Sensible knowledge is not the exclusive reserve of art. As a dimension always awaiting renewed discovery, it has become an unavoidable factor within diverse areas of research. Today, various laboratories measure and experiment with our “psyche“, our sense of hearing, listening, and touch, souch as, for example, the sensibility of our skin. The cosmetic industry invests in increasingly wider areas of sensibility. It has developed into an industry of intimacy directly addressd to our senses, creating, in its own particular way, new forms of sensibility, that infix the anxieties and desires of post-industrial society. The symbolic and imaginary spaces that it offers allow the staging of our desires within daily life. The beauty industry openly draws its inspiration from our desires, but it also draws inspiration from the results of spatial, biomedical, and ecological research, etc. This is reflected in the mediatization of products frequently legitimized through an authoritative techno-scientific language. On a political level, the beauty industry democratizes the axiom of the individualization of bodies that can already be found as early as Antiquity (Michel Foucault’s identification of “the care of the self“). It thus operates on a particularly subtle level, influencing our dreams, the apprehension of our bodies, and finally the perception of personal space. Distinct from one another, in the form of divergent modes of production (functional aesthetics or symbolic representation), the two worlds of the “beauty industry” and art, are nevertheless related through a common terminology and the consideration of bodily space, its representation, becoming and transformation. Both operate through minute perceptions and subtle sensations. The Laboratory of Sensibility proposes a number of considerations within this particular field without however proclaiming a conclusion or yielding circumscribed results. Rather, the elements assembled here attempt an approach by way of the sensible, the theoretical, and the experimental. It brings together a range of contributors who feel concerned by the subject in their own areas of investigation or those who are involved, on a daily or intermittent basis, as part of a professional practice. C.M. (traduit par Dean Inkster)