Sensing Art: Touch and Object-Based Research

VENUE: Online via Zoom (Techne Zoom account)

PARTICIPANTS: 15 to 25 participants max. – UK BASED

DATE AND TIME: 26th April 2021

DEADLINE FOR THE SUBSCRIPTION TO THE EVENT: 19th April 2021

DESCRIPTION OF THE EVENT:

Is vision the most important sense for analysing an artistic object? How much do the other senses, particularly touch, come into play to increase self-awareness and enhance the experience of an artwork? What is lost from our research when we have no tactile access to the objects we work with? And how can we reconcile the increasing popularity of working with objects, when those objects are so often unreachable, when tactile interaction is more often than not, impossible? This workshop presents an opportunity to explore the concept of tactile interaction with artistic objects, and to think about how we might develop new tools to overcome a lack of touch in our work and construct a more rounded sensory approach. We aim not only to address these questions but also to pilot a new approach, one which might provide us with a different way of describing the artistic object by means of a language that is not centred on vision and which defies and challenges the sensory hierarchy. This workshop is open to PhD students of all disciplines, focusing in particular on those who work with artworks or artefacts where tactile interaction is impossible or who are interested in object-based research. The workshop will be participatory and discussion-based and will include the analysis of objects that will be sent out in advance to participant’s homes. This being the case, the workshop will only be accessible to people currently based in the UK.

Requested reading materials attached to this page.

We want this event to be as accessible as possible so if you have any special requirements needed to access this event, please let us know. The event will be live captioned.

In order to give us time to send you the materials, please subscribe to the event by the 19th of April.

The event will be recorded for internal use.

SCHEDULE:

11:00 – 11:15 Introduction

11:15 – 12:15 Conversation and collecting of ideas: participatory.

The discussion will focus on the analysis of a few articles that we will send to the participants via e-mail about two weeks before the event. This highly interactive dialogue will create the frame for the subsequent activities.

12:15 – 12:45 Lunch break.

12:45 – 13:45 First workshop: Tactile stimuli and the fullness of the artistic experience.

Through the objects and images sent by mail we will try to understand how multisensory, and in particular tactile interaction, with common objects could help us better understand the unreachable objects we work with.

13:45 – 14:45 Second workshop: audio-descriptions.

During this activity the participants will challenge themselves with the audio-description of an artwork/object used in the previous part of the workshop. The aim is to amplify one’s self-awareness of an artistic object employing audio description as a means to achieve it.

14:45 – 15:00 Conclusion.

After the subscription to the event via Eventbrite please send us an e-mail with your address to Martina.Borghi.2017@live.rhul.ac.uk for receiving the objects for the workshop at home.