Abstract

This article appears in the Oxford Handbook of New Audiovisual Aesthetics edited by John Richardson, Claudia Gorbman, and Carol Vernallis. Film in the digital era is increasingly developing as a sensory experience. Sounds and images together yield sensations that can approximate senses other than sight and hearing. Cinema can thus render the coolness of the wet spray experienced by a fountain, for example, or speed, force, materiality, hollowness, heaviness, and so forth. At the same time, the nature of recording and filming takes sounds and images out of their real multisensory context and creates sensory isolates. Those who study film, games, and other audiovisual media should not to ignore their trans-sensory aspects.