Join us for a public presentation of our latest digital commission, Touch My Touch followed by a panel discussion.
Over the past eleven months the term ‘skin hunger’ has become an online trend, describing the feelings associated with the lack of physical touch for long periods of time. As we continue to live through the COVID-19 pandemic and its associated restrictions of social distance, feelings of loneliness due to the lack of physical contact continue to intensify prompting people world-wide to seek safe and responsible ways to mitigate these intense feelings of isolation.
Lost Connection: Can you feel my touch online? is a participatory online event that investigates the future of digital touch, the future of feeling connected and being with one another in a world that is increasingly impacted by physical separation. It aims to question what the social, personal and artistic implications are of our renewed online dependency, as well as how it affects identity, access and intimacy.
Join us as we launch our new digital participation space, The Hall, with a public presentation of Touch My Touch an explorative online experience created by artists Karen Lancel and Hermen Maat for UP Projects digital commissioning strand This is Public Space. Touch My Touch uses facial biometric monitoring technologies to facilitate a new playful touching ritual that allows you to connect with those you may be distanced from - shaping future narratives of touch, through touch. The presentation will be followed by a conversation chaired by Curator of Digital Design at the V&A in London, Natalie Kane between the artists and Professor in Performance and New Media and Director of the Centre for Intermedia and Creative Technologies at the University of Exeter, Gabriella Giannachi. They will explore both the potential and the implications of bringing touch into the digital domain.
This is the first event to be hosted in UP Project’s new online participation space, The Hall, that actively encourages a more participatory experience for online exchange and collaboration. During the event audience members will be able to influence and dictate the topics that are discussed giving them agency over the way the event plays out.
This event is free but please register now to reserve your place.
About Karen Lancel and Hermen Maat
Netherlands based art-science duo Karen Lancel and Hermen Maat are considered pioneers exploring embodied presence, privacy, empathy, and trust, in post-human bio(techno)logical entanglement with (non-)human others. They radically re-orchestrate automated control technologies, bio- feedback and social-sensory perception, to create ‘Trust-Systems’, for intimate meeting experiences and for public dialogue on resilient, AI/AE social eco- cultures. In hosted, immersive performance-installations (‘shared neuro-feedback systems’, ‘reflexive data-scapes’), audience interact through face-recognition, brain-computer, smart-textile technologies – portrayed in video-works and data- prints. Shows: ZKM, Venice Biennale 2015; Rijksmuseum Amsterdam; Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam; Ars Electronica; NABI Seoul; 2nd TASIE Millennium Museum Beijing, Transmediale Berlin; WaagSociety Amsterdam; ISEA2004- 2011-2016; Shanghai World-Expo2010. Residencies/fellowships grants awarded by Mondriaan Foundation, Banff Center, V2_Institute, TASML Tsinghua University, NWO-Netherlands, EMAP-EMARE Creative-Europe Programme. Lancel/Maat lecture, publish, teach internationally (CHI, ArtsIT, Leonardo), conducting PhD-research at TU Delft ‘Participatory-Systems-Initiative’ and at Hanze-University Groningen (Minerva Academy), where Lancel previously headed the MFA media-art program. Works are included in Digital-Canon LIMA and ZKM collections.
About Gabriella Giannachi
Gabriella Giannachi is Professor in Performance and New Media at the University of Exeter, UK. She has published a number of books including: Virtual Theatres (2004); The Politics of New Media Theatre (2007); Performing Presence: Between the Live and the Simulated, co-authored with Nick Kaye (2011); Performing Mixed Reality, co-authored with Steve Benford (2011); Archaeologies of Presence, co-edited with Michael Shanks and Nick Kaye (2012); Archive Everything (2016 and, in Italian translation, 2021) and Histories of Performance Documentation, co- edited with Jonah Westerman (2017) and is currently working on Documentation as Art: Expanded Digital Practices, co-edited with Annet Dekker (2022) and Technologies of the Self-Portrait (2022). She has written papers for a number of humanities and science journals, and has been involved in a number of AHRC, Innovate UK and RCUK funded projects in collaboration with Tate, Royal Albert Memorial Museum and Art Gallery, and LIMA.
About Natalie Kane
Natalie D Kane is a curator, writer and researcher based in London, UK. She is Curator of Digital Design at the V&A in London, and co-curator of curatorial research project Haunted Machines. Natalie is a Visiting Practitioner at the London College of Communication, and is an advisory board member of the Society of Computers and Law.
Touch My Touch (2021) by Karen Lancel and Hermen Maat is curated and commissioned by UP Projects for 'This is Public Space', with generous support from Arts Council England. It will be developed in collaboration with Lectorate Image in Context, Minerva Art Academy Groningen, University of Groningen, Delft University of Technology, Media Architecture Biennial 2021-2023, Public Art Lab Berlin. Touch My Touch is sponsored by Eagle Science and supported by The Mondriaan Fund.