Common Sensing
CRA #3
Riccardo Badano/Tomas Percival/Susan Schuppli

Common Sensing brings together practitioners and thinkers whose work engages with the relationships between different modes of sensing environmental conditions and the role of sense-making in producing collective claims and forms of resistance. Contributions move across a diverse set of contexts: from managing forest fires in China Muerta, Chile, replanting sabr, a prickly pear cactus in Palestine, the cultivation of peasant seeds by farmers in southern Italy, to communal walking projects in the settlements of Karachi and grass roots campaigns opposing geothermal energy production in Turkey. Contributions also explore how these everyday ‘common sense’ responses to local conditions operate alongside more technical forms of sensing, including X-ray imaging, satellite monitoring, ground penetrating radar, bio-acoustic recording, and smart sensor technologies. How might a poly-perspectival set of methodologies and techniques enable the production of a new ‘sensory commons’ that is grounded in an ethics of care and guided by a planetary sense of communal well-being?

The editorial team is composed of staff and researchers based at the Centre for Research Architecture (CRA), whose collective insights and interests guide each thematic book in the series. Riccardo Badano is an architect and researcher. He is a tutor at the Royal College of Art and a PhD candidate at the CRA. Tomas Percival is an artist, researcher, and writer. He was previously a lecturer at the CRA, where he also undertook his PhD. Susan Schuppli is an artist-researcher and writer. She is professor and director of the CRA and board chair of Forensic Architecture. Aslı Uludağ, associate editor for this issue, is an artist and PhD candidate at the CRA.