"Touch Touch Touch Touch Feel" Film Screening
Light Industry
This event has ended.
Imagining touch — how another experiences touch (feels) — is the beginning of empathy, of empathic human, social relations. We may be able to share in the experience of looking (at a sunset, or koala), hearing (the cries of a child), tasting (spaghetti, and other pastas) and smelling (farts) but one cannot feel the pain of another. When artists work with touch, they necessarily also bring into play aspects of empathy.
McLuhan pointed out in Understanding Media that touch — the haptic — has less to do with objects pressing against the skin than with a complex interplay between the senses that involves touch as the intermediary site in which one sense may be translated for another. If not full-blown synasthesia, then a kind of blurring of sensuous modes: eyes and ears that are pierced, caressed, punched, scraped, tickled. But let’s get back to objects pressing against our skin, which — rather than a blurring — begs for an obliteration of the other senses. Can one talk and feel at the same time? Yes, but not really feel: for that you need to shut up and close your eyes. This would seem to suggest that video is a particularly anti-haptic medium, as it tends to be full of talking and looking. But here are videos that elegantly suggest otherwise: they feel and, consequently you feel, I feel, we feel. (Touching optional.)
Media
Schedule
April 28, 2009 from 19:30