Our sixth journal issue: “translating ambiance” - now live.

Check it out here: “translating ambiance”

Guest editor: Jordan Lacey

This issue of Unlikely explores translating ambiance through essays, creative works and scholarly articles. It asks: is it possible to translate ambiance between environments? what are the embodied processes employed during acts of translation? and, what affectivities move across environments, via the gesturing artistic body? Contributors attend to how, through creative acts, new ambiances emerge in relation to previously explored environments, to reveal to the sensible those more-than-human worlds in which we are always immersed.

The translating ambiance concept is born of urban design considerations that take seriously the idea that affectivities might be transported from the wild into the urban, as a method for generating affectivities of equivalent intensities. The nineteen works in this issue range across three categories—exhibition translations, creative practice essays, scholarly articles—each of which positions the sensing body in relation to shifting mediums of perception and artistic intervention. The contributions show that the theory and practice of ambiances, and their translations, are just as diverse as the dance of mediums in which our bodies are immersed; and that their transformation can awaken new relationships with our world.

With 19 contributors, including artists/theorists Luz-María Sánchez Cardona, Lisa Hall and Salomé Voegelin, and Catherine Clover, Translating Ambiance poses questions about how the artistic voice can help to rupture the functionalist practices of urban planners, in the pursuit of more imaginative and diversely affective cities.