paper – Re:place – On the Histories of Media, Art, Science and Technology, Second International Conference, Berlin, 15-18 November, 2007

Karl Hansson, Ph. D., Department of Communication and Information, Hypermedia Studies, University of Skövde, Sweden.

title: Haptic Connections - On Hapticality and the History of Visual Media

This paper is about some aspects of the relationship between moving images and the sense of touch. More generally I will be talking about the relationship between media history and the senses, with special attention to the concept of the haptic. The coming of cinema as well as the coming of digital media some hundred years later seem to be accompanied by an intensification and rearticulation of the role of the senses in cinematic and cultural experience. Why is this so and what may a closer look at the senses in the history of visual media have to tell us about the period-building strategies and methodologies of art and media history?

Why for example is there a focus on sensorial experience in late 19th century as well as in late 20th century? How dependent are the categories of modernity and post-modernity on an implicit (or sometimes explicit) periodization of the senses? May hapticality be understood as a marker of transitional periods (in relation to media change)?

I believe that recent debates on the haptic are symptomatic for a renewed interest in the senses in relation to moving images, an interest brought around to a large extent due to the proliferation of new digital media. A more nuanced understanding of how periodization relates to haptic visuality might be used to reinforce or confirm already established categories and histories, but it may also be used to destabilize existing periodizations and showing possibly ignored connections.

I do not claim any exhaustivity in this matter, but to start I’ve done a minor survey of different universities, research centres and individual scholars in different parts of the world and there seems to be an increasing number interested in the senses the last 10-15 years and I’ve often found a combination of mediality and sensoriality connected in various ways, not seldom as a part of arguments distinguishing different media periods. Just to mention a few of the more elaborate projects you have the intersenses issues of Leonardo journal from 2001, the book series from Bergs publishers on the five senses from the last three years, a lot of publications from MIT Press by Mark B.N. Hansen, Bernadette Wegenstein and others, also from the last five years, and there has been several major conferences on the topic, all stressing various connections between intermediality and intersensoriality. One question this paper would entail for further elaboration is of course a more thorough survey and study of these projects and how they connect and interrelate.

So far, I think it’s fair to say that one question stands out in these debates and it is the question of media technology, both as an instigator and as a certain area of interest. For now, in this paper, I would simply like to point out this tendency as something worth investigation in relation to periodization, and look a bit more closely at the role played by one the senses, namely the sense of touch and the idea of the haptic.

There are I think a number of haptic connections that could be made between the two last turn of centuries, between the periodizations of modernity and postmodernity, between the analogue and the digital. At the turn of the century 1800/1900 we have of course a lot of well know discussions regarding the new sensorial landscape of electricity, visual advertising, moving images and new architectural spectacles. I terms of theoretical discussions we have for example Riegl and Bergson at the time, somewhat later Benjamin of course and now contemporary scholars as Jonathan Crary or Mary Anne Doane and many others dealing in retrospect with this period. If we turn quickly to the turn of the century 1900/2000 we have for example the work done by Mark B.N. Hansen, Laura U. Marks, Bernadette Wegenstein, and artists such as Bill Viola, just to mention one with an explicit interest in bodily experience of visual material. Here we have a lot of possible connections between characterizations of modernity and post-modernity. Questions of new speed in transportation and communication as well as cultural expressions are to some extent captured and analysed with new visual technologies during the late 19th and the beginning of the 20th century, and there are similar tendencies in our contemporary visual culture.

This might also be part of a tendency where media specificity loses in relevance and the bodily experience of the viewer takes on a more prominent role in the experience, at least as far as the theoretical framework is concerned. And this is the main reason for Mark Hansen when he tries to redefine the concept of the digital image. He summarizes the displacement like this: ”Simply put, as media lose their material specificity, the body takes on a more prominent function as a selective processor of information.”

There is with some certainty an increase in the academic interest in the senses and the body in medial expression and experiences. One is tempted to say that periods of media displacements and change tend to reconnect to a larger extent to the bodily and the sensorial just because one can find some solid ground or common denominator to stand on. A kind of continuity that might actually become stronger the more integrated, dissolved or unspecific media become. Many scholars point out that the time around the turn of the century 1800/1900 was an especially intense period of media change and then as now there was also a specific interest in the embodiment of media. Well know examples are the many chronophotographic studies of bodies in movements, or Alois Riegl’s discussions on the haptic, or perhaps most obvious in the philosophical work of Henri Bergson. Elsewhere I have show how this kind of Bergsonism was important for the work of Jean Epstein and how it gains a new relevance in the work of Bill Viola, and later, more importantly for this context, Mark B.N. Hansen’s claims a ”Bergsonist vocation” as a crucial standpoint for many artists working with digital media today.

To understand the implications of the haptic in art historical terms a useful starting point is art historian Alois Riegl and his distinction between the haptic and the optic. He made this distinction some different works from late 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century. The concepts where inspired by an influential essay by artist Adolf von Hildebrand, where he described different views as ”near” and ”distant”. Riegl builds on this and describes the near or haptic as analogous with the sense of touch, where you have to do a mental syntethisation of a series of discontinuous sensory impressions. The distant or optic is on the other side precisely distant and offers an overview of objects in a space. This is of course a rough outline, but what’s important here is that the haptic for Riegl is still a mode of vision and do not involve any direct bodily contact (in our normal use of the term).

Riegl therefore establishes a distinction between the tactile and the haptic, where the tactile is bound up with the fingers and physical touch, but where the haptic is a way of seeing. And haptic space is not necessarily one that invites you to physically touch it, but a mode of vision that involves the sense of touch.

A closer, but brief look at three more recent examples will show how the concepts of hapticality and tactility might be used to distinguish different periods or tendencies in moving image culture and the history of visual media.

First example: Laura U. Marks that in the book Touch from 2002 has gone through a large amount of video art and experimental film and one conclusion she arrives at is that more and more artist are starting to explore the haptic properties of the video medium. She writes that: ”Many of these works seem to express a longing for a multisensory experience that pushes beyond the audiovisual properties of the medium.”

Marks uses the haptic to designate a mode of vision that ”moves on the surface plane of the screen for some time before the viewer realizes what it is she is beholding.” She argues that ”video haptics” only gradually, if ever, seeks figuration, something you in other terms could describe as a space between abstraction and photographic representation or indexicality. An important source or starting point for many haptic video works is the electronic malleability of the medium, possible when it becomes easier to manipulate moving images.

Second example: Mark B.N. Hansen has a different take on the question and he picks up the concept of haptic space in an analysis of media artists like Jeffrey Shaw and Bill Viola. In the book New Philosophy for New Media he writes for example about the installations of Bill Viola from The Passions series from 2000 and 2001 and sees a possibility in digital technologies (which Viola used for these pieces) because the extreme slow motion and high resolution makes the viewer feels things the they cannot actually see. Hansen argues that Viola ”charges” the pictures with impressions that normal perception cannot register, but which we can still feel in our bodies. And therefore they activate a kind of haptic space. Hansen sums it up like this: ”Viola’s aesthetic experimentation with new media intensifies the now by literally overloading it with stimuli (units of information) that are properly imperceptible (i.e. imperceptible to natural perception).” Hansen writes on Violas Passions series and what distinguishes these works is the use of extreme slow motion, where the movement is barely perceptible. Their form, as you can see, also places them in a border zone between stillness and movement, between painting and video. Most of these works show human bodies and faces and Hansen builds his argument partly on psychology and different theories on how we perceive human faces. He argues that “…the affective shifts on the faces of the represented figures trigger richly nuanced resonances in the body of the viewer”.

This use of term differs from Marks and the most important difference is that Marks connects the haptic with the visual materiality that you actually can see in the images, whereas Hansen sees it as a visual component but non distinguishable with normal perception. But both are example where the sense of touch is used to describe and characterize a certain period in moving image history.

These two focus rightly on the haptic and not the tactile, but my third example picks up the term tactile as a way to characterize a “post-modern” visual culture. But to my mind it is useful to keep an analytical distinction between the tactile and the haptic. And it is important to separate representations of tactility (say for example close-ups of hands touching) and the kind of image manipulation that is the source of haptic visuality. A distinction that would be useful to nuance the picture Constance Classen gives of tactility in our visual culture. In The Book of Touch she writes:

[W]e live in a society of the image, a markedly visual culture, while there may be many representations of touch there is often nothing actually there to feel. The attractions of advertising, television, or the Internet, are designed to be consumed by the eyes and the ears. The endless appeal to the sense of touch one finds in contemporary visual imagery, unaccompanied as it is by actual tactile gratification, may have helped make touch the hungriest sense of postmodernity.

Classen's observation does seem adequate in relation to representations of touch and touching, but it does at the same time leave out aspects of a haptic visuality. In precisely this type of imagery that Classen mentions (advertising, music video etc.) there is very often what I’ve distinguished as a haptic visuality. Not representations of touch or any direct tactile connection, but a type of visuality that engages the sense of touch through different kinds of image manipulation. But this is nevertheless another example of how the sense of touch is used for periodization of visual material.

When Thomas Mitchell argues that "there are no visual media", as he did two years ago in the journal of visual culture, interestingly his main line of argumentation is based on a reading of the other senses as involved in making up the now so popular categorization of visual media. His argument is based mainly on the idea of all media being multisensory or mixed media. He also stresses the sense of touch as a point in case and points out the sensory ratios as an important area of research. He summarizes like this: “If all media are mixed media, they are not all mixed in the same way, with the same proportions of elements.”, and writes further that: “It is a question of specific sensory ratios that are embedded in practice, experience, tradition and technical inventions.” And despite its name visual culture is perhaps the last field of study to take the visual for granted.

There are undoubtedly different relationships between the history of visual media and the senses that I believe is worth further attention. The senses are often associated with hierarchization, but in this also lays elements for periodization. For example many of the discussion regarding media specificity also include a hierarchization and refinement of different sensory modes or faculties.

So could we say why the senses are something that keep coming up in relation to media change and what, more specifically, is their relationship to periodization?

I think one reason is that the senses quite easily can provide historical connections and therefore legitimacy, but perhaps more importantly for many humanistic scholars the senses can provide a link between the text and the context, and for example the idea of modernity in cinema studies has been so strong precisely because it provides a mean to study aesthetics and formal qualities in combination with the social, historical context, and of course the developing representational technologies.

To sum up, this paper has been mostly about pointing out an area of interest, of putting some questions. There is no simple answer on what the relationship between hapticality and the history of visual media looks like, and I’ve completely left out the more obvious periodizations based on other sensory categories such as sound or colour, or even interactivity. Another area to investigate would be the rhetoric involving the senses in other cultural contexts, such as commercials, to name one arena that seem to be of special interest. For now I would like to conclude but providing two working hypothesis: the first simply that both the modernity and post-modernity areas of interest are marked by a heightened interest in the role of the senses, the second is that a focus on hapticality could be a marker for specifically intense and rapid changes in visual media technologies. These two are of course interconnected and has the advantage of explaining the interest shown around the two last turn of centuries, but the disadvantage of still being perhaps too general and summary. The separation of the senses is a conventional and historical construction, and perhaps this separation in itself is what makes it relevant for media periodization, for as Ziegfried Zielinski recently put it: “Media are spaces of action for constructed attempts to connect what is separated”.

See for example: http://alcor.concordia.ca/~senses/ where several research projects are listed. See the book series ”Sensory formations from Berg Publishers with different volumes on different senses: www.bergpublishers.com/uk. See the writings by Bernadette Wegenstein, Mark B.N. Hansen and Ziegfried Zielinski, all on MIT Press and the writings by Laura U. Marks (primarily the book Touch – Sensuous Theory and Multisensory Media on University of Minnesota Press, 2002), the writings by Vivian Sobchack (primarily the book Carnal Thoughts – Embodiment and Moving Image Culture on University of California Press 2004), as well as the book Materializing New Media by Anna Munster, dealing with embodiment and information aesthetics. See also the journal The Senses and Society that published its first volume in 2006 and The Leonardo Journal with its theme on intersenses from 2001 that is available online.

Mark B.N. Hansen, New Philosophy for New Media (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press 2004), p. 22.

Karl Hansson, Det figurala och den rörliga bilden – Om estetik, materialitet och medieteknologi hos Jean Epstein, Bill Viola och Artintact (Stockholm: Acta Universitatis Stockholmiensis, Stockholm Cinema Studies 1, 2006).

Margaret Iversen provides a clear description of this argument in her book Alois Riegl: Art History and Theory (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press 1993).

Ibid., pp. 9-15.

This is also the use of the term picked up by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari in Mille plateaux (Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit 1980). See the chapter ”1440 – Le lisse et le strié”, pp. 592-625.

Laura U. Marks, Touch – Sensuous Theory and Multisensory Media, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 2002), p. 3.

Ibid., p. 8.

Hansen, op. cit. p. 260.

Quintet of the Astonished (2000), Quintet of Remembrance (2000), Anima (2001), Six Heads (2001) and Man of Sorrows (2001).

Hansen, op. cit. p. 261.

Constance Classen, ”Fingerprints: Writing About Touch”, in Constance Classen (ed.), The Book of Touch (Oxford: Berg Publishers 2005), p. 2

W. J.T. Mitchell, “There Are No Visual Media”, Journal of Visual Culture (8 2005; vol. 4), pp. 257-266.

Ziegfried Zielinski, Deep Time of the Media – Toward an Archeology of Hearing and Seeing (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press 2006.)