HyperTouching

Can I Touch You Online?

HyperTouching is the first performance art platform for ‘Digital Interpersonal Touch’. Since the 1990s, social digital technologies have facilitated audiovisual connections on a large scale. But what does it mean to communicate, connect, touch and be touched via technology, in mixed realities, stimulated by AI, XR and online?

HyperTouching calls for co-creation and imagination of future Touching Ecologies.
It explores historical and future visions on touching in symbiosis with technology; and the potential of neurologically, psychologically and sensory ‘rewiring’ the cyborg body,for shared experience of love, empathy, intimacy and trust.

Collaborations and Knowledge transfer
From different perspectives and disciplines we explore new connections, words and storytelling.
Collaboration and dissimination takes place through exhibitions, art-collections, symposia, expert meetings,
shared story-telling workshops; a website with interdisciplinary documentation; publications.

International partners are art centers, museums, academies, universities, healthcare, industry, the public.
We explore connections between media and performance arts; design; technology; ethics; philosohy; anthropology; and computing, social and neuro-science.
And we ask how participataory, interpersonal 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.
A selection of themes’ include:

• Can I feel you online? NeuroScience in AI, XR, mixed and merging realities.
Can we share scientific and artistic research approaches interdisciplinarily and learn from each other?

• Can I touch you online? Touch in Museums. What media artworks are included in museum collections? On the importance and possibilities of museum presentation of technologically mediated physical togetherness and touch. The platform opens collections and activates interdisciplinary collaboration between artists, scientists, designers, curators, and the public.

• 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?

Hypertouching is presented in Touching Contexts of:

○ Art-related environments at (museums, media festivals);
○ Locations where ethical questions surrounding touch are addressed (healthcare and educational environments);
○ Cultures with different ethical approaches to intimacy and touch.

HyperTouching emerges from Lancel/Maat’s international art-science practice,
and from Dr. Karen Lancel’s art-science PhD research thesis
at the Delft University for Technology - Participatory Systems Lab. (2023) (Download here)