[-empyre-] week two - MATTER

[Hannah Turner]

Sorry just to be popping in occasionally... but this was just so interesting and wanted to ask a question. 

Ashley, the metaphors of touch used by your respondents, or of some kind of haptic experience with screen technologies are, I think, extremely telling, but I'm wondering if it is that designers or the individuals building these technologies are indeed leveraging the sense of touch that is so fundamental to all of our interactions - so that we aspire to create systems we can touch or at least can use the metaphor of touch to connect with or alter the objects/systems/outcomes. So that it is not a coincidence that the metaphor of touch is employed. Not to take this into the realm of science fiction, but if we relied on other senses entirely what would these systems or objects appear like? This is articulated, I think by Rollin in your question to him about the materiality of pixels - the building blocks are what we need to use in order to make these processes intelligible to us, within the framework of our existing sense-capabilities (haptic, optical, affectual) etc. And further - perhaps we can take "material" as a historically located term - not an description of things as such. So that now, in this moment, it can include not only the act, but the metaphor of touching, feeling, sensing. 

Don't know if I am off on a tangent, but I'd be curious to hear what you think -

H


On Oct 17, 2014, at 11:59 PM, Ashley Scarlett <ashley.scarlett at gmail.com> wrote:

> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
> In a series of interviews that I recently conducted as part of my doctoral research, several of the respondents drew upon touch, and metaphors of touch, as a means of talking about the materiality and perceived immateriality of the digital. Through the proliferation of haptic devices, rising popularity of 3D printers, and increasing awareness of our “cyborgian” status, touching “the digital” seems eminently possible. To this end, I would like to ask the group, what role does  “touch” play in attributing materiality to the digital? How might touch be leveraged as a means of locating the whereabouts of this material?
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