“Touched, A Penumbra Keyboard Projection” presented by Sermon

Symposium:

• ISEA2019: 25th International Symposium on Electronic Art

• Installations

• Touched, A Penumbra Keyboard Projection

• Paul Sermon

Venue(s):

• Asia Culture Center (ACC), Gwangju, South Korea

• The underlying research for this paper recalls the development and presentation of telepresent installations ‘Telematic Dreaming’ and ‘The Telematic Séance’ from 1993. Twenty-five years on I produced the installation ‘Touched’, exhibited in the Digital Encounters Show for the British Science Festival in 2017. Technically, ‘Touched’ worked in exactly the same way as ‘The Telematic Séance’, its layering of keyboard projection, text and image explores a new telematic experience of intimacy where the meaning of the type becomes dependent on the richness of touch. The paper compares this with Myron Krueger’s founding ‘Metaplay’ experiments in the late 1970s involving touching hands on a telepresent screen and the findings of the proprioceptive ‘Rubber Hand Illusion’ developed by Psychologists Matthew Botvinick and Jonathan Cohen. These comparisons concur with the phenomenological outcomes participants experienced in ‘Touched’ where a greater sense of empathy emerges through a shared space of mutual presence.

Category:

• Paper
• Short Paper