The Sensing Body in the Visual Arts: Making and Experiencing Sculpture by Rosalyn Driscoll

Author:Rosalyn Driscoll
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury

7

Sensible and Sensitive

The most remarkable aspect of the haptic sense is that when I touch I am also touched. This reciprocity raises the stakes in our interchange with the world around us. I am engaged and not separate, impacted, and not aloof. When I meet a sculpture with my hand, the sculpture meets me with its mass, substance, and weight. I give and receive. I affect it and am affected by it.

Mandayam Srinivasan, founder of the Laboratory for Human and Machine Haptics at MIT, known as the Touch Lab, describes this reciprocity in the language of physics, as the interaction of two forces. Touching brings me by definition into direct contact with other bodies, objects, or environments, creating a connection that flows in both directions regardless of who or what initiates the contact. It may seem as if I am active and the object is inert, but two forces are in play: my force and the force of the object I am touching. When I touch a table, the table also touches me. If my force is greater than the table’s, I make it move. If the table’s force is greater than mine, it remains where it is. If my force is greater than the coherence of sand, I draw a line in it. If I press hard on concrete, my skin yields. However the forces resolve, they remain in dynamic reciprocity.

David Katz examines this reciprocity in psychophysical terms. He distributes each sense on a continuum between subjective and objective poles. His understanding of the two terms is quite specific. By subjective, he means that our impressions of the object are infused with sensations we feel in the act of perceiving; objective means that the object seems independent of our perceptual processes because we have few or no sensations. Sight hovers near the objective pole. The bodily sensations involved in seeing are so subtle, swift, and effortless that we rarely feel them. What we see is projected as existing outside ourselves and beyond the moment of conscious perception. Moving along the continuum, hearing is not quite as objective as sight; sounds seem to emanate from their source, but we can sometimes feel sounds in our bodies, especially loud ones. Taste and smell remain closer to the subjective pole, though they can move either way depending on the context; everyone has had the experience of smell triggering a memory, which is a completely subjective response. Taste allows us to identify what we are eating and also produces sensations such as sweet, sour, bitter, salty, or hot.

Touch alone can operate anywhere on the continuum between subjective and objective impressions. Touching generates sensations we can easily feel on the skin or within the body (subjective). These sensations inform our impression of the object (objective). Touch is a blend of subjective and objective impressions—impressions flowing from the object and from our sensations. We can focus our attention anywhere along this continuum. We can attend to the object or to our sensations or to some mixture of the two (Katz, 1989, 40–42).

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.