attunement to the more-than-human world.
One of such works is Cascade, an installation exploring waterfalls as natural sources of infrasonic frequencies that can travel vast distances of up to 400 kilometres. While inaudible to humans, these low frequencies are sensed by other species; some birds rely on them as navigational anchors during long-distance migrations. This ancient sonic relationship is now disrupted by artificial infrasound pollution, contributing to ecological imbalance. Cascade uses infrasonic recordings from large waterfalls to activate over a hundred small speakers that cannot reproduce such low frequencies. Instead, they generate vibrations through a curtain of luminous fibre optics. Sound thus “falls” as light, rendering the inaudible visible.
Moving through the installation, visitors enter a sensory field where vibrations resonate through their bodies, connecting them with dimensions of nature beyond ordinary human perception.
Vilanova’s work also probes the limits of scientific perception, engaging with the emerging field of quantum sensing, where phenomena operate at scales and speeds far removed from conventional understanding of reality. His work aims to speculate on what future technologies might reveal about our world and open pathways towards senses not yet discovered.
Translating Data into Sensory Experience
One of the defining gestures in this field is the conversion of abstract data into embodied experience. Rather than visualising information via screens and graphs, artists are increasingly interested in how data might be felt. Abel and Carlo Korinsky transform environmental data, often imperceptible in its raw form, into immediate, physical experience. Their work collapses the distance between system and subject: atmospheric shifts, pollution, and climate variations become palpable, immersive, and affectiveencounters rather than abstract metrics. Focusing on natural phenomena, real-time data, and spatial perception, they probe sensory thresholds where the visible meets the invisible and the audible meets the inaudible. Collaborations with nuclear physicists, marine biologists, aerodynamicists, and ultrasound researchers inform their inquiry into how humans relate to the world.
Their work Life A: Floating Senses visualises the presence of airborne particles that quietly define our existence. Real-time data—temperature, humidity, fine dust, CO levels, and air quality—controls the movements and behaviour of a fictional organism. Atmospheric fluctuations become kinetic and sonic expressions, while sculptural fragments vibrate and flicker, visualising microscopic environmental residues and microplastics that affect our bodies and ecosystems. Acoustic levitation suspends these fragments using ultrasonic waves, while AI interprets live environmental data to generate the fictional organism’s voice and choreograph the movement of robotic tentacles and floating fragments.
In Monumentum, the duo shifts scale from atmospheric to cosmic. Drawing on nuclear astrophysics and collaborations with scientists at the Facility for Rare Isotope Beams (FRIB), the work reflects on the formation of all chemical elements—from the Big Bang to supernova explosions, and neutron star collisions. Generative tools translate stellar data into humanlike forms, bridging cosmic processes and human existence. Immersive audio combines field recordings with simulated cosmic events, culminating in audible frequencies shaped by gravitational waves that emotionally connect audiences to the origins of our existence. Korinsky’s practice reflects a broader shift towards creating experiences that render complex datasets sensorially accessible, offering new ways to enagage with the vast bodies of knowledge they contain.
In a similar vein, Kerrie O’Leary works across environmental data, sculpture, and sound. Rooted in hydrofeminism, her practice draws on the fluid, interdependent behaviours of water to imagine more caring ways of living with nature, and with one another. In a world saturated with graphs and alerts, yet thin on felt connection, she uses sensors, code, and drawing machines to turn tidal charts, flood models, and underwater recordings into kinetic installations that move with real environmental rhythms. These works invite audiences off screens and back into their bodies—to hear, feel, and see forces that are usually hidden—creating spaces of shared attention.
Project by Therme Art
Art Senses is created by Therme Art, an international cultural initiative advancing Therme Group’s mission to promote wellbeing. In close collaboration with Therme Group, whose expertise in innovative environments and wellbeing infrastructures informs the programme’s vision, Therme Art supports and develops artistic and cultural experiences that generate positive social impact.
In addition to funding, mentorship, visibility, technical resources and support, Therme Art offers the possibility for projects developed within Art Senses to be realised permanently at Therme Group’s facilities worldwide, extending the artistic dialogue from the studio and exhibition context into lived, public environments that embody the programme’s curatorial aims.
