'How the world touches us'

Aesthetics and the tactile encounter with art, the 'haptic' and the 'optic'

i. 'How the world touches us' - the history of art, the 'haptic' and the 'optic'
ii. A haptic digital aesthetic - tangible play, prosthetic performance

Explored in chapter 6 of The Senses of Touch...

A haptic digital aesthetics

Tangible play, prosthetic performance

[Above] Stahl Stenlie's Inter_Skin project

Touch and digital performance. This examines the expressive possibility of digital media performances that involve technologies of touch. This analysis includes examples of artworks divided into three separate 'moments' - the 'skin' and the discourse of surface; the 'flesh' and the notion of technological extension and prosthesis; and the 'body' and its motility, the way interactive touch is performed both on stage and online.

In digital performance some interesting developments have occurred whereby the body becomes displaced, and the senses distorted. This refashioning of the body in digital space has implications for theories of embodiment and of body morphology. Some digital performances positively engage in Luce Irigaray's (1993) discourse of fluidity in its evocation of the virtual environment, even the way the body navigates and moves around the virtual world, not by mastering space but by being penetrated by it.

Examples in performance art of the skin and the play of surfaces, the flesh and the concept of vascularity, and the body are shown to be three 'moments' in the enfolding and interleavings of the one into the other, providing convenient points of analysis in what is a physiological and conceptual continuum. The haptic, the touch sense, underlies these physiological moments, and go towards re-affirming digital embodiment. Tactility is seen as an underlying theme in these cases, as opposed to the mostly masculinist emphasis on sight, and is prioritised by Irigaray. Touch brings us back into the world.

So this analysis of the digital body looks thematically at three types of performance, those of skin, flesh, and body. In using surgical technology, skin modification takes place as performance art for Orlan; prostheses and digital feedback in Stelarc play with ideas of flesh; and for Char Davies the synaesthetic links between vision, touch and space occur through the body, whose boundaries can be reconfigured and re-engineered in digital space to expand the sensorium.

See 'Links' page for more haptic aesthetics and performance material.

One way of gauging the way that we are touched and affected by tactile properties of objects in space is through aesthetics [from Greek aesthesis, pertaining to the senses]. The aesthetic encounter with sculpture for example is a way of informing our visual sense with other senses, including the tactile, and the way that the senses are combined in our phenomenological perception of the world. Aesthetic contemplation of a sculpture is illustrative therefore of our everyday, embodied tactile-spatial experience.

The means by which this analysis can take place is through an examination of sculpture and architecture, in fact the set of forms between these plastic arts that form and shape space. These cause us to experience a set of embodied perceptions that highlight the unitary basis of the sensations, and particularly of touch and space. The body is central in perception for Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty, and they dwell on the constitution of objects, or more explicitly 'things', as arising from the body's interaction with the world. For Heidegger especially, what makes the 'thingness' of things is important, and this can come forward to us through concrete or stonelike examples such as sculpture. But a more explicit analysis of touch and space needs to depart from the body per se and the thingness of things, to see how the senses interact in our everyday, embodied experience of space.

While aesthetic theory is involved in this consideration, chiefly Merleau-Ponty's (1964) reading of Cézanne's ability to evoke tactility through the visual medium of painting, this chapter is not primarily on the aesthetics of sculpture or architecture, although the aesthetic encounter heightens our appreciation of touch and texture and mass, those qualities which inform our visual perception. Instead, I want to examine in a series of phenomenological snapshots of the encounter with objects in space what the prerequisites are for the ability to synthesise touch and space. Moving on from the rather abstracted or extraordinary aesthetic encounter with a sculptural object, which engages in the debate in aesthetics of 'touch-space,' what can be gleaned from this will be applied to more quotidian encounters. The argument will therefore be extended into the objects that are crafted, that are the work of the hands; and in these, like sculpture, the reciprocality of crafted and crafter, of toucher and touched, will be investigated in order to pursue the links between touch-space and visual space through the mediation of objects. These encounters do not involve solely the senses of sight and touch but also, in the approach and the navigation around such objects or shaped spaces, the haptic senses generally, thereby including tactile-muscular, proprioceptive and vestibular senses in the everyday encounter with things.

The examination then considers the way that perception and body memory are involved in a set of sensory investments in space that unfold from the body. This is partly accomplished through Gibson's ideas of 'affordances' and Deleuze's concept of 'affect', tying together the body, the perceptions of mass, shape, colour, and the texture of the world, with body memory. Thus the discussion will take a more neuropsychological turn, away from the incarnated phenomenology of early Merleau-Ponty, and equally away from the metaphysical concepts of the flesh of the later Merleau-Ponty (1968). What I hope to achieve is something that accommodates the complexity of sensuous experience that lies in the interaction of bodies and things not only in the immediacy of the physical encounter, but the layerings and unfoldings of sensory phenomena that come from body memory into the world as we perceive it. It is in the interactions of the past, of both being touched and touching, that allow us to project forward, to make investments in perceived spatiality, in the present. What Henri Bergson, via philosopher Deleuze (1991), would term the collapse from 'virtuality' into 'actuality.'

From the position that our vision is informed by other senses and body memory, then, to the position that our everyday interaction with objects relies on a set of sensory investments in objects in space, is the purpose of this chapter. Taking this position, however, supports a wider definition of 'haptic' in the way that Iris Marion Young (1990) sees it, as "an orientation to sensuality as such." So by examining spaces as being invested with a complex assemblage of sensory information and body memories, the everyday experience of objects in space will be shown to take place in what unfolds from the body, a space of sensuality as such, what I will term 'haptic space.'

Deleuze, G. (1991) Bergsonism (Athlone: London)

Gibson, J. J. (1979) The ecological approach to visual perception (London, Houghton Mifflin)

Merleau-Ponty, M. (1964) The Primacy of Perception and Other Essays on Phenomenological Psychology, the Philosophy of Art, History and Politics, Tr. C Dallery, Ed. J M Edie (Evanston Il, Northwestern University Press)

Merleau-Ponty, M. (1968) The Visible and the Invisible, Tr. A Lingis, Ed. C Leforte (Evanston, Northwestern University Press)

Young, I.M. (1990) Throwing Like a Girl and Other Essays in Philosophy and Social Theory (Bloomington, Indiana University Press)