[s]kinaesthesia: defining the poetics of the touch experience

Introduction

This essay looks into certain concepts surrounding [s]kinaesthesia, an installation project that focuses on the tactile interactions of participants with a skin-like fabric structure. We will first explore the components of [s]kinaesthesia, including the spatial, intimate and aesthetic qualities of the skin-like membrane, with reference to the sculptural art of Ernesto Neto. As well, we will touch upon the intent behind the tactile experience. Finally, we will examine certain discoveries related to tactual perception proposed by David Katz, an early 20th century psychologist.

[s]kinaesthesia installation

[s]kinaesthesia is an interactive, participatory installation which focuses on the sensuous, bodily perspective. It involves the use of nylon and spandex fabric to create the walls, panels or membranes of a configurable structure. Three stretchable, translucent skin-coloured panels are fastened together, along with a separate standalone red panel. Fabric legs or 'pods', made of pantyhose legs and weighted with red or white rice, anchor the panels to the floor. Long fabric arm-like appendages, also weighted with rice, are wrapped over the metallic beams of a ceiling grid and support the structure vertically. Simple knots and rings are used to fasten the fabric panels and appendages together. The structure is portable and reconfigurable. [s]kinaesthesia is the prototype of a future project which will involve the use of a larger skin-like structure in a more extensive tactile experience.

The fabric panels embody certain evocative skin qualities, such as dimensional nipples, cuts and tears, which add to the tactual aesthetic of the membranes.

The moving images projected onto the structure include skin-like images and textures such as leather, hand, fingerprint, stucco, peeling paint, bubble wrap, rubber sole; markings on the skin, including tattooed body suits, words Chinese ideograms; as well as out of focus images exploring effects of light and shadow. The sound element of the installation consists of live Internet broadcasts of ambient music from Drone Zone (SomaFM). The images and the sound elements reinforce the calm, comforting, non-threatening skinscape created by the sculpture, inviting the interactor to experience the "body" subjectively, to merge with it as though one's own.

[s]kinaesthesia provides the interactor with a structure/sculpture she can move into and out of, and can touch. In this project, tactility and movement of the hands and arms and other parts of the interactor's body over the skin-like membranes and appendages are important. Skin vibrations are detected by thin, transparent nylon strings on which are fastened miniature bells connected to the skin panels. Movements initiated by the participants, as they move through, inside and out of the skins and as they touch the fabric, are sensed by the filaments, triggering the bell sounds, thus adding tensile and auditory dimensions to the experience. Though the sensing apparatus is rudimentary, it serves as a precursor to a more elaborate sensing system which would trigger body sounds generated by vibrating strings connected to an amplification device. The volume and softness of the sounds could be mapped to quality of the interactor's touch.

conceptual drawing of the skin panels for the installation

[s]kinaesthetic experience

Ernesto Neto is a Brazilian artist whose large organic lycra sculptures initiate exploration and interaction. His work has provided the inspiration for the current installation piece because of his treatment of space, touch, intimacy and interaction.

"Neto's work is seductive because it appears before the visitor as epidermis, warm and flexible skin, because it calmly invites us to touch, to overcome barriers, in order to feel its real weight, its lightness, its way of occupying the space, its insistence on breaking down spaces." (Fernandez-Cid: 29)

Likewise, the [s]kinaesthesia installation invites the participant to enter, examine, explore and interact with the skins and the spaces created by the movable panels. The structure can form a closed space, offering shelter, protection and privacy, hiding its insides; or, it can be open to the world, bare-skinned, displaying its insides. In a sense, the skin structure becomes a body, playing a crucial role in the experience, acting as intermediary, as interface between the inside and outside world. In real life, our skin represents the thin line between the inside and outside of our body, between the subjective and the objective. Skin is the element exposed or covered up, adorned or hidden.

[s]kinaesthesia invites the participant to interact with the open and closed dimensions of the spaces by moving inside and outside its folds, by exploring the limits and confines of its membranes, allowing one to press against its corners and concavities, its nooks and crannies. The structure encourages us to explore the membrane's elasticity, stretchiness, resistance; it entices us to scan with our fingers its epidermis, the textures of its skins, the rigidity of its nipple-like indentations and the malleability of its pod appendages. One feels free to wrap the skins or the pods around oneself, allowing it to envelop and encase us in a comforting, protective, yet transitory, shroud, chrysalis, or nest, not unlike the feelings of comfort, intimacy and privacy experienced as one cuddles soft pillows under a warm duvet.

In order to encourage free exploration and interaction with the skins, the environment must be safe, permissive and non-threatening. The transparency of the skins and the subdued lighting, as well as the visual and auditory elements assist in creating this ambience of privacy and intimacy by cloaking the interactor's actions, sometimes adding a sensual dimension to the experience. The [s]kinaesthesic experience is meant to be a very personal and private experience where the participant can imagine his own scenario, engage in an intimate touch experience with a sculpture, melding with it. The experience is meant to be the antithesis to the regular gallery-going experience where the art is an object, seen at a distance, rarely touched. In the final project, the installation will most likely consist of a maze of fabric skins through which the participant will travel, creating her own narrative, building her own meaningful sensorial experience.

[s]kinaesthesia installation • 2003.12.19

Tactual perception according to Katz

Touch is a very important component of the [s]kinaesthesia installation. In its most basic form, touch involves the contact of a sense organ with a touch object. The English language has several words that describe various types of touching. One can brush, caress, clench, clutch, explore, feel, flutter, fondle, glide or grasp; alternatively, one can grope, knead, massage, pat, pinch, prod, pull or puncture; as well, it is possible to roll, rub, scrape, scratch, smooth, spread, slide, stroke, tickle and twist. These verbs describe some of the touch actions performed by the fingers, the hands or other exposed areas of the body, such as the lips.

These actions could be categorized and described according to several qualities identified by David Katz, a major figure in the study of the psychology of perception. In his book The World of Touch, originally published in German in 1925, Katz defines several qualities of touch. Katz wrote an earlier work entitled The World of Colour in which he identifies various qualities of vision. He considers the sense of vision very important and his later work on tactual perception shows similarities between the qualities and characteristics of visual and tactual perception. He has been described as one of the twentieth century's exponents of psychological phenomenology.

"When I close my eyes and glide my hand over my writing paper, blotter, writing pad, and the cloth cover on my desk, I experience four distinctly different tactual impressions, one after the other. I feel the hard smoothness of the writing paper, the fibrous suppleness of the blotter, the leathery brittleness of the writing pad, and the soft roughness of the cloth cover. Once having become alert to these sorts of differences, if I now touch everything within reach, then I find that I not only can recognize the metal of the paper weight, the glass of the ink bottle, and the wood of the penholder, but that I can even distinguish-naturally also with my eyes closed-between different types of paper by their surface features."(Katz, 1989: 27)

Based on a number of experiments and quantitative studies he conducted, documented in the latter part of his book, Katz describes the qualities and identifying characteristics of touch, such as surface touch, immersed or space-filling touch, volume touch and touch-transparent film. Let us examine briefly these types of touch.

Katz states that "we experience surface touch when we feel and manipulate an object made of wood, metal, glass, cloth, or other material." (Katz, 1989: 50) In this type of touch, one touches a continuous area located at the surface of an object. The distance from the perceiver and orientation of this type of touch is located within the limits set by our physical body.

He declares that movement of the touch organ in relation to the object being touched is crucial. (Katz, 1989: 79) By moving the hand or arm over the touched surface, one is able to discern qualities such as smoothness or roughness, which cannot be perceived when the touch organ is at rest.

When one experiences a "tactual phenomenon that has no definite shape or pattern", such as feeling air against one's hand or moving the hand in various liquids, with no fixed orientation in space, then one experiences immersed or space-filling touch (Katz, 1989: 51). This type of touch can identify a substance but cannot confidently recognize an object.

In order to experience volume touch, a touched object, such as a matchbox, is first covered with a thick layer of cotton batting or cloths, and one feels the object in order to identify its form; one then one gets a pretty good idea of what the object is (Katz, 1989: 52). One is no longer aware of the surface of the filling material; it is almost as though it was not there. Volume touch plays an important role in medical practice: when examining their patients, doctors routinely touch the internal organs by palpating through layers of skin and fat. The fingers can accurately scan the position and shape of the organs as though there were no layers in between.

Katz goes on to explain that, when one wears a cotton glove and glides the fingers over a fixed surface such as wood or metal, one is making use of touch-transparent film. One can feel the texture of the underlying base with a surprising degree of accuracy, in spite of the veiling effect produced by the cloth, depending on the thickness of the cloth covering the fingers. (Katz, 1989: 53)

In addition to identifying the various types of touch mentioned, Katz explores the qualities and identifying characteristics of surface touch. The qualities of surface touch describe the surface being touched in a range between hard-soft to rough-smooth. According to Katz, "glass has hard smoothness, sandpaper has hard roughness, silk has soft smoothness, and billiard-table cloth has soft roughness." (Katz, 1989: 55)

Katz was also interested in the vibration sense (Katz, 1989: 187). This remote type of sensing allows us to perceive that a heavy car is passing by, or the motion of a car in which we are riding. Recent research has determined that the Pacinian corpuscle is the sensory structure responsible for the detection of vibration. This large ovoid corpuscle has onion-skin coverings and connects to the spinal cord, and perhaps the brain, via a single direct fiber. The Pacinian corpuscle is sensitive to high-frequency stimulation which manifests itself as a deep vibratory hum or buzz through many parts of our body. Studies on the perception of low frequency vibrotactile stimulation, called the flutter sense, were reported by Talbot in 1968. In contrast to the vibration sense, this sense is a proximal or near sense: the object being perceived must be in direct contact with the skin or cutaneous receptors. Since this type of touch reception seems more closely related to Katz's surface touch, the flutter sense may be more relevant than the vibration sense to participatory projects such as [s]kinaesthesia, where the experience focuses on surface touching.

He also introduces the notion of a tactual after-image (Katz, 1989: 62). In order to experience this, he advises us to move our hand over a material and then to suddenly stop. The impression of the material should persist, though the hand is no longer moving. One would not be able to create this after-image if the hand touching the material had remained stationary. Tactual after-image (or 'tactual after-feel', as it could be called) is an interesting concept; participants should be able to accurately recount and describe their tactual touch experiences, especially if they involve movement of the hand.

In his Introduction to The World of Touch, the editor, Lester E. Krueger, states that he received personal communication in June, 1988, from S. J. Lederman, a well-known psychologist studying touch and perception, in which he cites four reasons why our knowledge of touch has not developed as rapidly as that of vision and audition:

"1) there is the lack of off-the-shelf technology available for producing/presenting tactual stimulus arrays to the skin; 2) monks during medieval times were not allowed to transcribe, and therefore could not preserve, any scientific writings pertaining to the skin; 3) there is a general reluctance in our society to discuss touch-related matters, and 4) the skin is the largest organ in the body, and highly complex." (Katz, 1989: 2)

In more than one hundred publications until his death in 1953, Katz added much to our understanding of visual and tactual perception. According to Krueger, other researchers have been active in this area, but relatively little work has been done on the higher-order properties of touch since Katz's 1925 monograph, so that the current English translation continues to be of significance.

Extending the skins and the touch experience

Katz's meticulous work on tactual perception helps to enrich and extend the conceptual framework of the [s]kinaesthesia project. The various types of touch will be kept in mind when elaborating the larger project. Though surface touch experiences will be predominant, a serious attempt will be made to introduce other concepts, as appropriate: immersed touch, volume touch, touch-transparent film, flutter vibration and touch after-image. Katz has emphasized through is work the importance of defining the many qualities and characteristics of the touch experience, as well as the importance of developing an appropriately rich and accurate vocabulary that can be used by the interactor and the artist when talking about the tactual experience.

Bibliography

Fernández-Cid, Miguel. (2002). "Thin sculptures". In Ernesto Neto: O corpo, nu tempo. Santiago de Compostela (Spain): Centro Galego de Arte Contemporánea.

Katz, David. (Ed. & Trans. Lester E. Krueger). (1989). The world of touch. Hilldale, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.