“Touchy-feely” presented by Phillips

This paper will explore the emergence of a post-ocular culture created by the ubiquity of lensless sensing technologies that manifest the things that lie outside of the normal frames of reference. The hegemony of the eye, which for centuries has defined how we know the world, is fading. The invisible and obscured, the infinitely big or nanoscopically small, hover on the fringes of our collective cultural perception, things we have always known were there but never witnessed. This unseeable (im)material world has traditionally languished in the domains of the paranormal or the spiritual – forces so delicate that they require a leap of faith to believe that they are actually there. Whilst our science readily embraces this domain (stumbling around in the sub-molecular dark, lurking between atoms, feeling its way through the atomic forces that bind matter) our cultural philosophy struggles to believe and clings nostalgically to lens-based media-technologies for knowing and capturing the world.