touch

This paper investigates how the theoretical concept of embodiment and related keywords such as touch, movement, gesture and haptic appears within the current practice of tagging creative works in the ELMCIP Knowledge Base. It further suggests how this practice can be extended within the Knowledge Base platform both in terms of providing more precise tags, and through the forthcoming Platform content type which will give users the possibility connect specific hardware and software with a creative work. Finally, it presents the outline for a research collection that explores the notion of embodiment. The collection gives an introduction to relevant researchers, artists, creative works and scholarly works exploring the concept of embodiment and technology, in the hopes that such a framework can inspire the further investigation of works related to the field of electronic literature.

The intensification of tactile/haptic research by academia and the digital technology industry, has given rise to several instrumentalizations of the adjective haptic, often contradicting an entire philosophical haptological tradition, going back to Aristotle and allowing us to think of the haptic from a multisensory perspective capable of destabilizing the idea of pure sensory modalities. On the one hand, such intensification is evidenced by the ubiquity of digital technological devices that call for interaction through touch and gesture as tactile/haptic functions necessary for experiencing digital content. On the other hand, it may be seen in the increasing demand for tangibility between human and machine, particularly through sensory experiences made possible by virtual/augmented reality, as well as, mixed reality/virtuality platforms. Such intense literalization of the haptic also, paradoxically, ends up reinforcing the existence and primacy of a visual culture inherent to an ocularcentric society. It is in line with this haptological tradition, as well as through the recovery of a multisensory perspective explored by a series of avant-garde artistic practices that permeate the history of twentieth-century art, that I propose to (re)think digital literary works via means of an alternative and operative redefinition of haptic drawn from the metamedial and intermedial specificities of current digital poetic practices. Based on the mapping and analysis of carefully selected digital literary works, this research intends to understand how digital poetic practices make use of certain processes of haptic reading enabled by current digital technology, in order to explore and question the processes of writing and reading in media. In order to validate an argument largely based on the examination of ambiguities and tensions highlighted by the literary exploration of interface functionalities in arts and literature, this thesis will attempt to analyze the referred ambiguity, by showing a parallel between an inherent circularity of (multi)sensory perception and the way certain circular, or rather, spiral-like, trajectories, are able to be identified across multiple arts, artists and movements. All of this, of course, is put together via a process of dialectic subversion/disruption that characterizes multiple variants of experimentalism across the centuries. Moreover, doing so is a way of finding possible answers, or perhaps, raising new questions, regarding longstanding problematics pertaining to the relationship between tradition and innovation, from which the digital era is not exempt.

Modern forms of literature frequently question our reading habits, and provoke us to re-define the act of reading and the book form. The “magic” of the book, described by Bezos as its ability to be an invisible device that disappears in the reader’s hands, permitting them to enter a story-world, is nowadays replaced by the “real magic” of non-invisible interfaces. The latest manifestations of these interfaces invite us to do things we usually do not do while reading: to touch, to shout, or to shake the device. In the other words, our reading becomes a very sensual and corporeal action and our “reading behaviour” is important for discovering the meaning of the work. That’s why we need a revision of poetics (Simanowski 2009), like Bouchardon’s theory of gestural manipulation as a literary figure (2014). 

In this paper, while examining literary works dedicated to mobile devices, I ask how adding playability to the story and engaging readers’ gestures and body in act of reading can be useful to “renovate” the literary canon, and to remediate it for today’s digital natives. My main case study will be iClassic collection, in which playability and reader gestures are not used only to make well-known works more attractive. Every story is re-told in a new, multimodal way, not only illustrated or enhanced with mobile media possibilities – particular narration aspects are translated into new media language. 

Contexts for analysis will derive from both, the mobile-literature field (e.g. different remediation of Around the World in 80 Days, Elastico Press apps) and non-mobile e-lit (e.g. works that re-write the canon in playable versions: Concretoons, Bałwochwał). This remediated canon will be also analyzed in context of modern “mobile-books,” literary apps that use haptic aspects as primary strategy for reading digital-born stories (e.g. The Incredible Tales of Weirdwood Manor). But the context of various “new” (not only mobile) book forms that re-fresh and re-new the traditional vision of the book will be important, too. Thus, I will use examples of AR-books or digi-novels (Level 26), step-in-book technology (wuwu&co), playable non-mobile texts (The Winter House), texts that use biofeedback (The Breathing Wall), as well as locative and physical narratives (Turnton Docklands). Important context will also be the traditional tension between a book forms typical for children’s and adult literature (and actual evolution in these divisions, provoked by new-media).

 The broader context for my research is a question about the actual evolution (remediation) of canonical genres and literary forms. Here one of examples can be the classic epistolary novel and its modern incarnations as email- or sms-novel and then twitterature or other (trans)literary projects on social platforms (blogs, FB, flickr).

(Source: Author's description from ELO 2018 site: 

This paper reflects on the transformations of reading and writing literature promoted by digital environments by presenting some examples created by Serge Bouchardon between 2010 and 2016: Hyper-tensions. Exploring antinomies such as functionality and controllability versus a loss of grasp, desire for transparency versus a need for opacity, willingness to leave and disseminate traces versus discomfort in the permanent exposure of disseminated traces, the three artworks deal with the integration of sense modalities like vision and touch. This is a core question at a special moment in Occidental history characterized by the fact of it being less and less dominated by writing, taking us to a new illiteracy triggered by the rising of an elite that expresses itself by means of programming of cybernetic data banks and computational facilities. Also, exploring the visual and gestural metaphors in Bouchardon’s works as a synonym for transparency, imperceptibility, and inoperability, I argue that this countercultural strategy is his way of subverting the increasing interest in tangibility and immediacy by digital media industries.

With this paper it is my intention to reevaluate the use of the adjective “haptic” with respect to a growing demand for tangibility between human and machine, namely through multisensory experiences made available by mixed reality/virtuality. From a haptological philosophic perspective, a tradition oscillating between the emphasis on vision and the emphasis on touch, this paper also intends to analyze notions of touch, gesture and contact, in their multiple meanings, in which the latter serves as a probe to explore the idea of cybrid bodies within processes of haptic perception in HumanMachine Interface (HMI).

The replacement of mechanical-electronic interfaces for tactile haptic contact with the screen, using hands, fingers and, in some cases, biological bodies, brings to the fore a series of literal gestures with obvious influence on the way we read and write in digital multimodal environments. Making use of a rhetoric based on perceptual qualities such as “transparency” and “softness”, this prosthetic reduction seems to give continuity to an ancestral desire of immediate and non mediated access to knowledge. On the other hand, it ends up by paradoxically reinforcing the domain of visuality propelled by Gutenberg’s paradigm as well as an understanding of reading as a visual process. Based on approaches and departures that paradoxes like these are able to trigger, I propose to examine notions of touch and gesture, in relation to writing and reading processes. Namely, taking into account the way it was understood by artistic vanguards such as the Portuguese Experimentalists – whose intermedial, cybertextual and intersensory concerns are still able to give birth to renewed readings when it comes to transactions between literature and digital. Furthermore, a special emphasis will be given to confluences of both analog and digital gestures, as one of the central characteristics of haptic reading processes produced by actual and virtual manipulations of the text in digital literary artworks

“And one should understand tact, not in the common sense of the tactile, but in the sense of knowing how to touch without touching, without touching too much, where touching is already too much.” Jacques Derrida

A “hasty conclusion”, perhaps, as stated by Derrida, yet, one that was (and still is) able to cause an intense discussion among philosophers. In his questioning of touch, Derrida draws on Jean Luc Nancy’s philosophy of touch, particularly on the latter’s paradox of intangible tangibility, as a way to explore a slightly different meaning of the verb haptein (to be able to touch, to grab, to attach, to fasten), but also meaning “to hold back, to stop” (Nancy [2003]: 2008, 15).

By contrast, the intensification of research media devices that summon tactile/haptic functions, along with efforts to increase tangibility in the Human-Machine Interface (Gallace & Spence: 2014, 162), are often attached to literalizations and instrumentalizations of touch and gesture that seem to obliviate a long tradition in philosophy dedicated to these aporias. First, by representing touch and gesture as a superficial contact; second, by making promises of presence, transparency and intimacy that often resemble a fetishised and ancestral need of direct access to knowledge by means of tactility.

Calling attention to the non-superficiality of touch and gesture, there is evidence of a branch of digital literary works particularly concerned with multisensory perception in digital multimodal environments. Making use of a contercultural and metamedial poetics largely influenced by early avantgarde artistic proposals, these works enable us to question the ways we read and write in digital interfaces by means of another paradox: an intended loss of grasp in order to raise awareness.

Concerning digital interfaces’ transparency and ubiquity, Lori Emerson states that “[a]ll of these interfaces share a common goal underlying their designs: to efface the interface altogether and so also efface our ability to read, let alone write, the interface, definitely turning us into consumers rather than producers of content.” (Emerson: 2014, 1) Still, for Emerson there is some light at the end of the tunnel, namely by means of this “growing body of digital literature” that courts “difficulty, defamiliarization, and glitch as antidotes (…) against what ubicomp has become” (id.: 2), the “nearly pervasive multi-touch interface” included. (id.: 4) Such “antidotes” can be resumed to the aforementioned loss of grasp (for instance, glitch as a visual loss of grasp), a necessary

condition in order to raise awareness. However, taking into account specific materialities of digital devices, in spite of a continuity of disruptive operations of estrangement, we may ask what are the differences between previous understandings of “loss of grasp” and the ones enabled by digitality.

Loss of Grasp is also the title of a digital literary work of art, created by Serge Bouchardon and Vincent Volckaert (2010). Briefly described by its authors as “an online digital creation about the notions of grasp and control”, Loss of Grasp is an interactive narrative featuring a character who paradoxically loses grasp as he tries to have a grip on his life. Serving as a metaphor for the ways we tend to see functionality and transparency (for instance in digital multimodal environments), the subject is led towards a gradual state of awareness that only becomes possible by a total loss of grasp.

I argue that close-readings of such works of digital literature may help us to better understand what are the consequences of touch and gesture in contact with digital interfaces.

Leaps and take-offs

The blue sky above us is the optical layer of the atmosphere, the great lens of the terrestrial globe, its brilliant retina.From ultra-marine, beyond the sea, to ultra-sky, the horizon divides opacity from transparency. It is just one small step from earth-matter to space-light – a leap or a take-off able to free us for a moment from gravity.

Paul Virilio, Open Sky

As I read Virilio’s introduction to Open Sky (1997 [1995]), I decide to open the Google Earth app on my iPad. By sliding my forefinger over its glassy surface, I notice that I am coming closer and closer to what corresponds to my current geographical position, but still, at the same time I am able to travel around the world in just a few taps and swipes on the screen. As reminiscent as it may be of David Bowie’s “Planet Earth is blue/and there’s nothing I can do”, this apparently insignificant manipulation also reminds me of Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield’s version of “Space Oddity”, recorded inside the International Space Station and enabling more than 23 million people to witness Earth’s blueness through Hadfield’s camera lenses.

What all of these artefacts – videos, music, lyrics, quotations – have in common is the fact that they are affected by a series of interface mediations, all of which, of course, can be seen and touched through the Internet. However, one questions the real significance of this touch and why do we find the idea of holding the whole world in our hands so phenomenal. If what we need now to free us from gravity is just a leap or a take-off, which might be done by a simple touch of the hand or a snap of the fingers, what becomes of the eye?

The intensification of research around digital media devices that require tactile/haptic functions,1 such as touch and gesture, along with efforts to increase tangibility in the Human-Machine Interface (Gallace & Spence, 2014: 229), is giving way to a whole new rhetoric of bodies and surfaces (as well as interfaces). Not only touch and gesture are anything but superficial, but also these “new” processes of writing and reading tend to amplify the primacy of vision over other sensory modalities. This is a paradoxical situation that Wendy Hui Kyong Chun defines as a “compensatory gesture” by “the current prominence of transparency in product design and political and scholarly discourse”:

As our machines increasingly read and write without us, as our machines become more and more unreadable, so that seeing no longer guarantees knowing (if it ever did), we the so-called users are offered more to see, more to read. The computer – that most nonvisual and nontransparent device – has paradoxically fostered ‘visual culture’ and ‘transparency’. (2005: 2)

In addition, as ubiquitous computing turns into a naturalized process in our lives, the opacity/transparency paradox becomes even stronger, which is a natural consequence of its attachment to ubi-comp.

Extending an avant-garde countercultural tradition that started questioning visual culture as early as the beginning of the last century, there is also evidence of an increasing number of digital literary works channelling its countercultural and metamedial poetics towards the aforementioned phenomena. These “technotexts” (to borrow Katherine Hayles’ term) may or may not include multi-touch devices such as tablets and smartphones. Nevertheless, the one who do, often self-reflectively question the specificities of these digital devices and media, as well as the apparatuses enclosing them.2 I argue that such “machimanipulations”, manipulations of the device by both humans and machines, tend to defy the general assumption of surfaces as something superficial, recovering Deleuze’s idea of surfaces as double-fold and profound (1990: 4-11). If, in fact, we are now living in a “Glass Age” governed by a culture of transparency, to what extent are these “transparent” touching glass surfaces becoming an opaque looking glass?