Introduction
Every computer’s keyboard uniformly eliminates any bodily inscription and reduces each and every stroke to the pressing of a key, each pressing registering the same look and impress. In 1995, Ben Tibbs, a student at London’s Royal College of Art, created Font Taktile, a touch-sensitive digital typeface that allowed for the visible imprints of characters on the computer screen. These imprints correspond to both the pressure applied and the length of time a user’s finger remains on any particular key: a long, hard press results in a large black blob of a letter, while a light touch yields a vague outline of a letter. While remaining digital – its results are only visible on a computer screen – Tibbs’s device is also analog in that it translates the force and duration of each impression. Combining the haptic and the digital, Font Taktile pays homage to the sensual and bodily value of writing, which has been seemingly lost as digital technology rises in dominance (Pamminger 2002: 45–47; Jutz 2009: 208–209).
Not unlike Font Taktile, the artistic works under investigation in this article – two audio pieces and three experimental films – convey a tangible bond with the tools, machines, and processes involved in their making. The purely sonic works include Mes bronches by French sound poet Henri Chopin, who utilized the then-new tape recorder to capture his inner bodily sounds, and “Opus Putesco” from Opus Mors by Danish sound artist Jacob Kirkegaard, which features the sounds of decomposing human corpses recorded with highly sensitive microphones. As for the films, British filmmaker Vicky Smith’s Noisy Licking, Dribbling & Spitting is an exemplary work of camera-less animation. The artist manipulated the film directly by utilizing her stained tongue to imprint marks upon a transparent 16mm filmstrip, resulting not only in images but, thanks to the optical soundtrack, also sounds that spring from these oral gestures. Transit(ive) by Canadian artist Sarah Bliss depicts no pro-filmic event; her film is the result of the artist’s manual interaction with the projector lens, while the soundtrack presents a cell-phone recording of her father’s dying breath. The short sequence chosen from American filmmaker Betzy Bromberg’s feature-length film a Darkness Swallowed offers textured and barely identifiable close-ups of plants as well as a human womb. Pam Aronoff’s soundtrack for this sequence was made from an ultrasound of her own blood flow.
Sounds are frequently perceived as immaterial and fleeting entities. They seem to lack the concreteness of visual objects and a firm anchoring in the world, an assumption that might have contributed to the insufficient theorization of their material dimension. Andy Birtwistle’s Cinesonica, which draws on film and video sound, is a benchmark in recognizing sonic materiality. In his view, materiality in audiovisual practices extends beyond the medium’s physical substrate. He argues that every sound “has a material existence in space and time independent of its source. Thus, if we understand sounds to be material events or phenomena, then the notion of sonic materiality refers to the specific qualities, states, forms, and structures of those sounds” (Birtwistle 2010: 15–16).
The five case studies – briefly introduced above – all share a common feature in that they exhibit the technologically mediated human body as the source and foundation of sound and, in certain instances, of images as well. Based on these concrete examples and their theoretical contextualization, this article aims to investigate the complex relationship between materiality and hapticity. Hence, it is necessary to consider the various bodies involved in the production and reception of these works. This includes the material bodies of artists and audiences, the “body” of the respective medium, and the bodies of related technologies. The theoretical path forged in this article will first explore how performativity, understood as an operative act, is inscribed into the production of embodied sounds and images and why a dynamic understanding of material and materiality matters. This will be followed by a discussion of haptic vision and haptic listening, whereby the focus shifts to the act of reception. At the end of the introductory section, I will delve into a discussion of how the contemporary resurgence of analog technologies in general and the revival of photochemical processes, particularly in film, raise broader questions about material and materiality and what it means to return to “obsolete” artistic tools in an era dominated by the digital. The central section consists largely of in-depth analyses of the five case studies, based on close reading and listening, and on interviews with the artists to gain a detailed understanding of their working processes and their bodily interaction with the material. I am convinced that engaging with the material through embodied forms of art production and reception carries profound ethical and political implications, and I will argue this throughout the article. The concluding section will synthesize the key points and themes explored in the films and audio works and extend the discussion on how politics and ethics intersect within embodied art practices.