Prior to the workshop day, we sent each of our attendees a set of three texts each of the principal investigators had written thinking about the topic of sensation and experience, as a way to get our attendees thinking and inspire them.

Elaine’s essay, Archives Embodied, Bodies Archived, considers the kinds of Othering imaginaries at play in the work of naturalists like Alfred Russel Wallace and Richard Spruce, imaginaries that reified their own experiences of moss into scientific history in very particular ways while simultaneously erasing the experiences of other racialized and cultural bodies who were a part of those histories. She considers: “how do our own bodies bleed into the collections that we work with?”

In Sensations, Tega considers how processes of documentation using different tools change and structure the world as we encounter and come to know it: “When specimens are digitized, captured as data and stored in databases, how do they change and become something new? She reflects on her experiments with macrophotography and trying to capture the texture of moss and ponders the limits of the imperative to precisely render the world through imaging technologies and visual data.

Lastly, Ahmed’s essay, Thinking with Moss, Thinking Through Atmospheres, moves through the different ways in which German and Japanese philosophy theorize atmosphere. Noting that whereas the former situates atmosphere as emanating from the (human) body, the latter considers it as something produced through inter-species and nonhuman relations, he considers how non-Eurocentric knowledge systems might help us design differently: “the focus in Japan on proper configuration, or the art of setting and cultivating, connects environment to sensation, what, in the design of digital archives, might be the connection between architecture and interface.”