In Touch/Out of Touch with Touch
Session will present: On locationDrawing inspiration from Michel Serres’ reading of the original Cinderella tale, where recognition is made possible through the tactile intimacy of a fur slipper, we rethink and explore: what happens to touch when it is mediated through glass? In today’s hybrid societies, where screens have become our primary interface with the world, touch is often displaced by visuality, flattened into the screens, or abstracted into data. Yet, rather than presuming the disappearance of touch, this session considers how touch is being reconfigured, redistributed, and perhaps even reactivated across feilds of presence among shared embodied worlds. This session explores touch as a relational mode of sensing, an embodied experience in which bodies come into proximity without guarantee of contact, clarity, or closure. Touch is not just a physical sensation but a becoming, an unfolding gesture in the spaces between bodies.The following papers will delve into this problem, analyzing it with regards to particular sites or locations in which touch becomes an issue. In particular, we are interested in the ways studios (for artists and writers), classrooms, art museums, and digital spaces do and do not engage with touch. This does not suggest that these spaces are becoming “disembodied”. Rather, our point is that these spaces, now mediated through the ubiquity of the screen, are reconfiguring our bodies and what the senses can do. This sensorial alteration poses challenges and perhaps opportunities to understand the aesthetical and educational value of touch.
Keywords:
Touch
Topics: Art Education
Topics: Pedagogy
Dark
Infrastructure
Chair:
Nasrin Tork, University of North Texas
Abstract Submissions Closed