To Touch

Description (in English)

It may seem paradoxical to create an online work on touching. One cannot touch directly: in this case touching requires a mediating tool such as a mouse, a microphone or a webcam. This touching experience reveals a lot about the way we touch multimedia content on screen, and maybe also about the way we touch people and objects in everyday life. The internet user has access to five scenes (move, caress, hit, spread, blow), plus a sixth one (brush) dissimulated in the interface. She can thus experience various forms and modalities of touching: the erotic gesture of the caress with the mouse; the brutality of the click, like an aggressive stroke; touching as unveiling, staging the ambiguous relation between touching and being touched; touching as a trace that one can leave, as with a finger dipped in paint; and, touching from a distance with the voice, the eyes, or another part of the body. This supposedly immaterial work thus stages an aesthetics of materiality.

(Source: Author's description from Electronic Literature Collection, Volume Two)

Description (in original language)

Il peut sembler paradoxal de proposer une création en ligne sur le toucher : le toucher ne peut alors se faire immédiatement, c’est-à-dire sans médiation technique. Pourtant, ce toucher prothétisé a beaucoup à nous dire sur notre relation au toucher. « Toucher » met ainsi en scènecette relation en proposant à l’internaute d’accéder à cinq tableaux (mouvoir, caresser, taper, étaler, souffler), plus un sixième (frôler) dissimulé dans l’interface du menu.

Description in original language
Screen shots
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Technical notes

Adobe Flash player or plug-in required. This work requires headphones, a microphone (for "blow") and a webcam (for "brush").

Contributors note

Kevin Carpentier; Stéphanie Spenlé