Established by Erin Manning in 2004, the SenseLab is an international network of artists, theorists, researchers, dancers and writers who work together to explore the active passage between research and creation, promoting theoretical and artistic exploration of the sensing body in motion. The SenseLab is physically based in Montreal with space at the Society for Art and Technology . Part of the research agenda of SenseLab is to understand moving bodies and bodies in motion as relational bodies– “the senses are not seen as pregiven biological apparatuses, but as veritable technologies of life that continuously reinvent what the body is and can do, through its interactions with its designed environment and the technical objects populating it.”
The SenseLab interconnects a range of initiatives that each involves the collaborative participation of various members of its network. Bodies-Bits is a bi-monthly speaker series that provides a platform for international presenters to reveal insights into their research-creation works in progress. A series of thematically focused annual events with the title Technologies of Lived Abstraction aim to explore various modes of participation that view thought as a laboratory for creative practice and creative practice as a platform for thought. The 2009 event titled Society of Molecules connected ‘molcules’ of three to ten people as each simultaneously set up and executed a single aesthetico-political action within and between individual locations in eighteen different cities worldwide.
An interdisciplinary book series conceived by Manning and Brian Massumi and spawned from concepts examined during these annual events (also sharing the title Technologies of Lived Abstraction) is published by MIT Press. The SenseLab also publishes Inflexions, an open-access online journal aiming to promote experimental practices that combine research and creation in such a way as to foster symbiotic links between philosophical inquiry, technological innovation, artistic production, and social and political engagement.