5

Twin–Touch–Test–Redux: Media
Archaeological Approach to Art,
Interactivity, and Tactility

Erkki Huhtamo

A visual sense is born in the fingertips.

—f. t. marinetti

The idea of interactive art is intimately linked with touching. As it is usually

understood, an interactive artwork is something that needs to be actuated by a
‘‘user.’’1 If the user ‘‘does nothing,’’ it remains unrealized potential—rules,
structures, codes, themes, and assumed behavioral models designed by the art-
ist and embedded in a software-hardware configuration. An interactive work
challenges one to undergo a transformation from an onlooker to an ‘‘interac-
tor,’’ an active agent. A peculiar kind of dialogue develops. In addition to
mental interaction that is a precondition to the reception of art in general,
physical bodily action—one that involves more than just movement of the
eyes—takes place. One touches the work, often repeatedly—either physically,
by stepping on a pressure-pad, fingering a ‘‘touch-screen,’’ clicking on a
mouse or pressing a custom-made interface, or remotely, mediated by a video-
camera, sound, light, or heat sensors, and so on. As innocuous as these acts
may seem, they have potentially far-reaching consequences for the notion of
art as we have come to know it. Not only does the emphasis on touch run
counter to the customary idea of the ‘‘untouchability’’ of the art object; it chal-
lenges us to compare art with a whole range of other human activities—from
work to play—where physical contact is expected.
It is not just the ‘‘proxemic’’ relationship between humans and human-
made contraptions—from power looms to mechanical toys and videogame
consoles—that matters. If the traditional proxemics, as developed by Edward
T. Hall and others, focused on relatively short range relationships within
physical spaces, it is increasingly clear that we have entered the era of ‘‘tele-
proxemics.’’2 Technological systems from mobile phone networks to the Inter-
net connect humans with each other across great distances, redefining the idea
of place in the process. As Marshall McLuhan already stated in the early
1960s, the formative development of the ‘‘global village’’ (whether it has hap-
pened as McLuhan predicted or not) emphasized the role of tactility as part of
a more general reconfiguration of the senses.3 Artists and ‘‘metadesigners’’—
Kit Galloway and Sherrie Rabinowitz, Roy Ascott, Paul Sermon, Hiroshi
Ishii, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, and many others—have explored the ramifica-
tions of what it means to ‘‘teletouch’’ at a distance. Although the models they
have created have rarely been implemented on a permanent basis, the trans-
mission, simulation, and/or substitution of the sense of touch have become
vital concerns on many fields from personal telecommunications (including
‘‘cybersex’’) to networked multiperson training simulators, games, telemedi-
cine and remote-controlled warfare. That such developments run parallel with
artists’ and designers’ explorations of similar issues is enough to warrant an
inquiry.
This article develops a media-archaeological approach to ‘‘touching art’’ as
a contribution to a wider cultural mapping of interactive media.4 The em-
phasis is on technologically mediated situations, where the interaction hap-
pens via an interface, a hardware-software complex designed for this purpose.
The issue of proxemic social interactions between human participants, like
those taking place in happenings, body art, and experimental dance pieces,
all major elements of the ‘‘dematerialized’’ art scene since the 1960s, is of
secondary importance here.5 The psychophysical constitution of the human–
machine interaction is not a major concern in this essay either. Social psychol-
ogists like Sherry Turkle have already done a substantial amount of work to
uncover its complex ‘‘mechanisms.’’6 The emphasis here is cultural and histor-
ical, dealing with questions such as the following, without pretending to pro-
vide conclusive answers: What are the cultural, ideological, and institutional
ramifications of touching artworks—whether these artworks are labeled as
‘‘touchable’’ or not? What are the discursive formations informing such prac-
tices? How has touching art been related with the acts of touching taking
place in other contexts—at work, leisure, and in ritual? Finally, why does ask-
ing questions like these matter?

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 Haptic Visuality and the (Physical) Touch

Before beginning to tackle such complicated issues, we must state certain

premises. First of all, this essay will focus on cases that involve corporeal en-
gagement with an artwork—the use of one’s hands, arms, feet, or even the
entire body. So far most discussions of tactility in art have concentrated on
what Laura U. Marks has characterized as ‘‘tactile, or haptic visuality.’’7 This
refers to a peculiar visual relationship between an observer and an image
(whether static or in motion). As Marks explains, the issue concerns both the
modes of visual perception and the ‘‘haptic’’ qualities assigned to the images
themselves. The discussion about haptic vision (also known as ‘‘visual touch’’)
originated around 1900 in the works of German art historians like Adolf Hil-
debrand and Alois Riegl. As Jacques Aumont has pointed out, Hildebrand
identified two tendencies in figurative art, ‘‘the optical pole of distant vision’’
and ‘‘the haptic (tactile) pole of close vision.’’8 The first tendency emphasized
representation, often situating characters and events ‘‘deep’’ within perspective
spaces, while the latter emphasized the ‘‘near’’ presence of the objects them-
selves, highlighting their textures and surfaces, in other words, the ‘‘skin’’ of
things.
For Hildebrand, these tendencies were linked with two ways of seeing: ‘‘the
nearby image’’ (Nahbild ), which corresponded to the everyday vision of a form
in lived space, and ‘‘the distant image’’ (Fernbild ), which corresponded ‘‘to the
vision of this form in terms of the specific rules of art.’’ The former could be
interpreted as more informal and intimate, while the latter was more formal
and distant, bound by the conventions of representation. However, as has
been pointed out, in actual practices of looking the ‘‘optical’’ and the ‘‘haptic’’
can never be entirely separated. Rather, the observer negotiates between these
modes. These ideas have been developed further by Deleuze and Guattari, and
others, elaborating on the ideological implications of this division.9
The idea of ‘‘haptic visuality’’ implies the transposition of qualities of touch
to the realm of vision and visuality. It confronts the issue of the physicality
of touch indirectly, through a corporeal operation involving the eyes and
the brain. The hands are not part of it, except as an imaginary ‘‘projection.’’
Although useful, the notion of ‘‘haptic visuality’’ cannot be applied as
such to the analysis of phenomena like interactive art, where the body—
sometimes coupled with a ‘‘body image,’’ like the ‘‘levitating hands’’ in virtual
reality applications—is directly involved. The haptic gaze is supported—and

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perhaps at times contradicted?—by other corporeal operations. Quite clearly,
any segregation of the senses from each other is out of the question. As McLu-
han stated, ‘‘tactility is the interplay of the senses, rather than the isolated con-
tact of skin and object.’’10 This applies well to interactive art, which often
engages not only sight and touch, but sound as well.
Like David Howes, I emphasize the cultural nature of sensory perception.
‘‘The cultural meaning of the senses . . . is not simply derived from any pre-
sumed inherent psychophysical characteristics, but elaborated through their
use,’’ Howes writes.11 In short, sensory perception is culturally coded. Codes
are not learned and used in mechanical ways. In sensory activities a process of
negotiation takes place, where internalized ‘‘schemes’’ are tried out and acti-
vated in various ways in response to sensory ‘‘input,’’ sometimes subverting
the most obvious meanings.12 Anthropologists and cultural scholars like Con-
stance Classen and Howes have provided ample evidence about variations in
the sensory expressions and responses within different cultures. The most ob-
vious example is salutation; there is a great variety of salutations, not only in
those involving touch, but also those that do not. Far from being haphazard or
anarchic, these conventions correspond with social sanctions and divisions, and
deeply felt needs within the society. Touching is never just an improptu act, a
personal expression of ‘‘universal’’ feelings and intuitions. The meanings
of touch depend on the cultural context within which they are activated
and negotiated. In a technological culture, forms of touch have been instru-
mentalized into coded relationships between humans and machines. Arguably
they have been genderized as well, a fact reflected in strategies of interface
design.
Artists have designed ingenious ways of mediating between humans and
machines, and between humans and humans via the mediation of machines.
But are their solutions always ‘‘original,’’ without precedent? Or could artists
rather be seen as transmitters and transformers of sensory traditions rooted in
preceding cultural forms? As art historians have shown, artists are not always
fully aware of their influences and the implications of their choices. In some
cases, however, they can be highly aware of their goals, drawing on cultural
models and modifying them to suit their needs. Both alternatives are encoun-
tered in the artists’ involvement with touch. From the media-archaeological
perspective artists can be considered cultural agents working within cultural
traditions (even when they deliberately claim to clash with them) and reenact-
ing existing forms and schemes in their works, either consciously or uncon-

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sciously. An artwork can give us clues about how cultural traditions work and
recycle their elements in an effort to renew themselves. Of particular interest
are the cultural elements and clichés that appear, disappear, and reappear in
cultural traditions and provide ‘‘molds’’ for cultural expressions and experi-
ences. Inspired by the work of Aby Warburg and Ernst Robert Curtius, I have
called such elements ‘‘topoi’’ (topos in the singular).13 What kind of topoi, if any,
can be discovered operating in interactive artworks? What purposes do they
serve?

Art and the (Anti-)Tactile Tradition

How convenient it would be to state that tactile art began with interactive
media art! However, this is not the case. Although it has usually been seen
as a phenomenon of secondary importance, the idea of ‘‘touchable art’’ was
already evoked in the context of the historical avant-gardes of the early
twentieth century; the discourses on touching artworks go much further
back in time. To understand the role of tactility in contemporary media
arts, one must first trace these earlier manifestations. One also has to ex-
plore their reverse: the absent and prohibited touch. We could speak about
‘‘tactiloclasms’’—cases where physical touching is not only absent, but ex-
pressly prohibited and suppressed. Instead of being a minor issue involving
one of the ‘‘lower’’ senses at the fringe of dominant cultural practices, the
question ‘‘to touch or not to touch’’ turns out to have wide implications.
Far from being marginal, it is linked with important cultural issues—
contestations and tensions, rules and transgressions—happening in social
spaces. These issues are still—and perhaps more than ever—felt in today’s
museums and galleries due to the ongoing ‘‘crisis’’ of the traditional art ob-
ject, the emphasis on interactivity and tactility and the emergence of what
Nicolas Bourriaud has called ‘‘Relational Aesthetics.’’14 Many exhibitions
now present both works that encourage touching and those that strictly pro-
hibit ‘‘fingering.’’15 Exhibition visitors often find this situation confusing, yet
it is not totally unique or unprecedented.
The emergence of the discourse on haptic visuality in the end of the nine-
teenth century echoed both the dominant aesthetics and the academic
practices of displaying artworks. ‘‘Touching with one’s eyes only’’ was a
manifestation of an ideological ‘‘mechanism,’’ where the formation of the aes-
thetic experience was associated with ‘‘stepping back’’—maintaining physical

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75
distance from the artwork. Touching a sculpture or a painting was not only
deemed vulgar, but forbidden. Behind this situation there were multiple
determinants that did not always merge seamlessly with each other. The Ro-
mantic cult of the genius had emphasized the ‘‘otherworldly’’ quality of the
artwork; as a product of ‘‘divine’’ inspiration, it had a special ‘‘aura’’ that
made it almost sacrilegious—and therefore also tempting, at least for those
longing for a ‘‘touch of genius’’—to touch it with one’s hands. Art museums
and galleries were conceived as ‘‘temples of beauty and the sublime.’’ Reli-
gious connotations associated with behavioral modes were thinly veiled (but
not fully suppressed) by secular ones—indeed, touching a statue of a saint to
gain power or ‘‘contact’’ has been part of many religious traditions involving
images. However, alongside the veneration of their otherworldly qualities, art-
works were also admired for their superior craftsmanship, which emphasized
their material quality. They were increasingly seen as commercial products—
collectibles, investments, and status objects for the bourgeoisie. Thus the pro-
hibition of touching was linked with the ‘‘untouchability’’ of private property,
as the ‘‘cult value’’ was gradually replaced by exchange value.
Another development was the democratization of the museum, spurred by
the ideology of visual education of the masses.16 While access to museums had
earlier been retricted to privileged visitors who were assumed to know the
proper codes of behavior, the situation changed in the ‘‘age of the masses.’’
Artworks were increasingly enclosed in transparent display cases or behind
protective sheets of glass and kept under the inspecting eyes of museum
guards. Even the potential for touch, now seen as a threat of transgression,
was eliminated. As Classen has shown, the nineteenth-century museum, where
nontactility reigned supreme, was not a given, but a cultural and ideological
construct.17 In the early museums, stemming from private collections and
cabinets of curiosities, touching the artifacts was often not only allowed, but
encouraged. Many visitors took this as self-evident and were offended if the
right to touch the objects was denied. Not just three-dimensional objects,
but even paintings were touched, as a complement to the act of looking. The
tactiloclasm that came to dominate the museum institution, and in many
cases is still valid today, was a combination of factors—ideas about public do-
main and private property, notions of access and education, social hierarchies
translated into relationships to objects, surveillance, and protection (the mu-
seum could be seen as an ideological machinery whose purpose was to ease
mounting social tensions).

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 It is not entirely inappropriate to compare the museum to another great
nineteenth-century institution, the department store. While the museum did
its best to eliminate all forms of tactile access to the artifacts on display, the
department store looked for a working relationship between tempting haptic
visuality (represented above all by the window display) and tactile access to
the goods for sale. In the nineteenth century most merchandise was still kept
safely behind counters, only reached by the mediation of shop assistants. The
right to touch the merchandise had to be carefully controlled, because the de-
partment store could inadvertedly encourage kleptomania, a ‘‘dangerous’’ mix-
ing of social classes and sexes, as well as chaotic and even manic behavior
during sales events. This did not prevent Emile Zola from characterizing the
department store as ‘‘a cathedral of modern commerce,’’ while the architect
and polytechnician Julien Guadet called it a ‘‘museum of merchandise.’’18
The museum, the church, and the department store all regulated behavior,
although the suppression of the tactile dimension took different forms. Such
more or less strictly enforced institutional ‘‘tactiloclasms’’ provide the back-
drop against which the emergence of the ‘‘society of interactivity’’ should be
assessed. Popular culture, including penny arcades and other forms of ‘‘Auto-
matic Entertainments,’’ as well as avant-garde art, provide early hints of a
sprouting phenomenon that burst into the cultural mainstream during the
twentieth century.

The Futurist Art of Tactilism

Although F. T. Marinetti’s ‘‘Manifesto of Tactilism’’ (1921) has been consid-

ered one of the minor manifestos of futurism, it is the most programmatic and
explicit early plea for an art of touch.19 It emerged logically from the futurists’
attack on academic institutions and bourgeois culture. The art museum with
its static displays was the embodiment of ‘‘passéism’’ and an obvious target for
the futurist veneration of speed, machines, masses, and art turned into a social
force. While proclaiming the destruction of decadent and obsolete cultural
forms, the futurists wanted to renew the totality of contemporary culture by
resorting to multisensory and synesthetic strategies.
In his manifesto Marinetti outlines the principles of Tactilism as a new art
form, including the education of the tactile sensibility, the creation of ‘‘scales’’
of different tactile values, and the construction of models for tactile artforms.
Marinetti’s list includes various types of ‘‘tactile tables,’’ consisting of different

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materials to be touched, as well as tactile divans, beds, clothes, rooms, roads,
and even theaters. It is a pity that Marinetti does not explain all of his ideas in
detail. The rooms, however, anticipate some aspects of installation art with
their walls covered by large tactile boards made of different materials. The
floor provides tactile values by means of running water, stones, brushes, velvet,
weak electricity, and so on. All this is said to offer ‘‘maximum spiritual and
sensual pleasure to the naked feet of male and female dancers.’’ In the tactile
theaters the audience members would place their hands on long tactile ‘‘belts’’
that move at variable rhythms.20 The belts could also be applied to small
rotating wheels, accompanied by music and lighting effects.
For Marinetti, his ‘‘still embryonic tactile art’’ must be kept distinct not
only from painting and sculpture, but also from ‘‘morbid erotomania.’’ Its
purpose is to achieve tactile harmonies and to contribute to the ‘‘perfection
of spiritual communication between human beings, through the epidermis.’’
Marinetti does not consider his tactile art as separated from the other senses.
Rather, he feels that the distinction between the senses is arbitrary; Tactilism
can contribute to the discovery and cataloging of ‘‘many other senses.’’ Still,
Marinetti remarks that ‘‘a variety of colors’’ should be avoided in the tactile
tables so that they do not lend themselves to ‘‘plastic impressions.’’ Because
painters and sculptors tend to subordinate tactile values to visual ones,
Marinetti suggests that Tactilism may be ‘‘especially reserved to young poets,
pianists, stenographers. . . .’’ This statement is interesting. It seems to priori-
tize the writer’s, the pianist’s, and the stenographer’s hands because these are
means for evoking nonvisual realms of imagination and suggestion beyond the
visible. Their touch is both sensual and intrumental. If this interpretation is
correct, it could be associated with Marcel Duchamp’s famous critique of
‘‘retinal’’ art. For Duchamp, instead of clinging to the surface effects as the
impressionists did, art had to become ‘‘cerebral,’’ penetrate beyond the retina,
beyond the purely visual. Of course, Marinetti only hints at the intellectual
possibilities of tactile art. Still, his reasoning embodies an interesting paradox:
Tactilism, the ultimate art of the surface, is really about what is beyond it. It
is in the mind of the toucher. It is not a coincidence that he also compares
Tactilism with X-ray vision and points out its practical value for surgeons
and the handicapped. With Tactilism, ‘‘a visual sense is born in the finger-
tips,’’ one that ‘‘sees’’ deeper than the skin.
Knowing the futurists’ affectionate relationship with technology, it is strik-
ing to note that the ‘‘Manifesto for Tactilism’’ says nothing about machines as

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a new touchable realm (with the possible exception of the mechanisms for the
moving belts in the tactile theaters). One wishes Marinetti had mentioned the
hands of the typist (captured in motion in a ‘‘photodynamism’’ by fellow fu-
turist Anton Giulio Bragaglia already in 1912) or those of the driver clutching
a steering wheel, almost a fetish for the futurists. Such ‘‘interface awareness’’
obviously had not yet developed, although the works of some futurists, like
Gino Severini, did contain mechanical parts to be manipulated by the
viewer.21 It had also been implied in Giacomo Balla and Fortunato Depero’s
manifesto ‘‘The Futurist Reconstruction of the Universe’’ (1914), which
described varieties of fantastic machines and ‘‘futuristic toys.’’ Depero’s Plastic
Complex: Motorumorist Pianoforte (1915), a mechanical noise-making machine,
was controlled by a human performer via a keyboardlike interface. Marinetti’s
reference to weak electric shocks given to the dancers in his tactile room is,
however, a lead worth following. It refers to what may have been the most
popular technologically augmented tactile experience. Well-known to the
public through popular-scientific lectures at fairground attractions, doctors’
offices, and even homes, electric shocks were a nineteenth-century novelty
that was considered both exciting and healing. ‘‘Electricity is Life’’ was a
well-known slogan in the broadsides for shows and on devices administering
electric shocks. The quack machines meant for domestic electrotherapy had
their counterpart in the coin-operated ‘‘strength testers’’ at penny arcades; the
task was to grasp two metal handles for as long as possible while a steadily
increasing electric current flowed through one’s body.
Already in their first manifesto (1909) the futurists had promised to ‘‘sing
of great crowds excited by work, by pleasure, and by riot.’’22 It was in the
mass society that various technology-related tactile experiences emerged dur-
ing the nineteenth century, ranging from work in mechanized factories and
offices to the new kinds of pleasures offered by the varieties of coin-operated
devices at amusement parks, penny arcades, and on city streets. While the de-
partment store windows kept their desirable offerings behind panes of glass,
the strength testers, mutoscopes, and other ‘‘Automatic Entertainments’’
invited the user to a direct physical contact. As one can still experience at
places like the Musée Mecanique in San Francisco, the ‘‘user interfaces’’ of
such devices often had hand- or foot-shaped molds. Some even had surrogate
metal hands, challenging the visitor to an arm-wrestling match with Uncle
Sam or some other mythic figure. Operating these devices often required
more physical strength than dexterity, which seems to have directed their

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79
‘‘gender-designation’’ toward the male, while a more passive onlooker’s role
was reserved for women. However, other devices, including shooting games
and even mutoscope-like peepshows, appealed to females as well; the gender
divide was never as sharp as has been assumed. These devices also inspired
lively discursive manifestations, often evoking tactile relationships. This issue
has been dealt with in the author’s earlier writings.23
There is no lack of evidence about the influence of popular culture on the
avant-garde movements of the early twentieth century.24 Sergei Eisenstein’s
revelation, according to which his radical intellectual montage, including the
principle of ‘‘shock attraction’’ used in his classic Battleship Potemkin (1925),
was influenced by the experience of riding on a roller coaster, is a striking ex-
ample, but not the only one.25 It might be claimed that Picasso’s and Braque’s
practice of using found material, including tram tickets, newspaper cuttings,
cloth, and other pieces of residue from the urban mass culture in their collages
was potentially tactile, in line with Marinetti’s tactile tables, even though they
hardly encouraged actual touching. The tactile dimension was enhanced by
the soirées, cabarets, city wanderings, and other events organized by the Dada-
ists, surrealists, and other radical movements to break down the barriers be-
tween artists and non-artists. The sensational boxing match between the
Spanish Dadaist Arthur Cravan and the reigning world champion John John-
son (1916), which led to Cravan’s predictable knockout in the first round,
shifted the focus from the art object to the corporeal tactility of spectator
sports, although the audience’s participation was limited to haptic visual sen-
sations from the other side of the ring. However, the infamous and deliber-
ately provoked scuffles that sometimes took place between the performers
and the spectators at Dadaist and surrealist events demonstrated that cracks
were beginning to appear in the invisible shield separating art from its
audience.

Duchamp, Kiesler, and the Invitation to Touch

Marcel Duchamp’s readymades should also be discussed this context. As is

well known, Duchamp chose visually unremarkable mundane objects that
were put to tactile uses in everyday life without much thought—a bicycle
wheel and a stool, a bottle rack, a snow shovel, and the protective cover of an
Underwood typewriter, familiar from thousands of offices. In their mass-

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produced ordinariness such objects easily turn ‘‘invisible’’ in their normal con-
texts. Duchamp’s idea of displaying them in the gallery in the place usually
reserved for ‘‘untouchable’’ art objects is an ambiguous gesture that created a
powerful irony. Far from denying the tactile nature of these objects, it could
be claimed that their new site (with its preexisting connotation of ‘‘distance’’)
increased the temptation to touch them as a subversion of their newly
acquired ‘‘status.’’ Duchamp provided some of his readymades with enigmatic
texts that may have urged the visitors to come closer to study them, thus fur-
ther increasing the tension between ‘‘to touch or not to touch.’’ It should per-
haps be noted that as cultural artifacts, texts—whether on the pages of a book
or as public inscriptions or notices—seem less controlled by tactile restrictions
than images. Books are tactile objects par excellence, meant to be perused
with one’s fingers. Public inscriptions, often carved in stone, may not have
been meant to be touched (prohibitions controlling their untouchability
exist), but they often have nevertheless endured the touches of generations of
believers or tourists.
The first of Duchamp’s readymades (their ‘‘distant forerunner,’’ according
to Octavio Paz), Bicycle Wheel (1913), was different from the others in that it
incorporated an active possibility of (interactive) movement.26 There is some
evidence suggesting that Duchamp himself enjoyed putting it in motion by
hand. Whether this was ever done by exhibition visitors is uncertain, but the
form of work could certainly persuade the user to interaction. Unlike its typ-
ical situation when it is attached to a bicycle, the wheel protrudes toward the
viewer, while the stool serves as a pedestal.27 This might warrant calling it
—without belittling its other possible readings and identities—a ‘‘proto-
interactive’’ work. It went further in this direction than Man Ray’s Objet à
detruire (Object to Be Destroyed), a modified metronome with a cutout eye
attached to its pendulum. Although Man Ray also uses mechanical motion,
the (destructive) suggestion is largely transmitted by the title, obviously chal-
lenging the viewer to break the hypnotic spell of the to and fro movement of
the eye.28 Constantin Brancusi’s Sculpture for the Blind (c. 1920), an egg-
shaped, polished marble object, suggests touching both by its formal qualities
and its title, reminding one of the strong potential tactility of Brancusi’s
work.29 Meret Oppenheim’s Le déjeuner en fourrure (Breakfast in Fur/Fur Tea-
cup, 1936) is an example of a surrealist object with a suggestive but am-
biguous tactile quality. It is not meant to be touched physically—it exists

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more in the realm of haptic visuality, albeit on its tactile edge, almost ‘‘within
the reach of the hand.’’ Of course, while the fur may be inviting to the hand,
it may also feel repulsive if associated with the act of drinking.
Traditional exhibition design served as a ‘‘machinery’’ for maintaining the
untouchability of art within museums. Therefore it is logical that tactile ideas
were probed on this field by avant-garde innovators like Duchamp, Man Ray,
and Frederick Kiesler. Duchamp’s and Man Ray’s play with lighting at the
opening of the 1938 Exposition Internationale du Surréalisme is a cause célèbre.
The main hall was nearly dark, and the visitors were given flashlights to see
the works. Even the flashlights were quite dim, forcing the visitors to get very
close to the artworks, leading to an unusual interaction with the environ-
ment.30 Kiesler incorporated touch on multiple levels into his famous design
for Peggy Guggenheim’s Art of This Century gallery in New York (1942).31
He created swiveling ‘‘baseball bat’’ wall mounts that detached the artworks
from the walls and made them ‘‘rush’’ toward the spectator, as well as ‘‘bio-
morphic displays,’’ systems of strings stretched between the floor and ceiling,
holding small sculptures in between, potentially elevated or lowered by the
visitor. Perhaps Kiesler’s most radical—and controversial—gesture was the
construction of peep boxes for viewing artworks in the Surrealist Gallery.
Thus André Breton’s Portrait of the Actor A. B. could be seen by pulling a lever
that opened a diaphragm, allowing the work to be seen inside the box. Repro-
ductions of the contents of Duchamp’s Boite en valise could be inspected by
peeping into a hole and turning a large ‘‘ship’s wheel’’ (obviously a homage
to Duchamp’s Rotoreliefs). Critics immediately associated these designs with
popular cultural motives, calling them ‘‘a kind of artistic Coney Island,’’ or
‘‘a penny-arcade show without the pennies.’’ According to Lewis Kachur,
they also recalled Julien Levy’s original plan for a surrealist nickelodeon arcade
for the 1939 New York’s World’s Fair.32 Although they hardly created a
tradition, Kiesler’s designs are an important link between popular ‘‘proto-
interactive’’ devices and the interactive media of the future.
However, the most explicit experiment in tactility by Kiesler is the little-
known Twin–Touch–Test, a work created in collaboration with Duchamp for
the surrealist VVV: Almanac in 1943.33 It is disguised as a prize competition,
complete with a cutout coupon to be returned with the entry. Returning cut-
outs by mail was, of course, a common form of ‘‘programmed feedback’’ in the
popular press. The reader is asked to join the palms of one’s hands from both

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sides of a chicken wire fence, and caress it until ready to describe the experi-
ence ‘‘in no more than one hundred words.’’ If there is no access to a wire
screen, the back cover on the journal, containing a piece of actual chicken
wire inserted in a cutout slot in the shape of a female torso, could be used.
Detailed instructions for conducting the experiment both alone and with an-
other person are given. Although it has been described simply as an ‘‘auto-
erotic exercise,’’ the fact that a two-person mode is also available suggests a
training for sensual interpersonal communication, which Marinetti mentioned
as one of the goals behind his tactile experiments.
As can be expected, the work contains numerous other connotations. As far
as I know it has not been pointed out, for example, that the photograph on the
Twin–Touch–Test page, showing a young female (Peggy Guggenheim’s
daughter Pegeen) engaged in the act of caressing the wire fence with her
hands, eyes closed, undergoes a transformation when seen through the chicken
wire slot of the back cover. Only a part of the photograph is visible as if
through a peephole.34 The most prominent features are the raised hands be-
hind the wire fence, while the girl’s shoulder may be mistaken for her head
pushed back (her real head is framed outside). The connotation might be reli-
gious exctasy, but sadomasochistic fantasies, reminiscent of those seen through
the peepholes in Jean Cocteau’s film Le sang d’un pôete (1930), may be evoked
as well. Ironically, the words ‘‘Five Prizes’’ can also be seen, increasing the am-
biguity of the view.
The gender of the implied user has been left deliberately ambiguous. Al-
though the photograph shows a girl doing the exercise in the autoerotic mode,
the female figure of the cutout would seem to suggest the male as the implied
‘‘toucher’’ (as well as the ‘‘peeper’’ when the back cover is closed). The pro-
fuse and fetishistic use of naked female bodies in surrealist exhibitions and
actions—from ‘‘prepared’’ mannequins to actual nude models—would seem
to reinforce this.35 Duchamp himself used a female breast, made of soft
foam-rubber, in his famous cover design for the deluxe version of the exhibi-
tion catalog Le Surréalisme en 1947, accompanied with the exhortation: Prière de
toucher (please touch). The erotic tactile play of the cover was made even more
explicit in the photograph of a nude model posing in the exhibition hall next
to Kiesler’s Totem of the Religions, wearing nothing but a bandage over her eyes
and Duchamp’s foam-rubber breast covering her sex.36 Although this action
may be interpreted as merely a typical surrealist prank, it also engages the

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Figures 5.1a, 5.1b Frederick Kiesler and Marcel Duchamp, Twin-Touch-Test, 1943. See
plate 3.
discourse on tactility by placing a living human body among the artworks and
even providing her with a kind of eroticized ‘‘push button.’’ The ‘‘blinding’’
of the model further emphasizes the tactile register. Enrico Donati, the Amer-
ican painter who helped Duchamp in the production of the foam breasts,
remarked that ‘‘I had never thought I would get tired of handling so many
breasts,’’ to which Duchamp is said to have replied: ‘‘Maybe that’s the whole
idea.’’37 Perhaps—perhaps not; Prière de toucher was an oblique commentary on
the amount of naked breasts in surrealist art at the time.

Feminist Play with the Tactile Passive Body

Art that emphasized the tactile relationships between bodies, often mingling
those of the performers and the participants, became a major element of the
happenings, performances, ‘‘body art,’’ and other art events of the 1960s and
the ’70s. As already stated, this topic falls outside the frame of this essay, so
the discussion will be limited to a few projects that linked bodies with tech-
nological interfaces. Of primary importance is Valie Export’s Tapp und Tast-
kino (Touch and Taste Cinema, 1968). Helped by her partner Peter Weibel,
who—ironically—worked as her barker, Valie Export appeared in the city
street wearing a box with curtains that covered her naked breasts. The
passers-by were exhorted to reach out their hands and fondle them. In this
‘‘expanded (or perhaps reduced?) cinema’’ piece, the naked female bodies
offered by (mostly male) producers and exhibitors to the anonymous collective
consumption of cinema audiences have been replaced by a personalized and
proxemic experience involving not representation, but ‘‘the real thing.’’ Un-
like the pornographic images on a screen, this experience is controlled by the
female subject herself. While fondling her breasts, the toucher is also forced to
encounter her gaze. This is the opposite of the voyeuristic situation reigning
in the cinema, where the characters never really look back (although they may
pretend to do so). The haptic visuality of pornographic cinema was replaced
with corporeal bodily contact.38
Valie Export made this link even more explicit in her Action Pants: Genital
Panic (1969), a performance in which she entered a cinema showing a porno-
graphic film in pants with the crotch cut away and a sub-machine gun on her
sholder, offering herself to be sexually used by the audience, as a replacement
to the projected sex on the screen. Marina Abramovic, another pioneering
feminist artist, used a similar strategy in her action Rhythm 0 (1974). For the

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duration of six hours, she submitted herself passively to the physical manipu-
lation by the (mostly male) audience, even providing an array of torture and
pleasure instruments for the purpose.39 Abramovic aimed to expose the taboos,
desires, and inhibitions related with physical tactility in the ‘‘society of the
spectacle,’’ where the relationship to bodies has purportedly been distanced
and commodified.40 Both Export’s and Abramovic’s actions had been antici-
pated by Yoko Ono’s Cut Piece (1965) that introduced the figure of the seem-
ingly passive female subject left at the (tactile) mercy of the spectators.41
Another early tactile feminist work was Orlan’s Baiser de l’artiste (The Kiss of
the Artist, 1976–77). Orlan posed as a coin-operated dispenser machine, be-
hind a ‘‘shield’’ showing a naked female body. After depositing a coin that fell
into a basket between Orlan’s legs, the user was allowed to kiss her.
Tactile motives also began to appear in works that directly linked the spec-
tator with media technology. Although it may encourage haptic visuality, the
television set in its daily use is a nontactile object (in spite of Marshall McLu-
han’s arguments for its tactility).42 The television set was redefined as an ob-
ject for touching and manual manipulation in the early installations and
actions by Nam June Paik and Wolf Vostell. By modifying the electronic tele-
vision image with a magnet, or by turning knobs or shouting into micro-
phones, Paik’s ‘‘Participation TV’’ works turned the TV set from a terminal
for passive consumption of remotely transmitted content into a means of self-
expression. Paik’s goal of ‘‘doing television with one’s fingers’’ was not only a
transposition of his earlier preoccupations as a pianist from the aural to the
visual, but arguably echoed the topos expressed in Marinetti’s saying: ‘‘a visual
sense is born in the fingertips.’’43 Portapak, Sony’s early portable videocamera
and recorder, provided Paik and an entire generation of video artists a means
of exploring the body as it became interfaced with technology. The Portapak
came to be used in live performance and tape works focused on the artist’s
body, as well as in closed-circuit installations, where the visitor’s body image
was captured and transmitted back as if in a technological mirror. Video
scanned the skin and magnified body parts, creating an intimate, haptic dis-
courses. It also helped to set up stage situations where actual and represented
bodies were juxtaposed or superimposed. Video was linked with the possibil-
ities of the computer in the early works by interactive art pioneers like Myron
Krueger and Erkki Kurenniemi, leading to new ways of exploring the rela-
tionships between bodies, technology, and body images.44

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 Tactility and Interactive Art

An Internet search for ‘‘tactile art’’ produces mostly results that refer to a spe-
cific phenomenon, namely aesthetic experiences for the blind. There are exhi-
bitions and museums of tactile art, usually offering replicas of well-known
sculptures or embossed, relieflike versions of famous paintings (including, in
one case, Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase). In these cases the sense of
touch is meant as an ersatz to the missing visual channel. While it can be
argued that a faithful replica of Rodin’s The Thinker could indeed give some
kind of an idea of the artwork (sculpture itself can be seen as potentially tac-
tile, although this possibility is negated by institutional restrictions), the tac-
tile translations of paintings and other two-dimensional images are more
problematic. A relieflike copy of Nude Descending a Staircase may transmit
some idea of its representational content to experienced hands, but other levels
are lost. Some rare original artworks have been meant for both the visually
impaired and people with normal sight. The Japanese artist Takayuki Mit-
sushima, whose works were recently shown at the Touch, Art! exhibition at
the Kawagoe Art Museum in Japan, was weak-sighted at birth and lost his
sight completely by the age of ten.45 His collages use delicate paper cuttings
to create relieflike surfaces that appeal both to blind visitors and those with
normal sight. Remarkably, the artist uses colors, resorting to the visual mem-
ories from his childhood. Mitsushima also took part in Tactile Renga (1998–),
a collaborative networked painting project he created with media artists Tosh-
ihiro Anzai and Rieko Nakamura. As part of the project, a new kind of printer
and plotter technology for the creation of embossed images was developed.46
The realm of tactility in art is not, however, limited to the experiences for
the visually impaired. Interactive art, in particular, is tactile art almost by
definition. As already stated in the beginning of this essay, interactive art
requires the user’s action to function. The work then responds in some way,
and a ‘‘conversation’’ between the user and the work develops. This is, of
course, the most rudimentary definition of interactive media. Adding the issue
of tactility raises numerous questions that cannot be fully answered here. First,
the nature of the touch itself: Is it possible to create taxonomies of different
kinds of touches? What are the connotations of caressing versus hitting, press-
ing versus pulling? How does proxemic touching differ from teleproxemic
touching? How does actual physical touching differ from ‘‘virtual touching’’

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(without direct contact with the interface)? Second, the function of the touch:
Does touching the work trigger ‘‘local responses’’ (from the physical artwork
and/or the surrounding space) or ‘‘remote responses’’ (i.e., touching the work
affects realities that are spatially distant, while the responses are mediated by
the work)? Do the responses come from a system (a software-hardware com-
plex) or from other human beings via the mediation of the system? Third,
the relationship between touch and the other senses: Is the goal of the work
the ‘‘purification’’ and segmentation of the sensorium by separating touch
from the other sensory channels, or, rather, their synthetic integration? Can
the work serve the interchangeability of the senses, or the simulation of other
senses? Fourth, the role of tactility itself: Is all art that involves touching ‘‘tac-
tile art’’? Must there be a physical response (‘‘force-feedback’’) to the user’s
touch for the application to qualify as tactile? Does tactile sensation have to
be a goal in itself, or can touching play a more metaphorical or instrumental
role, and still warrant the piece’s classification as tactile art?
Here it is possible to give only tentative answers by examining some art-
works where the issue of touching plays an important role. Quite clearly, a
very rich range of ‘‘touch modes’’ has been proposed by new media artists,
from gently fingering living plants (functioning as an interface to growing a
digital garden) in Christa Sommerer and Laurent Mignonneau’s Interactive
Plant Growing (1993) to aggressively throwing balls at a wall-relief made of
modified computer keyboards in Perry Hoberman’s Cathartic User Interface
(1995). While some artists prefer to use standard interface devices (mouse,
keyboard, joystick), others see designing their own as an essential aspect
of the work. Ken Feingold’s The Surprising Spiral (1991) has two interface
objects: a touch screen designed as the cover of a simulated book and a pile
of books with a model of a mouth on top of it (putting one’s finger across
the ‘‘lips’’ makes the mouth speak). A tactile interface does not always involve
the use of hands. The user communicates with Tony Dove’s interactive narra-
tive installation Artificial Changelings (1998) by stepping on interactive floor
pads. Marnix de Nijs’ Run Motherfucker Run, recently awarded at Prix Ars Elec-
tronica (2005), invites the viewer to run on a large industrial treadmill. In the
virtual reality installation Osmose (1995) Char Davies used a combination of a
breathing interface and body motion tracking as a way of controlling the user’s
movements within a virtual world.
To what extent should the user ‘‘feel’’ the responses from the work? In most
cases artists seem content with providing visual-aural feedback, only implying

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tactile responses. There are, however, works where tactile feedback has become
an integral part of the concept itself. Bernie Lubell’s surprising wooden (reso-
lutely nondigital) interactive installations often contain pneumatic tubes and
soft diaphragms (inspired by the work of Étienne-Jules Marey) that provide
the interactor genuine tactile sensations. In Cheek to Cheek (1999) the interac-
tor sits on a specially built wobbly stool; the gyrations of one’s bottom are
transmitted through pneumatic tubes to one’s cheeks, leading to an uncanny
‘‘autoerotic’’ experience. Christa Sommerer and Laurent Mignonneau’s recent
works have also explicitly begun to explore the tactile dimension. NanoScape
(2002) uses powerful magnetic forces to ‘‘tactilize’’ (visualize would not be
the right word) the invisible nanolevel phenomena. The interface is a ringlike
device worn by the user; by moving one’s hand over a special table one feels
the forces in motion without actually touching the table surface. In Mobile
Feelings (2001–) Sommerer and Mignonneau explore wireless tactile com-
munication between human participants. Using Bluetooth-technology and
advanced microsensors for mobile communication, they have created wireless
objects that allow users feel each other’s heartbeats, and will soon provide
other sensory experiences as well. While the first versions were hidden inside
actual pumpkins (an organic interface evoking the plants in Interactive Plant
Growing), the later egg-shaped objects strangely remind one of Brancusi’s
Sculpture for the Blind (and the human heart, of course). The idea behind Mobile
Feelings can also be read as a topos going back to the seventeenth-century pro-
posals for intimate distant communication by means of magnetism.
Mobile Feelings raises the issue of tactile communication over a distance.
This in itself is not a new idea. Kit Galloway’s and Sherrie Rabinowitz’s tele-
matic art workshops (1980s), Paul Sermon’s Telematic Dreaming (1992) and
Stahl Stenslie and Kirk Woolford’s CyberSM (1993) were all in their own
ways concerned with exploring the intimate touch between people separated
by distance. The teletouch could be achieved either by a mental transposition
of visual impressions (two ‘‘body images’’ touching each other) or by using a
custom-made ‘‘teledildonic’’ interface, technologically transmitting the part-
ner’s body movements.47 Numerous art and design projects have explored
the real-time transmission of the sense of touch to another location by means
of force-feedback interfaces. A well-known example is inTouch (1997–98), cre-
ated by the Tangible Media group at the MIT Media Lab,48 which used
synchronized wooden ‘‘massage rollers’’ as its telematic interface. Japanese
media laboratories in particular, such as the one led by professor Hiroo Iwata

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Figure 5.2 Bernie Lubell, Cheek to Cheek, 1999. By kind permission of the artist.

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Figures 5.3a, 5.3b Professor Machiko Kusahara and the writer experimenting with Christa
Sommerer and Laurent Mignonneau’s Mobile Feelings I (2001) at Ars Electronica 2001.
See plate 4. Photos by Christa Sommerer.

at the Tsukuba University, have created many prototypes for new kinds of
force-feedback applications, often shown at Siggraph. Recently the possibil-
ities of teletactility have also been explored by artists and designers interested
in smart clothes and wearable media, which is a logical path to follow, clothes
being the most intimate and persistent ‘‘interface’’ everyone uses.
There are also works where touching plays a more metaphoric and/or in-
strumental role. Marinetti’s idea of ‘‘a visual sense born in the fingertips’’
was realized by Agnes Hegedues in her installation Handsight (1992), where

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Figure 5.3 (continued)

‘‘the hand that sees’’ is a Polhemus sensor disguised as an eyeball. It is held in

hand by the user to explore a virtual world supposedly inside a glass jar—a
poetic but also rather literal translation of McLuhan’s idea of technology as
an extension of the human body. In Rafael Lozano-Hemmer’s teletactile
work Displaced Emperors (1997), the user’s ‘‘hand image’’ was projected on the
facade of the Linz Castle, peeling away layers of history. The idea of a data-
glove (reduced to a wearable ring) was given a new role and interpretation,
rich in cultural connotations. Although no actual touch was involved, the
sense of mediated touch was strong. Feingold’s The Surprising Spiral, already

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Figure 5.4 Paul Sermon, Telematic Dreaming, 1992. By kind permission of the artist.

mentioned above, not only explores tactility, but also tactility’s media-
archaeological implications and earlier discursive manifestations. The name
on the back of the book interface reads ‘‘Pierre de Toucher,’’ an explicit refer-
ence to Duchamp’s Prière de toucher. The work builds a dense network of
references around tactile media, from fairground attractions (also present in
Feingold’s later works using speaking and animated puppet heads, descen-
dants of popular ‘‘talking heads’’ and ventriloquist dummies) to surrealism,
Duchamp, and Alain Robbe-Grillet’s L’immortelle (1963), a film where sensual
touching plays a central thematic role.49
These examples by no means exhaust the range of uses of tactility in con-
temporary media art. While exploring state-of-the-art technologies and new
ways of linking humans and machines, many artists draw from a rich pool of
shared cultural storehouse of sensory experiences, discourses, and imaginaries.
Sometimes this happens unknowingly, but often quite consciously, as Fein-
gold’s example shows. The critical and theoretical exploration of this pool
has only recently begun in earnest. The recently introduced book series Sen-
sory Formations, published by Berg, is one demonstration of this interest. As
it happens, the volume about tactile culture, The Book of Touch (2005), edited
by Constance Classen, has devoted very few of its 450 pages to the topic of

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Figure 5.5 Ken Feingold: The Surprising Spiral (installation detail), 1991. Interactive instal-
lation: computer, laserdisc, audio, projection, silicone, wood, books. Collection: ZKM Center for
Art and Media, Karlsruhe. By kind permission of the artist.

interacting with machines and media.50 The words ‘‘interactive’’ and ‘‘interac-
tivity’’ don’t even appear in the index. After hundreds and thousands of years,
during which the ‘‘(in)human touch’’ was the most important form of tactility
in its countless manifestations, the practice of touching technological artifacts
for self-expression, communication, entertainment, or erotic sensation is still a
recent phenomenon. Videogames, purportedly one of the dominant forms of
tactile media already now and even more clearly in the near future, only have
a history of some thirty-five years. How these developments will affect the
realm of tactility as we know it remains to be seen. How will the ‘‘new’’ merge
or converge with the ‘‘old’’? Interactive artworks can provide some—strictly
imaginary—sneak previews.

Notes

1. The juries for the ‘‘Interactive Art’’ category at the prestigious Prix Ars Electronica
competition have in recent years made efforts to annihilate this definition—they have

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given awards to many works that recuire no active input from the spectator at all. For
a closer analysis, see my essay ‘‘Trouble at the Interface, or the Identity Crisis of Inter-
active Art,’’ available online at http://www.mediaarthistory.org/ (in the section ‘‘pro-
grammatic key texts’’).

2. This concept was used by the experimental designers Anthony Dunne and Fiona
Raby in their presentation ‘‘Fields and Thresholds’’ at the Doors of Perception 2 con-
ference in Amsterdam, 1995. See http://www.mediamatic.nl/Doors/Doors2/DunRab/
DunRab-Doors2-E.html/. On proxemics, see Edward T. Hall, The Hidden Dimension
(Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1966).

3. On McLuhan’s ideas about tactility, see Takeshi Kadobayashi, ‘‘Tactility, This Su-
perfluous Thing—Reading McLuhan through the Trope of Sense,’’ University of Tokyo
Center for Philosophy Bulletin, 4 (2005), 26–35.

4. For earlier stages of this project, see my articles ‘‘ ‘It Is Interactive, But Is It Art?,’ ’’
in Computer Graphics Visual Proceedings: Annual Conference Series, 1993, ed. Thomas E.
Linehan (New York: ACM SIGGRAPH, 1993), 133–135; ‘‘Seeking Deeper Contact:
Interactive Art as Metacommentary,’’ Convergence 1, no. 2 (autumn 1995), 81–104;
‘‘Time Machines in the Gallery: An Archeological Approach in Media Art,’’ in
Immersed in Technology: Art and Virtual Environments, ed. Mary Anne Moser with Doug-
las McLeod (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1996), 232–268; ‘‘From Cybernation to
Interaction: A Contribution to an Archaeology of Interactivity,’’ in The Digital Dia-
lectic: New Essays on New Media, ed. Peter Lunenfeld (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press,
1999), 96–110, 250–256; ‘‘Slots of Fun, Slots of Trouble: Toward an Archaeology
of Electronic Gaming,’’ in Handbook of Computer Games Studies, ed. Joost Raessens and
Jeffrey Goldstein (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2005).

5. For overviews of these developments, see Udo Kultermann, Art and Life, trans.
John William Gabriel (New York and Washington, D.C.: Praeger, 1971); Out of
Actions: Between Performance and the Object, 1949–1979, ed. Russell Ferguson (New
York: Thames and Hudson, 1998).

6. See Sherry Turkle, Second Self: Computers and the Human Spirit, 20th anniversary edi-
tion (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 2005 [1984]).

7. Laura U. Marks, Touch: Sensuous Theory and Multisensory Media (Minneapolis and
London: University of Minnesota Press, 2002).

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8. Jacques Aumont, The Image, trans. Claire Pajackowska (London: BFI Publishing,
1997 [1990]), 77–78.

9. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans.

Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987).

10. Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (London: Sphere
Books, 1967 [1964]), 335.

11. David Howes, Sensual Relations: Engaging the Senses in Culture and Social Theory
(Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003), xx.

12. About the use of ‘‘schema,’’ see E. H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion (London: Phai-
don Press, 1977 [1960]).

13. For topoi in media culture, see my ‘‘From Kaleidoscomaniac to Cybernerd: To-
wards an Archeology of the Media,’’ in Electronic Culture, ed. Timothy Druckrey
(New York: Aperture 1996), 296–303, 425–427. For an interesting collection of
essays on Warburg’s contribution to cultural history, see Art History as Cultural His-
tory: Warburg’s Projects, ed. Richard Woodfield (Amsterdam: GþB Arts International,
2001).

14. Nicolas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics (France: Les presses du réel, 2002 [1998]).

15. I experienced this on a recent visit to the exhibition Ecstasy: In and About
Altered States (MOCA, Los Angeles, 2005). To give just one example, here is a story
of my encounter with Olafur Eliasson’s Your Strange Certainty Still Kept (1996). The
following note had been posted at the entrance to the installation: ‘‘Viewers with light
sensitivities please be advised: the artwork uses strobe lights.’’ Entering the darkened
space, I noticed a transparent ‘‘curtain’’ created by water dripping from the ceiling. It
was illuminated by strobe lights, which made the waterdrops ‘‘dance’’ in different for-
mations. The installation was placed close to the entrance, and there was no barrier
that would have prevented the visitors from standing right next to it; it was even pos-
sible walk around the water curtain to the other side. Because of this it felt natural to
stretch out one’s hand and feel the running water. In fact, this caused interesting
changes to the patterns of light as well as to the surface of the water as it fell to the
pool below, and may well have been intended by the artist (at least, there was no no-
tice forbidding it at the entrance). However, when I started playing with the dripping
water, a guard immediately intervened and told me that it was forbidden to touch the

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water. To my question why it was so, he explained that he had ‘‘received instructions.’’
Exiting from the other side, I began to suspect that the unannounced tactiloclasm had
nothing to do with Eliasson and everything to do with the fact that the museum ad-
ministration was concerned about the floor getting wet from sprinkles. Indeed, I
noticed the familiar yellow ‘‘Cuidado piso mojado/Caution wet floor’’ signboards, at
both entrances to the installation (although one of them was folded and leaning
against the wall).

16. See Tony Bennett, The Birth of the Museum: History, Theory, Politics (London and
New York: Routledge, 1995).

17. Constance Classen, ‘‘Touch in the Museum,’’ in The Book of Touch, ed. Constance
Classen (Oxford and New York: Berg, 2005), 275–286.

18. Stephen Bailey, Commerce and Culture: From Pre-Industrial Art to Post-Industrial Value
(Tunbridge Wells: Penshurst Press, 1989), 46. For a history of the early department
store, see Michael B. Miller, The Bon Marché: Bourgeois Culture and the Department Store,
1869–1920 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981).

19. F. T. Marinetti: ‘‘Tactilism’’ (1924), in Marinetti, Selected Writings (New York:

Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1972), 109–112.

20. Interestingly, similar ideas were proposed by Luis Bunuel and Salvador Dalı́ as a
tactile addition to their film Un chien andalou (1929). The spectators were supposed to
receive tactile sensations to enhance the deliberately shocking scenes they witnessed on
the screen. Such ideas have since become commonplace in the theme park industry.

21. See Classen, The Color of Angels: Cosmology, Gender, and the Aesthetic Imagination
(London and New York: Routledge, 1998), 128. Classen refers to Severini’s Dancer
with Movable Parts.

22. ‘‘The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism’’ (Le Figaro, February 20, 1909), in
Marinetti, Selected Writings, 42.

23. See my ‘‘Slots of Fun, Slots of Trouble: Toward an Archaeology of Electronic

Gaming.’’

24. See Kirk Varnedoe and Adam Gopnik, High & Low: Modern Art and Popular Cul-
ture (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1990).

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25. Tom Gunning, ‘‘The Cinema of Attractions: Early Film, Its Spectator, and the
Avant-Garde,’’ in Early Cinema: Space Frame Narrative, ed. Thomas Elsaesser and
Adam Barker (London: British Film Institute, 1990), 56–62.

26. Octavio Paz, Marcel Duchamp: Appearance Stripped Bare (New York: Seaver Books,
1981), 185.

27. Varnedoe and Gopnik point to the wheel jacks used in bicycle repair shops as a
possible iconographic source for Duchamp’s piece. Whether the connection is actual or
not, the wheel jack is a highly tactile application. Varnedoe and Gopnik have also
published a photograph from 1915 showing a bicycle display (from a shop or a fair?)
with a commercial installation resembling Duchamp’s. Varnedoe and Gopnik, High &
Low, 275.

28. The complex evolution and personal background of this work has been investi-
gated by Janine Mileaf, ‘‘Between You and Me: Man Ray’s Object to Be Destroyed,’’ Art
Journal 63, no. 1 (spring 2004), 4–23. Although the work may date back to 1923,
versions with different titles were shown over the years, and Man Ray later produced
several replicas. It got the title Objet à detruire only in the early 1930s, when Man Ray
provided it with a cutout of Lee Miller’s, his lover’s, eye. Privately the work came to
signify the hypnotic spell Miller had on him, and the new title can be read as a sign of
despair or an effort to break Miller’s spell, after she had left him. Other readings are
also possible. Whether Man Ray himself smashed any of the versions is unclear; he
definitely planned doing so as a performative act. One version was smashed by a group
of protesting students in 1957, taking the suggestion of the title seriously (Mileaf,
‘‘Between You and Me,’’ 5).

29. The work can be seen in the Brancusi gallery of the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
For the yet unwritten history of tactility in art, it is worth remembering the close re-
lationship between Brancusi and Duchamp.

30. Lewis Kachur, Displaying the Marvelous: Marcel Duchamp, Salvador Dalı́, and Surre-
alist Exhibition Installations (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2001), 73–74.

31. See Peggy Guggenheim and Frederick Kiesler: The Story of Art of This Century, ed.
Susan Davidson and Philip Rylands (New York: Guggenheim Museum Publications,
2004).

32. Kachur, Displaying the Marvelous, 201.

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33. VVV, no. 2–3, 1943. In the journal the experiment is credited to Kiesler. See the
reproduction in Frederick Kiesler: Artiste-architecte (Paris: Centre Georges Pompidou,
1996), 137.

34. Obviously this use of the peephole is another anticipation of Duchamp’s last
major work, Etant données, which he worked on for two decades in secret. This work
is far too complex to be dealt with here. Another peephole work was Duchamp’s Rayon
vert, which Kiesler installed according to Duchamp’s instructions in the Le Surrealisme
en 1947 exhibition. It was peeped at through a hole in the wall, seen through a sheet
of green gelatin sandwiched between two panes of glass.

35. See Kachur, Displaying the Marvelous.

36. Pictured in Frederick Kiesler: Artiste-architecte, 124.

37. Francis M. Naumann, Marcel Duchamp: The Art of Making Art in the Age of Mechan-
ical Reproduction (Ghent and Amsterdam: Ludion [distr. Abrams, New York], 1999),
165.

38. Laura U. Marks does not agree about the haptic visual quality of pornographic
cinema. For her, hapticity has more to do with revealing and hinting. See Marks,
Touch, 15. In this sense Tapp und Tastkino could be haptically erotic, if Valie Export
did not shatter the eroticism by the presence of her direct stare.

39. See Out of Actions, 100–101. In her work with Ulay, Abramovic also created sit-
uations that encouraged audience tactility. In Imponderabilia (1977) Ulay and Abra-
movic stood naked in the narrow entrance to the museum, facing each other. Visitors
could only enter sideways, touching their bodies; they were also forced to decide
whether to look at Abramovic or Ulay, thus making a gender-oriented choice (see
Out of Actions, 101).

40. In 2005 Abramovic performed a version of Export’s Action Pants: Genital Panic as
part of her Seven Easy Pieces, at the Guggenheim Museum, New York.

41. Ono sat motionless on a stage inviting the audience to cut off any of her clothes
with scissors. The link between Ono and Export has been made by Regina Cornwell,
‘‘Interactive Art: Touching the ‘Body in the Mind,’ ’’ Discourse 14, no. 2 (spring 1992),
206–207. Another work by Ono, Painting to Hammer a Nail (1965), originally intro-
duced in slightly different form as a series of instructions in her book Grapefruit
(1964), also featured audience tactility: the visitors were invited to hammer nails into

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a wooden panel hanging from the wall. This seems like a concrete interpretation of
Duchamp’s famous saying: ‘‘The spectator makes the picture’’ (Paz, Marcel Duchamp,
86). Other tactile works from fluxus include Ay-O’s Tactile Box (1964) and Finger
Box (1964), meant to be released as fluxus editions. The cubical boxes have holes for
the finger to penetrate. The boxes contained foam rubber.

42. For a discussion of McLuhan’s idea of television as a tactile medium in relation to

the work of David Cronenberg, see Mark Fisher, Flatline Constructs: Gothic Materialism
and Cybernetic Theory-Fiction, chapter 2.8, ‘‘Tactile Power.’’ Available online at http://
www.cinestatic.com/trans-mat/Fisher/FC2s8.htm/.

43. ‘‘Fingering the TV screen’’ had already been practiced in the early 1950s in the
popular children’s television program Winky Dink and You (CBS, 1953–57, plus a
short rerun in the 1960s), where the child was encouraged to draw on the TV screen
following the finger of the host, Jack Barry. A transparent ‘‘Magic Window’’ would be
attached to the screen, and the child would draw on it with Magic Pens. The window
and the pens could be bought as a set, as the host often reminded viewers throughout
the program.

44. A rich source of Krueger’s ideas is his book Artificial Reality II (Reading, Mass:
Addison-Wesley, 1990). About the recently rediscovered Kurenniemi, see Mika
Taanila’s remarkable DVD about his career, The Dawn of DIMI (Helsinki: Kiasma/
Kinotar, 2003).

45. Touch, Art!, Kawagoe Art Museum, January 7 to March 26, 2006. I visited the
exhibition on the opening day. It featured works by six contemporary Japanese artists.
While some of the works were genuinely tactile (meant to be touched), touching cer-
tain works was forbidden. The exhibition thus shared the problematic relationship to
touching that is often encountered in contemporary art exhibitions.

46. For more information about this ambitious project, see http://www.renga.com/
tactile/.

47. Although as an artwork, CyberSM anticipated the explosive interest in ‘‘sex

machines,’’ high-tech masturbatory devices that have arguably become one of the
most titillating forms of tactile cyberculture, albeit usually without the possibility of
teletactile communication. Examples can be easily found on the Internet.

48. Credited to Scott Brave, Andrew Dahley, and Hiroshi Ishii.

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49. For an analysis of The Surprising Spiral, see Cornwell, ‘‘Interactive Art: Touching
the ‘Body in the Mind,’ ’’ 213–214.

50. The Book of Touch, part IX, ‘‘Touch and Technology,’’ 399–447. This section is
very mixed, and only Susan Kozel’s Essay ‘‘Spacemaking: Experiences of a Virtual
Body’’ (439–446) analyzes new media art, the experience of using Paul Sermon’s Tele-
matic Dreaming.

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