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Materiality and the senses

Media theorist Laura Marks developes a formulation about a new form of seeing: Haptic visuality.

In her analysis of this concept, she starts from making a distinction between two forms of vision: Optical visuality and haptic visuality.

She describes haptic visuality as a kind of seeing that uses the eye like an organ of touch. This type of vision usually comes from a lack of distinction in the image. It could be due to a closer, intimate interaction that enables the viewer to focus on the surface of the thing being contemplated, dissolving the boundaries between the beholder and the thing beheld.

Otherwise, optical visuality depends on separation. We use this kind of vision for distance perception as a way to distinct forms, making solid borders between the subject and the object.

As an example of the use of these different ways of vision, we can talk about the use of optical visuality to survey a landscape whilst we use haptic visuality when we focus on the patterns of some cloth, embracing the dissolution of shapes in a combination of yielding and mutual identification, losing the sense of distance but not losing ourselves in the process.

Both conditions are necessary to conform vision and they offer two separated methods of analysis: Criticisim and haptic criticism.

If criticism is observing something in order to form an opinion of it, in an objective way, haptic criticism implies a more subjective evaluation of the objects by relaying on one’s sensory impressions. In other words, the viewer’s body is more involved in the process of seeing and it allows a transformation in the subject. The use of this kind of criticism can be useful as a way to confront our cultural tendency to take a distance.

Nowadays there is an increasingly tendency towards the haptic image in fields like media art, cinema, video games or advertising.

Some of the most widely used techniques to create haptic images are the speeding up of footage, changes in focal lenght or underexposure among others. These images invite the viewer to immerse in a fully sensorial experience.

As an example of haptic visuality in art installation, we might note the work of Nicolas Clauss “Somnambules” which combines haptic visuality with interactive and responsive media:

http://www.somnambules.net/english/menu.htm

Claudia

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