Playlist:

Touch

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In this month's Playlist we present a selection of videos that use touch to explore a range of different themes. Featuring: Claire Hope, Victoria Lucas, Anna Flemming and Ingrid Berthon-Moinen.

 


Claire Hope, Contact, 2016.

 

In 'Contact' female actors and students explore affectionate gestures of attachment. Beginning by touching hands with hands, in a way that draws on depictions of closeness in cinema, the women’s interactions become increasingly creative as ‘Contact’ aims to depict, and imaginatively extend, the kind of bodily inventiveness often witnessed between attached people. Conversations with the actors about their experiences of performing attachment, and of making ‘contact’ with other actors in film and theatre productions, overlay or disrupt the footage of their interactions with the students. ‘Contact’ creates a dialogue between the representation of close relationships in visual culture and the political potential of reframing creativity between attached people as forms of collaboration and agency.

 

Check out Claire's profile here

 


Victoria Lucas, Poke, 2011.

 

Poke is an interactive touchscreen artwork permanently situated in the Wilberforce Health Centre, Hull. The audience is presented with the human eye, which seems to passively gaze at them until it is touched. As the viewer’s finger touches the screen, the eye suddenly reacts; the eyelid closing then opening. The work engages with the interplay between humans and technology as creatures and instruments of time.

Poke was commissioned by NHS Hull through a residency with Digital Media Labs in 2009. It can be found in the main reception atruim at the new Wilberforce Health Centre on Storey Street, Hull City Centre.

 

Check out Victoria's profile here

 


Anna Flemming, Haptic Skin, 2019.

 

I’m desperate to feel something, but not just anything, in fact, often I want to feel less in order to feel something better. With gloves on, our hands are protected, whether it is from harmful substances or from cold weather conditions. Often gloves give us a feeling of safety, but perhaps for some they give pleasure. If we could grow a second skin, a protective, different skin, a skin that goes beyond ‘nature’, naturalism and its rigid binaries, perhaps we could take on a subjecthood that worries less about being an essential human. For those who have ever been made to feel alienated, those who feel chronic pain, perhaps we need to develop a better mode of feeling, a haptic referral from screen to body, opening up alternative sensations that transform ourselves into whatever we desire.

 

Check out Anna's profile here

 


Ingrid Berthon-Moine, i Touch, 2011.

 

i Touch questions the evolution of the dissemination of pornography and its consequences on the representation of sexuality.

It is now more than ever tied with technology and discourses of consumerism and hedonism. In the XXIst century, porn can now easily be consumed in a private environment within a public space. Propagated by new technical popular forms of communication such as internet and mobile phones, the increased visibility of porn shapes social interactions and the creation of communities.

i Touch raises questions of accessibility and the way this is shaping our sexual behaviour, it also engages in issues surrounding gender representation, the real, culture and commerce.

 

Check out Ingrid's profile here