Community without Community in Digital Culture by Charlie Gere, Palgrave Macmillan:

The word ‘digital’ refers to both digital data, as used in computers, and also the digits, fingers, of the hand, and thus by extension touch, which has long been a trope for connectivity, community, and participation. Thus, in its drive towards greater connectivity, our culture is digital in more than one sense, in that it increasingly encourages such contact (from the Latin, ‘com’, together, and ‘tangere’, to touch). But at the same time such technologies always involve separation, gap and distance.

Community Without Community in Digital Culture suggests that networks always involve this other aspect of touch, separation, distance and gap, as a necessary concomitant of our fundamental technicity. Continue reading

Theory Beyond Codes: Haptics, Mobile Handhelds, and other “Novel” Devices: The Tactile Unconscious of Reading across Old and New Media by Rachel Lee :: CTHEORY: Theory, Thechnology, Culure VOL 35, NOS 1-2 :: Editors: Arthur and Marilouise Kroker.

I. Don’t Press. Just Touch

In a 2007 news article in the ~Korea Times~ covering the then innovative technology of the capacitance v. resistive (i.e., pressure sensitive) touch screens, Cho Jin-Seo uses the lead-in “Don’t Press. Just Touch” to capture the habituated finger knowledge one would have to incorporate in order to switch from the more familiar interface of ATM’s and cashier check-out stands to the newer interfaces of mobile devices. [1] Continue reading

Continue reading

Touched: A Space of Relations — Janine Antoni, Lygia Clark, Lynn Hershman Leeson, Annette Messager :: until April 16, 2011 :: bitforms gallery, 529 West 20th St., New York NY.

Touched: A Space of Relations explores the sense of touch as a metaphor of bodily presence and an extension across boundary. Actualizing our understandings of public/ private and inside/ outside, touch is a gesture system. It manipulates physical, social, psychological and electronic domains, aiding in their transformation.

Presenting a cross-generational selection of voices, Touched: A Space of Relations includes the work of four prominent artists working in Europe and the Americas. Continue reading

Shilpa Gupta: Half A Sky :: until January 30, 2011 :: OK Offenes Kulturhaus, OK Platz 1, 4020 Linz, Austria

A cross-section of works along with a new installation produced in conjunction with the OK provide a look at the oeuvre of the young Mumbai-based artist. The new piece is an interactive sound installation, a skin globe that viewers bring to life with their touch.

Shilpa Gupta works across disciplines and with a variety of media: interactive video, internet, photography, object art and performance. In her diverse works, Gupta blurs the boundaries between art and everyday culture, calling into question how we think and who we are. Her themes include consumer behavior and cravings, violence and security-consciousness, religion, terrorism and human rights, social injustice and power. Continue reading

iFeel_IM! is a mixed reality system that transmits the virtual interactions of two Second Life avatars to their real world owners via haptic harnesses that have hand shapes, hearts, and other contact points. Continue reading

TELE_TRUST by Karen Lancel and Hermen Maat: How do we trust each other as networking bodies? Do we need to look each other in the eyes? Or do we need to touch each other?

In TELE_TRUST Lancel and Maat explore how in our changing social eco-system we increasingly demand transparency; while at the same time we increasingly cover our vulnerable bodies with personal communication-technology. For TELE_TRUST Lancel and Maat designed a hybrid play zone for a vulnerable process, of balancing between fear AND desire for the other. In a visual, poetic way they explore the emotional and social tension between visibility and invisibility; privacy and trust. Continue reading

MindTouch by Camille Baker, SMARTlab Digital Media Institute:

The intention of this project is to contribute to performance technology studies by investigating ‘liveness and presence’ within the context of a specific networked, mobile media performance research project, currently underway, in order to uncover any new understandings that may have emerged from the use of new wireless and mobile technologies.

This project explores ideas of non-verbal transference, telepathic collaboration, and the participant as performer, using biofeedback and mobile phone technology under meta-goals of studying “liveness” within mobile networked environments. Continue reading

Put your online friends in your pocket and … in your jacket! Based on our online communication style with social networks such as facebook and the research on remote physical communication, you can now be anonymously/friends-only massaged. Brainchild of Keywon Chung, Carnaven Chiu, Xiao Xiao, Peggy Pei-Yu Chi and Hiroshi Ishii, Stress OutSourced (SOS) is a peer-to-peer network that allows anonymous users to send each other therapeutic massages to relieve stress. By applying the emerging concept of crowdsourcing to haptic therapy, SOS brings physical and affective dimensions to our already networked lifestyle while preserving the privacy of its members. SOS is an exploration and illustration of a new field of haptic social networking. [Posted by Cati Vaucelle @ Architectradure] Read more about the project here [PDF]