SYNAESTHESIA AND THE BODY POLITIC Feelings change. They intensify, they numb, they may even transform from one sense to another. Synaesthesia is the neurological condition of this crossfire (hearing colours, tasting sounds), and it has proven an incredibly suggestive field for artists probing the interface between sense and materials, self and the world. In the last five years, an onslaught of exhibitions have showcased synaesthesia in both aesthetic production and reception — from the colour organs of the 18th-19th centuries to the abstract films of Oskar Fischinger. In our current political moment, this resurgence takes on a new light, for synaesthesia is also usually regarded as modernism's seamy underside, as the Gesamtkunstwerk where totality of affect all too easily becomes totalitarianism. Efforts at creating immersive environments where different senses coalesce are positioned as the progenitors of mass spectacle and suture, or synaesthesia's related dream of a universal language, where sound or image or touch are translatable and share one code (in our age, it is digital) is identified as hopelessly utopian. But this is a narrowly retrospective viewpoint, one that does not account for historical moments when synaesthesia could function as oppositional or otherwise. Glimpses of difference, ruptures or realignments of the increasing colonisation of the body by technocratic means, have each been triggered by experiments in synaesthesia. At its most utopian, synaesthesia served as an escape from regulated and administered life (hence its frequent linkage with spiritualism). But it could also plumb the depths of aesthetic materials or the corporeality of bodily sensation, revealing how these territories have been mediated in turn. The postwar rediscovery of synaesthesia revives the ambivalence of mass ornament and its latent possibilities for sensing truth in surface. In 1958, visitors to the Brussels World Fair entered the pavilion of the Dutch electronics corporation Philips — to emerge shaken or elated. Inside was an eight-minute spectacle of sound and light, whose sensory effect was amplified by its soaring silver concrete shell. Hundreds of speakers projected swirling arcs of sound. A filmic montage splayed across the curving walls that were bathed in spectrally metamorphosing lights. It was an assault. One Dutch critic described being "in [the work's] stomach; it is as if the pavilion is literally digesting us and exposing us, against our will, to acids that etch us
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