Making touch visible with the suture of fantasy with virtual aesthetician in “The Best Facial Clinic”:The glitchy-score of tele-synaesthesia performance in the age of global pandemic

In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, we have been adapting as fugitives of this accidental encounter with an “untouchable” virus, while being rendered into the shared virtual arena, where our discursive bodies are situated within, embedded in and tele-commuted to. Our increasing dependence on online interaction and video conferencing during the pandemic is not only facilitating social connectedness, but also contemplating the question: How to elongate our somatosensation and echo the embodied experience of touching through the incorporeal virtual connectivity? This essay focuses on the embodied nature of tele-synaesthesia performance, its potential effect of forging a rhythmic connection from one sensuous modality to another, and the concurrent emergences of glitch and internet latency as non-verbal cues of internet-situated communication. In reference to Laura Mark’s theory of haptic visuality, where vision triggers a tactile experience in the body; Naomi Bennett’s concept of virtual touch, in which an affective sensory response of touch can be elicited through non-tactile senses, Paul Sermon’s artistic production of Telematic Quarantine (2020) and Pandemic Encounter (2020), that telepresents the stories of self (isolation), and in relation to Michel Foucault’s concept Heterotopia in the context of internet-situated performance, I examine the performance work I have been developing during lockdown since March 2020: The Best Facial (2021), supported by Centre for Digital Media Cultures Research and School of Art Postgraduate Research at University of Brighton, a number of sessions of 25-minute 1-to-1 participatory tele-synaesthesia performances that take place on Zoom, where I become a virtual aesthetician and use telepresence to perform meditative virtual facial tactics, and to make tele-contact improvisation upon the surface of the participant’s face to trigger tactile experiences through haptic visuality, virtual touching, and auditory fantasization

Affective Medicine: a review of Affective Computing efforts in Medical Informatics

Background: Affective computing (AC) is concerned with emotional interactions performed with and through computers. It is defined as “computing that relates to, arises from, or deliberately influences emotions”. AC enables investigation and understanding of the relation between human emotions and health as well as application of assistive and useful technologies in the medical domain. Objectives: 1) To review the general state of the art in AC and its applications in medicine, and 2) to establish synergies between the research communities of AC and medical informatics. Methods: Aspects related to the human affective state as a determinant of the human health are discussed, coupled with an illustration of significant AC research and related literature output. Moreover, affective communication channels are described and their range of application fields is explored through illustrative examples. Results: The presented conferences, European research projects and research publications illustrate the recent increase of interest in the AC area by the medical community. Tele-home healthcare, AmI, ubiquitous monitoring, e-learning and virtual communities with emotionally expressive characters for elderly or impaired people are few areas where the potential of AC has been realized and applications have emerged. Conclusions: A number of gaps can potentially be overcome through the synergy of AC and medical informatics. The application of AC technologies parallels the advancement of the existing state of the art and the introduction of new methods. The amount of work and projects reviewed in this paper witness an ambitious and optimistic synergetic future of the affective medicine field

The telematic dress: Evolving garments and distributed proprioception in streaming media and fashion performance

Centered around several short films from streaming performances created in 2005, this paper explores new ideas for movement technologies and garment design in an arts and digital research context. The "telematic dress" project, developed at the DAP Lab in Nottingham, involves transdisciplinary intersections between fashion and live performance, interactive system architecture, electronic textiles, wearable technologies, choreography, and anthropology. The concept on an evolving garment design that is materialized (moved) in live performance originates from DAP Lab's experimentation with telematics and distributed media (http://art.ntu.ac. uk/performance_research/birringer/dap.htm] addressing "connective tissues" through a study of perception/proprioception in the wearer (tactile sensory processing) and the dancer/designer/viewer relationship. This study is conducted as cross-cultural communication with online performance partners in Europe, the US, Brazil and Japan. The inter-active space is predicated on transcultural questions: how does the movement with an evolving design and wearable interactive sensors travel, how does movement - and capturing of movement - allow the design to emerge toward a garment statement, and how are bodies-in-relation-to sensory fabrics affected by the multidimensional kinesthetics of a media-rich, responsive environment

A fabric-based approach for wearable haptics

In recent years, wearable haptic systems (WHS) have gained increasing attention as a novel and exciting paradigm for human-robot interaction (HRI).These systems can be worn by users, carried around, and integrated in their everyday lives, thus enabling a more natural manner to deliver tactile cues.At the same time, the design of these types of devices presents new issues: the challenge is the correct identification of design guidelines, with the two-fold goal of minimizing system encumbrance and increasing the effectiveness and naturalness of stimulus delivery.Fabrics can represent a viable solution to tackle these issues.They are specifically thought “to be worn”, and could be the key ingredient to develop wearable haptic interfaces conceived for a more natural HRI.In this paper, the author will review some examples of fabric-based WHS that can be applied to different body locations, and elicit different haptic perceptions for different application fields.Perspective and future developments of this approach will be discussed

Immediation|toward the selfless other?

One should hear the calling of two hyperbolic selfs within this questioning concerning what I would propose to call here the desire for panop-tech-clair-voyance: Selfless interpreted as an infinite reactivity (machinery) Selfless interpreted as an infinite responsibility (agency

MeTA: Mediated Touch and Affect

The main aim of this first workshop on Mediated Touch and Affect (MeTA) is to bring together researchers from diverse communities, such as affective computing, hap tics, augmented reality, communication, design, psychology, human-robot interaction, and telepresence. The goal is to discuss the current state of research on mediated touch and affect and to formulate a research agenda for future directions in research on aspects of the touch-technology-affect triangle

Calming Effects of Touch in Human, Animal, and Robotic Interaction—Scientific State-of-the-Art and Technical Advances

Small everyday gestures such as a tap on the shoulder can affect the way humans feel and act. Touch can have a calming effect and alter the way stress is handled, thereby promoting mental and physical health. Due to current technical advances and the growing role of intelligent robots in households and healthcare, recent research also addressed the potential of robotic touch for stress reduction. In addition, touch by non-human agents such as animals or inanimate objects may have a calming effect. This conceptual article will review a selection of the most relevant studies reporting the physiological, hormonal, neural, and subjective effects of touch on stress, arousal, and negative affect. Robotic systems capable of non-social touch will be assessed together with control strategies and sensor technologies. Parallels and differences of human-to-human touch and human-to-non-human touch will be discussed. We propose that, under appropriate conditions, touch can act as (social) signal for safety, even when the interaction partner is an animal or a machine. We will also outline potential directions for future research and clinical relevance. Thereby, this review can provide a foundation for further investigations into the beneficial contribution of touch by different agents to regulate negative affect and arousal in humans

Broadcasting the body: affect, embodiment and bodily excess on contemporary television

In recent years television has seen a notable increase in evocative images of the human body subject to exploration and manipulation.Taking the increasing viscerality of television’s body images as a starting point, the work presented in this thesis asserts the importance of considering television viewing as an embodied experience. Through a focus on displays of the body across a range of television formats this thesis demonstrates the significance and complexity of viewers’ affective and embodied engagements with the medium and offers an alternative to accounts of television which are focussed only on the visual, narrative or semiotic aspects of television aesthetics. This work challenges approaches to television which understand the pleasures of looking at the body as simply an exercise in power by considering the role of the body in fostering the sharing of affect, specifically through feelings of intimacy, shame and erotic pleasure. Additionally, the research presented here accounts for and situates the tendency toward bodily display that I have described in terms of traditional television aesthetics and in relation to conditions within the television industry in the United States and the United Kingdom. Rather than considering the trend toward exposing the body as a divergence from traditional television, this thesis argues that body-oriented television is a distinctly televisual phenomenon, one that implicates the bodies onscreen and the bodies of viewers located in domestic space in its attempts to breach the limitations of the screen, making viewers feel both intimately and viscerally connected to the people, characters and onscreen worlds that television constructs for us. The methodological approach taken in this thesis is based on close textual analysis informed by a focus on affect and embodiment. This thesis relies on the author’s own embodied engagement with televisual texts as well as detailed formal analyses of the programmes themselves. In order to understand the place of explicit body images on television this thesis engages with a broad range of contemporary debates in the field of television studies and with the cannon of television studies. This thesis is also deeply informed by writing about affect developed in film studies and studies of reality television. This thesis is structured around a set of case studies which each explore different dimensions of the trend toward bodily excess across a broad range of genres including reality television, science programming and the drama series. The chapters in this thesis are organised around four tendencies or modes related to traditional television aesthetics: Intimacy, community, public education and melodrama. Each of these case studies examines how the affective body capitalises upon and extends the traditional pleasures of television through an affective appeal to the body

MINDtouch: Embodied mobile media ephemeral transference

Copyright @ 2013 ISAST.This article reviews discoveries that emerged from the author's MINDtouch media research project, in which a mobile device was repurposed for visual and non-verbal communication through gestural and visual mobile expressivity. The work revealed new insights from emerging mobile media and participatory performance practices. The author contextualizes her media research on mobile video and networked performance alongside relevant discourse on presence and the embodiment of technology. From the research, an intimate, phenomenological and visual form of mobile expression has emerged. This form has reconfigured the communication device from voice and text/SMS only to a visual and synesthetic mode for deeper expression