Cloudy Somatics and Haptic Imagery
The paper will research and present how our somatosensory system influences our perception of imagery and how we corporally make and understand images.
Imagery and image making represent complex and multidimensional events. The perception of an image is in no case a straightforward process, but includes both physical, mental and chemical components. Through our body and all our senses of touch we continuously shape images of the world.
On the one side we have the Haptic Image, ‘calling upon the Eye to Touch’ (McTighe, p.31, 2013), that is producing sensations of touch by watching images. On the other side we have what can be called Somatic Images where the body and all its senses produce perceptive images. The Somatic Image arise where active somatic perception produces and influences image making. Much like Haptic Images, these Somatic images are not clear visions, but blurry and cloudy representations of the world. Further these cloudy somatic images represent what can be called an existential somatics, being corporally anchored and fundamentally important elements in our Life World (Merleau Ponty) and constitutional for our phenomenological being. The final paper so compares the alternative idioms of Haptic versus Somatic images to critically consider their cloudy imagery and image making.
Trish McTighe. 2013. The Haptic Aesthetic in Samuel Beckett’s Drama. Palgrave Macmillan. (p.31)
Stahl Stenslie works as an artist, curator and researcher specializing in experimental media art and interaction experiences. His aesthetic focus is on art and artistic expressions that challenge ordinary ways of perceiving the world. Through his practice he asks the questions we tend to avoid – or where the answers lie in the shadows of existence. Keywords of his practice are somaesthetics, unstable media, transgression and numinousness. The technological focus in his works is on the art of the recently possible – such as i) panhaptic communication on Smartphones, ii) somatic and immersive soundspaces, and iii) design of functional and lethal artguns, 3D printed in low-cost plastic material.
He has a PhD on Touch and Technologies from The School of Architecture and Design, Oslo, Norway. Currently he is teaching and researching as a professor in Art and Technology at Aalborg University, Denmark.
He has been exhibiting and lecturing at major international events (ISEA, DEAF, Ars Electronica, SIGGRAPH). He represented Norway at the 5th biennial in Istanbul, Turkey, co-organized 6cyberconf and won the Grand Prize of the Norwegian Council for Cultural Affairs. He has moderated various symposiums like Ars Electronica (Next Sex), ArcArt and Oslo Lux (2013).