Touching-Making Access by Building Tactile Archives

The keys of my laptop feel warmer than my skin, and easily give in to light pressure, tap, tap. My fingers know how to find each letter in space while my palm rests gently on a metal surface. In this workshop, we will follow what our hands and bodies know about touch.

Through language and embodied practices we will disrupt the primacy of the visual and question the relationships between touch, access and digital archival practices. What you'll need? Your hands (or feet, arms, backs..) and some curiosity.

The workshop consists of two parts: We will begin by tuning into our tactile sensibilities, and write our own tactile descriptions. A tactile description puts experiences of touch into words. It communicates how it feels to touch, be touched and be in touch with a touchthing. How heavy is this thing? How cold, slippery, opulent, textured, humid is another? This is a space for trying things out with touch and with language.

Building onto our shared tactile know-how, we will then question how these tactile experiences can enter archives. Tactile worlds are lost in common digitisation processes that exclusively rely on visual representations. We will speculate towards how it could be otherwise. From my project Feeling Virtual, I will bring vibration motors and tactile VR experiments for you to try out and play with. Leaving future visions aside, we will find a plurality of answers to the question: What would a tactile digital future feel, buzz, vibrate like?

Note: Our reserved seats have now all been taken – thank you for the great interest! But not to worry: we always keep a number of seats available for spontaneous guests. So even without a reservation, you’re very welcome to come along. And if you’d like to be notified when a spot opens up, you can sign up for our waiting list.