The case for sensorial proof
What it means when the wind and the body testify
Reminder: In the previous post, 64% of readers chose “Option 1: 🌬️ The case for sensorial truth” which brings us here.
The first time I felt proof, it wasn’t in a courtroom. It wasn’t even in a document. It was in the air. In the garden of the Triennale Milano, I attended Forensis live documentary performance The Drum and The Bird, a sonic and visual investigation into the 1905 German g€n0cide in Shark Island, Namibia. They made the wind speak, literally.
Forensis had recorded the wind on Shark Island as part of their reconstruction of how currents and waves had shaped the rocks and, in turn, the camp’s layout and living conditions. Those wind-carved formations became evidence: spatial witnesses to atrocity, more reliable than colonial archives written by executioners and administrators. In the performance, the live replay of these non-human elements put you inside the site’s conditions: you weren’t just watching a reconstruction, you were inhabiting it, drawn into the conditions of the site. Proof moved beyond sight or text into something sensorial.
If “sensorial” and “proof” sound like a contradiction to you, it’s worth stepping back in time. For centuries, Western thought kept sensation at arm’s length. Descartes split mind from body. Kant classified perception as raw material for reason, not truth in itself. Merleau-Ponty cracked that separation open, showing that perception is not a raw, unreliable input but the very ground on which meaning takes shape. But it’s only with philosopher Isabelle Stengers that feeling regains its standing, showing that the sensorial can serve truth, and that what we feel can be part of the evidence itself. (p.36 of Thinking with Whitehead, in free access here).
Standing in that garden, I recognised what she meant, the performance gave form to something usually ungraspable. Sound, especially wind, is fleeting by nature, yet here it was fixed in time. Artists Harry Yeff and Trung Bao go further, materialising sound into physical form. In their project VOICEGEMS, they are compressing the fingerprint-like patterns of voices (human, machine, and landscapes) into digital gemstones, each one unique. The ephemeral sound becomes a mineral artefact. An object you can hold in your hand, where matter and memory are inseparable.
But what happens when proof stops being static can interact with you? In Alice Bucknell’s awarded game Earth Engine, the planet itself is the main player; we are reduced to non-playable characters. Your local climate data seeps into the game, altering its environments and behaviours. The weather patterns shift, ecosystems collapse or recover, depending on the input. You’re no longer reading a report or listening to a field recording. You’re inside a system that reacts to you. Proof becomes an exchange, a dynamic circuit.
And sometimes it bypasses interpretation entirely. Architect Pavels Hedström’s GAIA Communication System is a speculative wearable system that transmits the health of an ecosystem directly into your nervous system. You don’t learn that the forest is stressed. You feel it. The pulse of a coral reef under bleaching, the breath of a wetland under heatwave, they arrive as sensations in your body. Proof has left the registers, the laboratories, the exhibition space; it is in your bloodstream now.
This is where the ground truly shifts. In the age of generative AI, the kinds of proof we once kept at arm’s length (numbers, photographs, recordings) can now be fabricated with ease. What happens when the sensory territory we once trusted to sight or sound moves directly into the body’s circuits? A wearable transmitting the stress of a dying forest, can move you deeply… yet it could just as well trick you! When facts enters through the nervous system, it bypasses the filters we use for written or visual proof. That is power, and it is peril.
And here, empirical philosopher Bruno Latour is essential. His work insists on the coexistence of multiple regimes of truth, refusing the fantasy of a single, “purified” factual order. Each regime carries its own lived experience, and within that frame, that experience can stand as proof. In practice, I had the chance to follow his course on Controversy cartography which showed what this multiplicity looks like: mapping not just facts, but the disputes, standpoints, and actors (human and non-human) that give them meaning. And meaning is never abstract. In Forensis’ work it lives in the sound of wind hitting stone, in the breath of survivors’ descendants, in the texture of a site’s soil. If proof can be fabricated across all regimes, then our defence is not purity, but plurality.
I keep thinking back to that moment of Forensis’ performance. The sound of wind filling the garden of the Triennale in Milano. There was no framing text that could have made it more persuasive. Which is also the risk and the responsibility of this kind of evidence. The moment you’ve felt it, you’re in the story; you’re part of the chain of custody. It better be legit.
Latour’s work gives us a map for navigating competing factual regimes. But when proof is no longer just factual but sensorial, we need to extend that critical mapping to the sensations. Imagine a world where we could access a choral cartography of sensations through wearables. Each one mapped, traced back through the actors, devices, and conditions that shaped them. A gust of wind could carry with it not only its temperature, but also the story of where and how it was recorded, who captured and transmitted it, and even the memories and bodily reactions it triggered along the way.
When sensorial proof becomes not a fleeting impression, but a networked mapping, you gain another role. You can move through the archive as it mutates, layer by layer, seeing not just what you felt but how it was made and by whom it was shaped. The wind in the garden, the pulse of the wearable, the resonance in your bones: each become a mapped event, traceable through the web of forces that produced it. Only then can you decide whether to let it stand as evidence, or mark it as a construct. In that act, the archive lives on through you, anchored by its own traceability. 🌬️
🗳️ From mapping sensory worlds to crafting within them, that’s where the path now leads. Pick your detour:
Option 1 : We taught AI the remix and it’s teaching us back 🎨🔄
From early conceptual gestures to today’s neural networks, a look at how remix became both the engine of creativity and the trigger for its reinvention.
Option 2 : When the artisan strikes back 🪡✨
Why the fatigue with concept art and endless generated creativity might be fuelling a renewed appetite for craft.
👇 Vote here, or reply 1 or 2 in the comments. I’ll follow the most voted path :)