HyperTouching

Studio Lancel/Maat with curator/journalist Sanneke Huisman
and LI-MA Living Media Art Platform Amsterdam.

What does it mean to communicate, connect, touch and feel touched via technology, in mixed realities, stimulated by AI, XR, robots and online?
Since the 1990s, social digital technologies have facilitated audio-visual connections on a large scale. But how do we imagine more than human connections, haptic practices and rituals in a post-anthropocene world with plants and animals, in the future?

HyperTouching is a new platform for touching and feeling touched in digital eco-cultures. It originates from a desire to find new forms of bodily love in symbiosis with technology and other living beings, in more-than-human connections. Supported by the MondriaanFund and Fund for Creative industries, HyperTouching is a long-term project that provokes critical and sensitive awareness about our future sense of empathy, through touching and feeling touched.
This artistic research is inspired by cross-disciplinary perspectives from interactive media performance art going hand in hand with science, ethics, philosophy and interaction design - in different international (cultural) contexts. HyperTouching creates new visions, bodily narratives, imaginations and practices: Together we co-create Future Touching Ecologies.

HyperTouching emerges from Dr. Lancel's Art-Science PhD at the Technical University of Delft, TPM, Participatory Systems Lab (2023) "CAN I TOUCH YOU ONLINE? Embodied, Empathic Intimate Experience of Shared Social Touch in Hybrid Connections."
Download Lancel's art and science PhD here.

HyperTouching presents:

● World's first Art-Collection on touching and feeling touched in digital eco-cultures.
● 'TouchLabs', Workshops, Lectures. With: Round Table Discussions, Exhibitions, Performative research, resulting in Design Fiction, Prototypes, and (online) Publications.
● Web Portal. The first accessible cross-interdisciplinary website on social touch for artists, (scientific) researchers, students, designers, and the public.

Collaborations.
We collaborate with an international network of partners and experts in art centers, museums, academies, universities, healthcare, industry; and the academic network 'Dutch Touch Society' (taking part in Eurohaptics, Worldhaptics). The TouchLabs (workshops) are playful and inclusive both tacit and academic research containers - for roaming and collecting emerging knowledge in diverse cultures - fed by participants' insights and citizen science, in different set-ups and contexts.

Research themes:

•. CAN I FEEL YOUR TOUCH?.
ROBOTICS, AI XR and Neuroscience for empathic social touch interaction. Current art and scientific research into social touch focuses mainly on AI for control, automation, and data collection. Art stimulates processes of subjective experience and meaning-making. Can we share methods and findings interdisciplinary and learn from each other? Can insights from Neuroscience and Psychology - into the dynamics of empathy, flexible body-boundaries and shared dataflows (Hansen 2012, Paterson 2007) - lead to new hybrid connections for cyborgs, robotics, AI, and XR ?

• CAN I TRUST YOUR TOUCH? Ethics. How are different personal and cultural implications of touch experienced in the case of mediated touch? About Professional Intimacy on Work places, in education, and care. Ethical norms for touch include agency for consent, privacy, control, and responsibility for each other. This differs in diverse personal situations, contexts, and cultures. How are these differences experienced in case of technically touch, online and social care robots?

• CAN WE FEEL EACH OTHER TOUCHING?
How does it feel when humans and robots embrace? Can we kiss with plants?
HyperTouching explores bio-ethics and kinship with (non-)human others (Donna Haraway 2020), through the creation of ‘intercorporeal’ (Maurice Merleau Ponty 1962) digital systems in different hybrid social and spatial configurations, ) in MORE-THAN-HUMAN ECOLOGIES and symbiosis.

• CAN I TOUCH YOU NOW? Touch in Museums.
About the importance and possibilities of museum presentation, the practice, of mediated reciprocal experience of touch. What does touching each other mean in an environment where touching is not the norm? Ideally, the Workshops take place in a location that is related to the theme. We take the tables to museums; and to contexts where (ethical) questions about touch are explicitly addressed.

• HOW DOES MY TOUCH FEEL IN EEG DATA? Language, lexicon.
Can we imagine collective brain-to-brain kissing? What do words such as touching, hugging, kissing and embracing mean in digital mediated interaction? HyperTouching reappropriates language and words through processes of dialogue, grounding and sharing emotions.

Contexts for workshops and lectures.
Hypertouching is presented at locations where ethical questions surrounding touch are addressed, such as:
○ Healthcare and educational environments;
○ Art-related environments at (museums, media festivals);
○ Cultures with different ethical approaches to intimacy and touch.

PLEASE CONNECT WITH US IF YOU HAVE QUESTIONS, IMAGINATIONS OR FEEL TO COLLABORATE. lancel@xs4all.nl, maat@xs4all.nl