Technology and Touch

The Biopolitics of Emerging Technologies

A. Cranny-Francis

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781137268303
• eBook ISBN: 9781137268310
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Cultural & Social Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

Technology and Touch addresses the development of a range of new touch technologies, both technologies that we reach out to touch and technologies that touch us, by exploring how we use touch to connect with and understand our world, and ourselves.

Part I

Technologies of Touch

In By the Light of the Body: The Somatic Senses in the Visual Arts (2013), Rosalyn Driscoll writes of meaning in art:

Meanings in artworks are not singular, monolithic or objective. The multiple, ambiguous, referential nature of art ensures that the meanings embedded in an artwork remain open-ended enough to allow anyone to find his or her own meanings. Meanings are catalyzed by the maker, embodied by the artwork, and discovered by the perceiver. Artworks create the shared symbolic and imaginative glue that binds and defines a culture with a universe of meaning.

(Driscoll, 2013c)

From this perspective, artworks are an important source of information about how meanings are created by material culture (the art object) through sensory engagement with the embodied subject. This section explores how artworks deploy the sense of touch; how they interrelate the materiality of the artwork, the bodily (physical, emotional, intellectual, spiritual) responses of their audiences, and a shared history of cultural meanings to generate new understandings and knowledges about our own being and about our relationships with each other and the world.

When exploring the meanings of touch for this study of touch technologies, it soon became clear that it was not sufficient to rely on writings about touch. Most of the literature available was from health-related disciplines such as medicine, psychology and neuroscience that had very practical applications but did not capture the significance of touch for our fundamental understandings of meaning and being: how touch positions us in the world; how it contributes to our understandings of self and other; how it is crucial to the formation of knowledge. What was missing from the written studies was both the materiality and the interdisciplinarity that gives touch its power – the graininess of texture that reminds us that we live in a world that is discontinuous, but contiguous, with our being; the metaphorical richness of touch that tells us that our understanding of the world is as much emotional and physical as intellectual; the interrelationship of touch with other senses that demonstrates how the senses work together to create complex understandings of the world and ourselves. And although writing can be just as allusive and intertextual as other artforms, most of the writing about touch (with notable exceptions such as Michel Serres’ The Five Senses (2008)) was not of that kind; it was written as scientific analysis, which meant that it actively suppressed other meanings.

This section is called ‘Technologies of Touch’ because it shows how a number of artworks use the sense of touch to affect their perceivers (to use Driscoll’s term) – to engage them with the materiality of the work and with the cultural meanings it offers. In this sense, the artwork can be seen as a form of making that is also a revealing, to refer back to Heidegger’s vision of technology; which is to say, that it engages the perceiver in an embodied analysis of being (who we are) and meaning (what we know). In Foucault’s terms, the artwork is a practice by which embodied subjects become part of a particular culture (at a specific time and place) by learning how to ‘be’ and to ‘mean’ within that culture, and it can also be a medium by which an individual subject may interrogate and challenge the conventional ideas and values of their society and its culture(s). In studying these works, then, we explore touch as a political practice that articulates and interrogates meaning; communicates discourses with which individuals are familiar and empowers them to analyse and critique those discourses.

3

Eye Feel: Visuality and Touch

In 2009, I curated an exhibition called The Sense of Touch at the Macquarie University Art Gallery. It was a research exhibition, a way of using artworks to communicate aspects of my research that could not be so easily conveyed by words. It was also, for me, a way of fully exploring some of the meanings about touch and its relationship to meaning and being that I had been reading about in articles and books in a range of disciplines. Though I had not, at that time, read Rosalyn Driscoll’s wonderful study, By the Light of the Body: The Somatic Senses in the Visual Arts (2013a), it does sum up many of the findings I made while putting this exhibition together, and I refer to it throughout the chapter.

Sense of an exhibition

The first choice I had to make with the exhibition was how it should be presented within the gallery – basically, a long rectangular space, painted white. My first concern was that the space was so non-tactile; indeed so sterile and distancing, especially for an exhibition about touch. Could I perhaps have visitors touch something on their way into the space, some kind of powder perhaps, which could then be shed in various ways throughout the visit, to show the tactile exploration of the exhibition, which included several works that could be touched, as well as many that could not? The exhibition included several video installations with banquettes for viewing, where traces of touch might also be visible. The gallery director quickly demonstrated the lack of practicality of this suggestion on many grounds, not least being the university’s insurance policy that would not allow potentially slippery substances to be shed on the floor, visitors’ disinclination to use the powder, potential damage to artworks.

Still, the issue remained; how to give some experience of tactility to visitors in an exhibition about touch that was largely untouchable. The solution I chose was the use of panelled silk curtains in rich jewel tones – purple, emerald green, deep pink – to divide the gallery into a series of rooms. Visitors could push through the curtains, thereby experiencing the gentle brush of silk against the skin or walk around them. As well, the colours gave a richness and vibrancy to the exhibition space that was quite at odds with the conventional ‘white cube’. Visitors subsequently commented on the very different experience the curtains gave; a greater intimacy and sense of immersion in the exhibition itself, and a feeling of safety.

This simple choice confronted a conventional attribute of the white cube; its presentation of the artwork is not only conceptual but also sensory isolation. The more traditional display isolates the artworks from factors that might bias their reception, which mimics the distancing role of sight in our culture. Sight, a sense traditionally associated with the mind not the body, is distanced and analytical; as Driscoll writes: ‘The visual system is concerned with salience, orientation, arousal, attention and identification of things’ (2013d). While my exhibition also deployed the sense of sight, I wanted in some way to draw attention formally to the sense of touch, with which the exhibition was concerned and which has very different functions culturally. Driscoll describes touch this way: ‘the haptic system attends to safety, motion, spatial orientation and self-definition’ (2013d). I was quite surprised by the visitor response to the curtaining as creating a sense of safety, but Driscoll’s understanding of touch helps to explain this. The touch of the silk created a bodily connection with the visitor that both welcomed them into the exhibition and encouraged a fully embodied engagement with the exhibition, confirming that the meanings of the works lay both in the bodily responses of the viewer and in the ideas they provoked.

Visual art

The decision to present an exhibition rather than write another research paper was based on a number of factors: the ability of the artwork to demonstrate one or more aspects of the sense of touch; the way that the artwork relates the sense of touch (as a key aspect of its material practice) to meaning; the polysemy or multiplicity of the meaning practice of the artwork, which includes reference to the history of the art practice as well as implicit and explicit references to its cultural and social environment including associated histories of meanings; relationship to the embodiment of the viewer in a way that draws the viewer’s attention, implicitly or explicitly, to their bodily connection and to the ways that these are associated with meaning and to memory, and hence to our understandings of ourselves and of how we understand our world.

The paintings included large oil and acrylic paintings by a number of artists: Amanda Robins’ lush oil paintings of folded silk in rich colours (echoed in the curtain panels) from her Hypochondria series (2005), and two of her paintings of old coats with the lining turned out to face the viewer – Lovelocked (Open Coat IV) (2005) and Harris Tweed II (2004) – lush, textural, with the silk lining contrasting with the denser outer material; Gerd Schmid’s heavily textured oil paintings in gold and midnight blue of the Australian landscape from his Air, Light, Water series (2008); indigenous artist, Rosella Namok’s heavily textured acrylic work in five panels Old Girls They Talk in the Sand … Yarn for Country … Family Law (2005b) that addressed issues of kinship and country. Sculpture was represented by one work that could be touched – Jan Shaw’s Whisper Again (1983), a sensuously curved work in local (Gosford) sandstone and an eponymously titled video about the work of Ron Mueck (2008), whose hyper-realist sculptures cannot be touched. The beadwork was by Meredith Brice and included a robust work Molecular II Bloom (2007) that could be touched as well as other beadwork and samplers (Molecular Bloom I (2009), Smart Fabric Samplers (2008)) that could not. There was also a DVD of work by film maker Stefan Popescu, Repressions: Screenworks 2000–2004, that focused specifically on the materiality of film, often through the director’s direct touching of film stock. And there were two design works: Fauxy the Fake Fur with Feelings (2008– 2009) by Stephen Barrass, Linda Davy and Joel Davy, an electronically enhanced fake fur coat and Hidden (2007), a dress with an electronic warming pocket designed by High Tea with Mrs Woo (Rowena, Juliana and Angela Foong).

The works were diverse generically and each addressed issues of embodiment, being, knowledge and sensory engagement in particular ways. For this study, each also offered a particularly interesting way to think about the role of touch in relation to all of these issues. They operated as technologies of touch in that they used the sense of touch in order to tell their story and prompt the viewer’s engagement, and also in that their manipulation of touch demonstrates the kind of role embodiment and touch have in relation to both meaning and being.

Design

It is useful to start with design, since new technologies are the focus of the research project and because these designers have been so conscious of developments in (wearable) technology. For High Tea with Mrs Woo, the Hidden dress with its secret warming pockets utilizes technology in a non-dramatic way to add functionality to a garment. Hidden is a form of shirt-dress, styled in a cream fabric with embroidered black fabric around a bib-front that extends to include the hidden front pocket and constituting the deep shirt-cuffs. When the wearer places her hands in the front pocket, the metallic thread used in the embroidery closes a circuit (powered by a removable battery) that causes a heating pad to warm up. Reflecting on the success of the project and wearable technology generally, they note:

It would seem that wearable technology would merely be a modification of clothing in terms of fabrication and construction, but we must ask the purpose of such a modification? Is it just another form of cultural expression in this new technological era? Or perhaps it may be considered as a shift towards a new purpose for clothing as a second skin, a means to document, analyse, understand and modify the relationship between our bodies and the environment in which we live.

(High Tea with Mrs Woo and Anne Cranny-Francis, 2008, p. 300)

The warming pocket adds a second layer of tactility to a design that is already tactile in function; meant to be worn close to the body. This was demonstrated in the exhibition by an accompanying video that showed one of the Foong sisters walking around the streets of their city wearing the dress. Hidden raised the question of how our sense of embodiment might be challenged or changed by new kinds of technology, particularly those that are worn close to the body. In particular, it argued that clothing, often described as a ‘second skin’, might best be understood as a form of technology, which then opens up a range of questions about the role of this textile-based technology in our lives: how has clothing already influenced our understanding of ourselves as embodied beings? Has clothing influenced touch, and how has it done this? How has clothing mediated between our selves (as embodied subjects) and our environment? In an interview from 2008, the designers note: ‘If human senses are defined as receptors of information from inside and outside our bodies, then wearable technology has a vast potential to affect, monitor, enhance, alter and control our human senses and our experiences as human beings’ (High Tea with Mrs Woo and Anne Cranny-Francis, 2008, p. 301) (Figure 3.1).

Figure 3.1 Barrass, S., L. Davy and J. Davy (2008–2009) Fauxy the Fake Fur with Feelings. Mixed media, 70 × 50 × 30 cm. Collection of the artists. Image courtesy Effy Alexakis

Fauxy the Fake Fur With Feelings, a flamboyant scarlet fake fur coat with feather collar, was designed to pursue these same issues. At the time of this exhibition, Fauxy’s main functionality came from sensors and accelerometers placed under the jacket’s feather collar. If anyone approached the coat, the sensors detected the movement and prompted the accelerometers to vibrate so that the collar fluttered. As designer Stephen Barras explained:

Fauxy will be used to explore the idea that tactile nerve extensions can connect the sensors in a Smart Fabric to the sensory system of the wearer. What are the immediate sensations? Do the nerve extensions provide altered or augmented perceptions? Does the coat influence behavour in some way? What are the effects on the scale of minutes, hours, or days? Is there an augmented or heightened awareness when wearing the coat? Can you learn to understand patterns of activity in the surroundings from these perceptions? If touch is one of our greatest pleasures then does the active dynamic tactility of the coat make it more pleasurable to wear? Does the coat amplify or change socialisation and interpersonal communication? What happens when buttons are placed in different regions?

(2008, p. 328)

Prior to the exhibition opening, I wore Fauxy for a short period. As Barrass suggests, the textures of feathers and fur and the beautiful craft-work of the coat make it very pleasurable to wear, while the sensory extensions added a slightly uncanny aspect to the experience, particularly when the coat detected movement before I did (as when someone approached from behind me). Somehow Fauxy seemed nervous, and it seemed important to soothe her (Fauxy seemed a female name) but at the same time the unannounced vibration so close to the body sometimes made me jump nervously. Not because I was worried about someone sneaking up behind me, or because I thought Fauxy was acting outside my control, but specifically because this garment/device suggested some very fundamental changes to the relationship between clothing, technology and the human senses. It challenged the extent to which it was possible to incorporate technological extension into the human sensorium without feeling a loss of some sort of fundamental humanity. The experience was not frightening; it was equally disturbing and exhilarating. What might this technological enhancement enable, and given that it is actually within the tactile domain of the body, literally on the body, how would we feel about it? Would we become different humans, as humans with pacemakers would no doubt appear to inhabitants of the nineteenth century? Were we indeed on our way to becoming cyborgs?

Both Hidden and Fauxy opened up some basic questions about how our embodiment defines us as human beings. With technology enabling us to perceive and know the world differently, will we no longer be us; ‘we are not who we are’ as parasite-infected characters in The X-Files once proclaimed (1993). New technologies seem no longer to be just a longer lever or a bigger hammer, the kind of technology powered by steam, that enables us to do what we already do, just bigger. The technologies we are now developing are enabling us to do things that are different and that is affecting fundamentally our understanding of ourselves as embodied subjects, and also how we understand the world around us.

Sculpture

As noted earlier, Rosalyn Driscoll’s study of sculpture and touch By the Light of the Body is an excellent meditation on the ways that sculpture informs the ‘perceiver’ (her term) about touch and, consequently, the senses and embodied being: ‘Touch is Hermes the messenger, weaving together the conditions of body, world and self’ (2013c). Driscoll’s own sculptures are made to be touched, as she explains: ‘I sought to give rightful place to the body in the art experience. To understand and expand the body’s ways of knowing. To awaken people’s bodies to their native sensory authority’ (Driscoll, 2013c). Touching the sculpture is revelation and self-revelation, telling perceivers about not only the sculpture itself, but also how they experience the work...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part I: Technologies of Touch
• Part II: Technologies That We Touch
• Part III: Technologies That Touch Us
• Conclusion
• Notes
• References
• Index