The Forgotten Sense : How materials evoke tactility
(2025)
author(s): Mae Alderliesten
published in: Royal Academy of Art, The Hague
Thesis of the Royal Academy of Art, The Hague, 2022
MA Interior Architecture (INSIDE)
The most valued value of architecture, houses, interiors today is on an aesthetic level: we appreciate what we see. That can be the shape of a building or the material used. What is missing in the discourse on (interior) architecture are the other senses while they might have more impact on the users.
I find myself adding this extra step in the process of designing a space based on the user experience. While we now look at the space with hygiene and durability in mind, I wonder how to bring along this sensations into the experience of space. And how this step can provide a comforting, healing or stimulating environment.
With a series of sense enhancing objects I would like to reintroduce tactility to spaces where there is a demand for tactility through texture, touch and sensations. Choice of materials will influence how a space is experienced which in turn could affect how users deal with their emotions. As a designer, I feel the urge to address this emphasis of material choice and in this way contribute to a sensorially fulfilling experience for the user and add this extra layer of comfort/support through an exploration of materials and textures.
Spatiality and the Tactile Experience
(2025)
author(s): Anders Holst
published in: Rhythmic Music Conservatory, Copenhagen
This artistic research project reflects a deeply personal exploration of the ritualistic and symbolic aspects of music, from the perspective of my own practice a soloist. It touches on the idea that the act of creating sound is not merely a technical or performative endeavor, but a sacred, energetic exchange. The fingertips, as the primary point of contact between the musician and their instrument, are seen as a portal—an interface between the inner world of the musician and the outer world of sound, music, and the present moment.
Digitally Produced Jewellery: Tactile Qualities of a Digital Touch
(2019)
author(s): Sofia Hallik, Darja Popolitova
published in: Journal for Artistic Research
The importance of tactile contact between the artist and their jewellery has increased over the last decade. More and more artists now implement digital technologies into their work process. This raises questions about the notion of tactility, something that is usually associated as something tangible or given to touch. The authors show that there is a different sensorial mode of engagement with jewellery presented on the screen: during the 3D modelling process or 3D printing. This article aims to investigate the intangible qualities of tactility in the field of digital crafts, while focusing on the material, technical, performative, and psychological aspects. The outcomes include a set of tactile qualities evoked by screen-oriented labour and machinery production: resolution sensitivity, thin-skinned data, psycho-performative realism; and fingerprints, incompleteness and glitch.
Tactile paths : on and through notation for improvisers
(last edited: 2022)
author(s): Christopher A. Williams
connected to: Academy of Creative and Performing Arts
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
Tactile Paths: on and through Notation for Improvisers is an artistic research project that articulates and expands the nexus of notation and improvisation in contemporary and experimental music. The project interweaves direct artistic experience with insights from improvisation studies, the social sciences, philosophy, and various scholarship in the arts to reveal methodological connections among diverse artists such as Richard Barrett, Cornelius Cardew, Malcolm Goldstein, Lawrence Halprin, Bob Ostertag, Ben Patterson, and the author. By focusing on how notation is used, rather than on what it represents in an abstract sense, the author shows how written scores emerge from and feed back on ongoing improvisational processes. Thus, it is argued, they are not fixed texts whose primary purpose is to prescribe and preserve, but rather tactile paths in the improviser’s ever-crescent musical and social environment. This practice-based approach aims to lay the conceptual groundwork for theorizing and broadening the creative relevance of work whose importance to practitioners belies its marginal presence in academia and institutions.
First Draft (in Progress) Touching the surface: Concretising the image through an expansion of traditional aesthetics
(last edited: 2020)
author(s): Rosa Marouane
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
The field of aesthetics has relied on the visual as crutch for its speculation since the creation of its most fundamental texts. Whether it be through Immanuel Kant’s focus on human critique and its own influence on beauty, or Deleuze’s later texts covering the expanded Movement-image and Time-image, the experience of imagery has been reserved to those capable of sight, and more importantly, those able to testify of this act. Beginning with Jakob Von Uexküll’s ‘Umwelten’, the sensory experience of our environment becomes one formed through the combined input of multiple sensory organs and the processes used to interpret the stimuli these organs encounter. Though the focus of Von Uexküll’s Umwelten remains the visual aspect of this information package: the visual functions as dominant sense whilst the other senses are merely secondary in experiencing space; this interpretation of sensory imaging does begin to differ from what we consider to be traditional Aesthetics, in that it allows for the possibility of imagery existing in the worlds of organisms that either lack or possess higher optical processing capabilities than that of humans, thus opening the speculation on imagery to a wider field of organisms and their individual experience of the visual. Up to the 20th century however, imagery and the aesthetic studies surrounding it focus on an intangible entity, eithered layered on top of or derived from concrete form. The field of aesthetics is overdue a reconfiguration of its approach, and a new wave of aesthetics should be focussed on defying the restrictive visual realm. One proposal to an expansion of this area of research would be to incorporate an affective aspect into image production and dissemination, Affect in this case referring to Brian Massumi’s definition of the phenomenon wherein “to affect is to be affected” and the matter of affect is one of response that is neither physical nor emotional, but rather a mediation between aspects of the two, joining the virtual to the real in one fell swoop even if only temporarily. This applies to the image in the sense that it cannot be fully accessed, its surface tension never breached until either it becomes capable of affect, we become capable of affecting it, or in true Massumi-ian fashion, we develop a mutually affective relationship with imagery. Writers such as Hito Steyerl, who through her essay “In Defense of the Poor image” describes an affective relationship between the audience and image initiated by the propagation inherent to internet culture, and Tavi Meraud, who’s speculation on the surface as providing mediation between the intangible and tangible, introduces us to the touch allowing for a mediated form of seeing through an alternative sensory organ. Through these glimpses into an affective alternative to Aesthetics, we can begin to formulate further knowing that it can exist in a form that goes beyond the traditional non-affective, spectator-image binary; perhaps this can go even further to initiate a dissolution of the optical barrier to entry that imagery has until now maintained. Should the objective of Aesthetics be to further expand its own boundaries to account for an inclusion of sensory imaging into the aesthetic canon? Can imagery be perceived as a concrete, and consequently tactile phenomenon? Could this shifted interpretation of imagery bring us into contact with a concretised universally available image?
This artistic research project reflects a deeply personal exploration of the ritualistic and symbolic aspects of music, from the perspective of my own practice a soloist. It touches on the idea that the act of creating sound is not merely a technical or performative endeavor, but a sacred, energetic exchange. The fingertips, as the primary point of contact between the musician and their instrument, are seen as a portal—an interface between the inner world of the musician and the outer world of sound, music, and the present moment.open exposition comments (0)