touch

In today’s lecture, we listed thousands of (metaphor of course) ways that we touch through devices or interfaces. Looking at all those kinds of touch, I realised that there’r so many possibilities of touch.

Like Maria said in Touching Visions: “Unfolding and problematizing the possibilities of touch draws me into an exploration of its literal as well as figural meanings.” So what’re the figural meanings of touch?

- I’m in touch with you.
- We have connection.
- I feel what you feel.
- I’m extremely close to you.
- Potentially I would harm you. (Or you can harm me)
- I caught you.
- You are not hidden from me.

In the short list I came up with, we can see the contradictory of touch. Touch is caring, warm and intimate. Touch is also violence, cold and ruthless. Understanding contact as touch, in Touching Visions Maria related touch with the affective, ethical, and practical engagements of caring. Meanwhile, she also mentioned Thomas Dumm ’s words : “Touché is a metaphorical substitute for wounded. The way in which touch opens us to hurt, to the (potential) violence of contact.”

These contacts emphasise the reversibility of touch - When you are touching, you are also being touched. Touch blurs the boundaries between self and the other, therefore emerges a reversibility between the subject and the object. (So it could be seen as a way to questioning the dominance.)

And another significant point draw from the figural meanings is the that touch not only equal to the physical connection. Considering touch caring knowing, we could engage with touch to reclaim vision, as Maria proclaimed, “by manifesting deep attention to materiality and embodiment in ways that rethink relationality, in ways that suggest a desire for tangible engagements with mundane transformation.” Especially when we watch close-up images, which taken at an almost touching closeness, we would also immerse an engagement of “bodily relationship” from such haptic images.

Haptic images of skins are one of the classic components in Sondra Perry’s artworks. In one of her installations in Serpentine Gallery, there’s a whole wall of projected animation of an extreme close up of her skin, and in front of the wall, there’s a monitor showing a lot of footages of the racist police brutality, but not showing any violence images of people being extinguished by police, but things around those moments. So we don’t directly see the police’s violent touch to the arrested people’s body, instead we are surrounded by the extremely close-up, highly modulated, highly contrasted, ocean like skin, or flesh texture. And as we know, the skin, the flesh, as an active living surface, it almost like the embodiment of the touch to our bodies. Watching the vivid close-up skin, we spiritually have a sense of touching, or being touch, or both. And when it comes to the subject of police brutality, we usually see the images of people being arrested, or abused by the police. But in those cases, we were just observing the images, not touching them, so even the image is visually, cognitively intense, it might be still difficult for the viewers to affectively, practically engage with it. (We see it, but don’t feel it.) And in Sondra Perry’s installations, the haptic flesh images make us connect to the bodily touch/touched. And by this touching/being touch, we experience as the subject and the object, as self and other, therefore we get more engaged in the caring, the hurts.

# Term2_7

Touching
- Reflecting on Touching Visions by Maria Puig de La Bellacasa and artworks by Sondra Perry

Reference

Sondra Perry: Typhoon coming on - YouTube [WWW Document], n.d. URL https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qunkb4piXGw (accessed 4.4.19).

Puig de la Bellacasa, M., 2017. Matters of care: speculative ethics in more than human worlds, Posthumanities. University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis.

Reference