For more than three centuries, Swiss commodity trade has been caught up in colonial, and later in postcolonial and neoliberal entanglements. Having fuelled early modern industrialisation as well as contemporary finance, Swiss trading activities have influenced vivid cultural, affective and moral economies. They have contributed to Swiss wealth, but also to national narratives of independence, safety and white and aesthetic supremacy. The Swiss mythology of neutrality transforms the often violent and “dirty” material complexities of mining and trading into an opaque and orderly form of technocracy, discretion and smartness.

The panel Somatic Archaeologies consists of three talks: Reading an Invisible Scene through the Experience of its Temperature, The Embodied Image, the Image Embodied and Digital Performance in 21st Century Taiwan: Huang Yi & KUKA, a New Form of Sino-Corporeality

I performed my first trip to the Moon on 9 June 2017. The launch site was the fifth floor of an old building in Hamburg, Germany.

The panel Sensory Evolutions and Medial Transformations consists of three different talks: Aesthetics and Evolution of Structural-Color Producing or Biophotonic Nanostructures in Birds, From Chiaroscuro to the Collapse of the Wave Function: Light as the Quintessential Trans Sensorial Phenomenon and Revisioning Chinese Antiquity

The Critical Dictionary of Southeast Asia (CDOSEA) begins with a question: What constitutes the unity of Southeast Asia – a region never unified by language, religion or political power?

Along a typical river in Bali, small groups of farmers meet regularly in water temples to manage their irrigation systems.They have done so for a thousand years. Over the centuries, water temple networks have expanded to manage the ecology of rice terraces at the scale of whole watersheds. Although each group focuses on its own problems, somehow everything works out in a way that optimises rice harvests for the farmers in dozens of villages. How is this possible? Google Earth reveals transitory patterns in the rice paddies that closely resemble phase transitions in physics, like the onset of magnetism.This unlocks a story of hidden order that charms the physics community, perplexes economists and offers everyone a startlingly new way to think about how people interact with nature.

Thinking is not the first thing in the human being […]. The human being, the animal, first senses himself obscurely, then senses himself vividly; he subsequently senses pleasure and pain within himself obscurely; after which he senses the pleasure and the pain outside himself; only then does he have cognition (Herder).

The Urban Explorations Project began as an investigation of ordinary happenings and encounters in the Singapore heartlands, narrated through the retrieval of sound, colors, smells, soil samples, found objects, behavioral observations and traffic patterns.

According to an adage in conjuring, the strongest magic happens in the hands of the audience.

The panel Asian Sensecapes and Imaginaries consists of three talks: Senses and the Social in Asia: Some Theoretical Propositions, Imagining in Oppressive Contexts, Or, What’s Wrong with Blacking Up? and Violence as Spectacle: Exploring the Trans-Sensoriality of Pain, Sorrow and Anger