It’s easy to think that noticing must be done with the eyes. But when we notice in everyday life, we often use our full sensory palette – we are struck by a sound, a smell, a taste, the feel of something.
Sensory noticing generally involves more than one sense at the same time. It also quite often means that we imagine beyond the immediate thing/event/action/person. So when we watch a film, we might notice an image or a sound or both as movement or a moment – but we might also imagine at the same time what this smells like. We might also imagine an emotional state accompanying this noticing.
Sometimes of course we notice an absence or we just sense something we can’t put our finger on.
Ethnographers like me want to notice and to interpret actions and events using all of our senses. This is a film used in research training; it was made as an exercise in sensory noticing, interpreting and imagining into the action/events.
Questions For the Senses
why does one come to the fore, how is one imagined through another?
What role does empathy or sympathy play in responding/noticing?
How does this subjectively effect and play out in any subsequent noticing or describing?
What happens when noticing seeps out beyond the object/situation (film), returning with gathered ideas/experiences/knowledge’s and questions?
What is the role of longing in relation to noticing?
Are these films constructed in such a way as to deliberately disorientate or unbalance ones perceived position, literally tipping ones physical line of sight?
You can look in order to notice but how might you nurture a sensitivity, patience, reciprocity in order to allow stuff to imprint (impress) upon you in a more affective way?
How then might something non-articulate be known, conveyed, shared, transmitted, told?