Ethics of Touch in Art Practice During Covid-19 Pandemic (original) (raw)
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A World of Touch in a No-Touch Pandemic
Anthropology In Action, 2021
Touch is essential when living with dementia for communication and remaining connected with the world, and it is also unavoidable when performing body care. Thus, it is impossible to think of living and caring for people with dementia in the absence of touch. Drawing from my ethnographic fi eldwork conducted with therapy animals and people living with dementia in Sco ish care facilities, in this article I argue that the public health measures taken against the spread of COVID-19 infections need to be reimagined by taking into consideration the role of touch. Furthermore, I try to draw a ention to the lessons that we should learn about touch and the role of intimate bodily entanglements in dementia care from the high COVID-19 death tolls amongst British care home residents.
ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction, 2022
We are at a tipping point for digital communication: moving beyond 'ways of seeing' to include 'ways of feeling'. Much as optical technologies transformed sight and the visual (from the telescope and microscope to Google Glass), the rapid expansion in digital touch technologies is set to reconfigure touch and the tactile in significant ways. Advances in haptics, virtual reality and physiological sensing provide new sensory ways of communicating, as well as new ways to capture the quality of touch. These state-of-the-art digital touch technologies promise to supplement, heighten, extend and reconfigure how people communicate. They are reshaping what and who can be touched, as well as when and how they can be touched, changing existing forms of communication and giving rise to changes in co-located and remote communication between humans, and between humans and robots. These developments sit alongside social discourses of concern and loss, with the digital being associated with the removal of touch from the material sensory landscape [Jewitt et al. 2020]. Yet, in our current climate of social distancing and disengaging with touch in our everyday interactions, the promise of the digital becomes increasingly appealing and significant in re-enabling touch possibilities. As the global population emerges from and comes to terms with their experiences of the COVID-19 pandemic, these questions become all the more significant. The breadth and interdisciplinary interest in this growing field-across designers, artists, computer scientists, engineers, psychologists and social scientists, with interests in robotics and touch, affective computing, wearables and digital installations-brings attention to the growing need to engage with 'social' aspects of digital touch, moving beyond technologies and physiological foci to engage with touch practices [Jewitt et al. 2021]. We argue for the need to think about touch beyond the physiological act of sensing and perceiving to a more rich and nuanced interpretation of touch that takes account of its emotional and psychological significance, the social, cultural and historical evolution of touch practices in human communication, and approaches to touch of the 'lived, social body as a site of meaning-making, where the skin acts as both a boundary between and a point of connection with others' [Karpashevich et al.]. Given this landscape, this special issue addresses timely and important questions around the need to think about touch in different ways. This provides a new direction in the field that seeks to address the complexity of human touch and interrogates the limitation of today's haptic devices. Papers in this special issue contribute to understanding this gap by engaging with socio-cultural
I want to be held: Empathy, technology and the body
‘I want to be held’ is my dissertation, completed during my MA at The Royal College of Art. The topic area is empathy, technology and the body. During this time I wrote and filmed a video series to accompany the dissertation, which was premiered on the online artists platform WUU2?, curated by Emily Simpson. Thank you to my tutor Lee Triming and to Michael Harding, Andrea Khôra, Helena Kate Whittingham and other friends who sent me links and shared their experiences, without whom the breadth of the research would be considerably narrower.
Cranny-Francis, Anne (2011) 'The art of touch: a photo-essay'
Social Semiotics, Vol.21, No.4, 591-608, 2011
This photo-essay explores artworks and technology that deploy touch either literally or virtually in order to interrogate the nature of contemporary being and meaning. They do this by engaging viewers in a virtual deconstruction of their own embodied being their positioning in space/time; their incorporation of values, beliefs and attitudes articulated by affective practices that engage them bodily; and their reconstitution within a technological assemblage that includes their own bodies and the technologies they use in everyday life. Keywords: touch; tactile; contact; body; embodiment; texture; affect; sound; space; connection; articulation; technology
[Graphic Medicine] DON'T TOUCH ANYTHING: Tactility, COVID-19 and Graphic Medicine
Visual Studies, 2023
The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed the precarious porosity of the human body. Biological vulnerability and the fear of contagion in recent times has prompted the exercise of caution by enforcing distinct demarcating boundaries between the environment, the self, and the other. Thus, the faculty of touch is restricted despite its importance in functional, developmental, haptic, intimate, non-verbal, therapeutic, cultural, and social dimensions. Avenues of direct contact have been barred, with digital and mediated touch dominating various spheres. The lived experience of a population negotiating with the loss of tactile contact finds expression within the subjective narratives of the viral subject detailed insightfully through the medium of comics. Taking instances from graphic medicine, this paper aims to analyse the parameters of touch and tactility during the COVID-19 pandemic by close reading comic panels from various sources.
Towards an Understanding of the Paradox of Touch
This essay builds an argument that leads towards an understanding of the paradox of touch. When the immediacy of a tactile sensation and—its logical contrary—the mediated or metaphorical connotations of a ‘touching’ experience, are juxtaposed, we arrive at a paradox, which I expose in relation to the aesthetic encounter. I do this by examining my experiences of the works and process of Cuban performance artist Ana Mendieta, and Ståhl Stenslie’s employment of haptic technologies. Engaging with these very different artists enables me to open a multi-dimensional discussion about touch. To elaborate this discussion, I draw together several key ideas: the haptic sense in the aesthetic experience, haptics, empathy, aura and synaesthesia. Juxtaposing these ideas, and applying them to my chosen artists, demonstrates the value of considering the paradox of touch. It does so because my expansion of this theme reveals how touch signifies our mimetic capacity—as humans—to empathise, to be affected, to react and repeat. A key consequence of the paradox of touch is its facility to redistribute binary logic, whereby two opposing or contradictory notions can be realigned to co-exist and, potentially, cooperate. I argue that this ethical transition evolves from the haptic aesthetic experience. Thus my original intent to juxtapose Mendieta and Stenslie develops into a larger conversation about the role that touch has to play in this aesthetic experience. My application of the paradox of touch then begins to demonstrate how we co-exist in the world, with other people.
Sociotechnical Imaginaries of Digital Touch
Interdisciplinary Insights for Digital Touch Communication, 2019
This Chapter explores the potential of the concept of sociotechnical imaginaries for digital touch communication research and design. It defines the social imaginary and discusses how it works to produce and animate shared systems of meaning and belonging that guide and organize the world, in its histories as well as performed visions of desirable futures through advances in science and technology and imagined technological possibilities. The chapter explores the ways in which this concept can be employed as both a design resource, and as a methodological resource. We argue that as new digital touch technologies enter the communicational landscape the setting for interpersonal sociability is/will be reworked. We explore and make legible emerging sociotechnical imaginaries of digital touch, asking how might touch practices be changed through the uses of technology, and how might this shape communication. In particular, the chapter explores the core themes of the body, time, and place in relation to participants' sociotechnical imaginations of digital touch. Turning our attention to the sociotechnical imaginary as a methodological resource, we describe our use of a range of creative, making and bodily touch-based methods to access participants' sociotechnical imaginaries of digital touch and to both explore and re-orientate to the past, present and futures of digital touch communication.
Digital Touch Ethics and Values
Human–Computer Interaction Series
This chapter examines key ethical considerations and challenges of designing and researching touch technologies, with a focus on incorporating ethical touch sensitivities and values into digital touch communication. We discuss the difficulty of researching and designing ethically in the context of an emerging technological landscape, as reflected in wider HCI ethics debate. The chapter then explores the central role of the human body as site for digital touch communication, before focusing on key challenges around trust, control, consent, and tactile data. In line with preceding chapters, we argue that digital touch practices are part of, and impact on, wider social relations and communications. The kinds of touch practices and relations designed into touch technologies bring with them implications for power relations and social cohesion, and it is these wider processes that digital touch design is able to-at least in parts-anticipate and shape. We close with a summary of key points and their implications for research and design.
2009
The sense of touch is being revalued in disparate places, from cultural theory to expanding markets of haptic technologies. In this paper I explore the potential of thinking with literal and figural meanings of touch. My standpoint inherits from discussions in feminist knowledge politics and constructivist conceptions of science and technology that problematize epistemological distances -between objects and subjects; knowledge and the world; and science and politics. In this direction, touch expresses a sense of material embodied relationality that seemingly eschews abstractions and detachments that have been associated with knowledge-as-vision. Engaging speculatively with experience, knowledge and technology as touch, I explore the differences made by touching visions.