More than modal? Exploring affect, affordance, invitation and solicitation.

Abstract

The aim of this chapter is to make a strong case for the adoption of a radically different approach to the archaeology of the senses. This is an approach that focuses not on what is sensed per se (or any ingenious mapping or digital representation of such) but instead the emergent affects that may have arisen in any given sensory encounter, and the impact(s) of such on the assemblage of individuals, things, animals, environments, landscape elements, memories, expectations and anticipations (to name but a few) that were bound up within it. This is not to say that we should abandon attempts to, for example, delineate, visualise, map and analyse what could be seen, heard or smelled. Instead, it is to stress that such efforts should always be treated as a means-to-an-end and never taken as definitive end-products. In the discussion that follows, we build the theoretical framework needed to effect such a re-orientation, drawing upon affect theory and notions of relational capacity and affordance. We then go on to demonstrate the value of this through a case study involving the mapping and exploration of visibility and foreground the unique (yet largely untapped) interpretative potential of virtual, mixed and augmented reality approaches to move beyond mere representation, to instead evoke affects directly.