HyperTouching

Can I Touch You Online?

HyperTouching explores touching and feeling touched in digital cultures.
Since the 1990s, social digital technologies have facilitated audiovisual connections on a large scale. But what does it mean to communicate, connect, touch and feel touched via technology, in mixed realities, stimulated by AI, XR, robots and online? And how do we imagine more than human connections, and haptic practices and rituals in a post anthropoceen world with plants, animals, in the future?

The HyperTouching Platform is an international participatory thinking- and experiment-space, to explore together shared embodied experience of love, empathy, intimacy and trust for cyborg bodies. Through the lens of (historical and current) media performance art, Hypertouching explores different ways of understanding shared touch experience in science, academic research and society. It opens up cross-disciplinairy connections with design, AI, complex computing, psychology and philosophy, social and neuro-science. Together we co-create Future Touching Ecologies.

Shared Research takes place through in situ and/or streaming performance experiments, (expert) meetings, symposia, workshops; which leads to exhibitions, art-collections, shared story-telling, a lexicon for social touch experience, website and publications.

"Touching each other takes place on the skin, in the brain and in the imagination."

NOMADIC LAB - for EXPERIMENT, COLLABORATIONS and KNOWLEDGE TRANSFER
We collaborate with international partners and experience specialists in art centers, museums, academies, universities, healthcare, industry, and the public. We meet in the playful and inclusive HyperTouching Nomadic Lab: a mobile and modular space for bodily practice, experiment and dialogue. The Lab functions as a both tacit and academic research platform for roaming and collecting emerging knowledge in diverse cultures - fed by participants' insights and citizen science, in different set-ups and contexts. Together we explore themes including:

•. Can I feel you online?.
NeuroScience in AI, XR, robot, brain and skin interfacing mixed and merging realities.
What potential hybrid and multi-modal sensory connections can lead to a sense of shared presence, touching and feeling touched in symbiosis with technology? Can we share scientific and artistic research approaches interdisciplinairy and learn from each other?

• Can I look with your eyes, through touching?
How does it feel when humans and robots embrace? Can we kiss with plants?
HyperTouching explores empathetic and intimate connections 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, and dataflows (Hansen 2012, Paterson 2007).

• Can I touch you online? Touch in Museums.
On the importance and possibilities of museum presentations for reflection on technologically mediated social physical togetherness and touch.
We investigate how participatory touch performance art can take place within the context and walls of festivals, museums and exhibitions - and what this means for both these institutions and audiences. In dialogue with curators, the platform opens collections and combine the museum's artworks with media art performance. What social touch artworks are included in museum collections?

• Can I trust you online? Ethics.
How are different personal and cultural implications of touch experienced in the case of mediated touch? How do we experience agency for consent; responsibility and vulnerability, bias and inclusiveness; control and trust, through technologically mediated affective touch?

• How does my kiss 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.
The Hypertouching Lab 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.

HyperTouching emerges from artists Lancel/Maat’s international art practice; and from Dr. Lancel's PhD thesis (2023) at the Delft University for Technology (Download here).