These artists, I contend, foreground the very particular human ways in which the visual system operates in making sense of the world, for their work explores the different ways in which we sense space at various scales, from the body to the landscape. Throughout this dissertation, I argue for a rethinking of concepts of touch, intimacy, and connection in the digital age.ĪBSTRACT In this article, I focus on how four artists working with light can reveal the different capacities of illumination and darkness in shaping human apprehension of the world. Each of the artworks that I include place an emphasis on the embodied experience, engaging bodies in interactions of virtual touch with other bodies, with digitally reactive artworks, and with light and space. Along with works by artists Paul Sermon, Adrien M & Claire B, teamLab, and James Turrell, I include analyses of two research performances I created, Being Present (2016) and (dis)embodied in space (2019), both of which entangled live and mediatized bodies through telematic video technology. Grounded in Merleau-Ponty’s theory of the embodied subject, I focus on three broad categories of installation art, each of which creates an affective response of virtual touch through senses of sight and proprioception: telematic performance using video-conferencing technology, digitally reactive animations, and immersive sculptures of light designed to decenter the perceptual and visual senses. The works I include in this study create a feeling of virtual touch through a co-functioning of the senses, and through what Brian Massumi terms “the superiority of the analog,” in which all experience is inherently rooted in the body. Through analysis of digital and virtual installation art, I examine the ways that non-tactile touch remains rooted in the embodied experience. Digital media, which have traditionally been thought of as disembodied, nevertheless have the ability to elicit intense feelings of touch. In the digital age, online interactivity has expanded the ways in which individuals experience connection, intimacy, and touch. In this dissertation, I explore a phenomenon I call virtual touch, in which embodied sensations of touch are felt through non-tactile senses.
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