Paper short abstract:

Thresholds of Touch, a performance experiment, is a collaboration between an artist, composer & social researcher. We discuss our use of video to explore artistic embodied strategies to engage with participants by layering visual responses & reenactments to create an analytical dialogue on touch

Paper long abstract:

This presentation presents excerpts from a video that reflects on the interactive performance experiment Thresholds of Touch that took place one month before the first UK Covid-19 lockdown. The experiment was developed through a two-year interdisciplinary collaboration between the authors – a digital artist, a sound composer, and social researcher, founded on a shared interest in touch and the challenges of researching it. The performance invited participants on an expansive journey through different aspects of touch rituals, self-touch, and touching others, the environment and objects, while critically exploring thresholds of touch and touch as care. We discuss the method of the video, and the performance itself, to interrogate touch through an empathetic dialogue with our and the participants’ experiential touching bodies filtered through our disciplinary lenses. The video explores artistic embodied strategies to engage with the participants including through the layering of participant visual and written responses, our re-enactments and live-tracing of participant responses, and our spoken and written reflections to create an analytical dialogue with the performance, and as a route to newly research and attune to touch.