STARVED TOUCH
Sketch or, What’s in a touch?
BY Tammuz Frankel ILLUSTRATION Sylvia Atwood DESIGN Daniel Navratil
Each partner dons a wristband equipped with a pulsating motor and a touchpad; taps on one are registered in real time on the other through vibrations. The website proudly promises to “close the distance” between loved ones, with one quote reading, “Touch your wrist…Touch their heart.” Released only a month before the United States fully began to feel the brunt of the pandemic, the Bond Touch Bracelet’s timing could not have been better. Whereas many other portable technologies (e.g., smartphones) suffered decreases in sales, smartwatches experienced an unexpected boom. But smartwatch sales were eclipsed by the sales of another vibrating technology— sex toys. In June, the New York Times reported that Adam and Eve, one of the largest online sex retailers, saw 30 percent more sales at the beginning of the pandemic than over the same period the previous year; smaller direct-to-consumer companies, like the Wow Tech Group, saw 200 percent more sales in April 2020 as compared with April 2019. Even reporting these statistics, I feel a tinge of embarrassment. But I think this goes beyond decorum regarding sex—after all, I find myself constraining even the most mundane forms of self-touch (fixing hair, picking at a scab) to private activity. Perhaps it is because I feel ashamed that I focus on myself when I should instead be focused on others. Or, maybe the real shame comes not from guilt displaced onto others, but my inability to displace myself from myself: faced with the inescapability of my embodiment, flesh on flesh, I often turn the Zoom camera off if I need to scratch an itch.
At their spring 2016 “Worldwide Developers Conference” release event, even Apple seemed skeptical. Nearing the end of his presentation on the new iOS 10, vice president Craig Federighi handed the stage over to Bethany Bongiorno and Imran Chaudhri, a software engineering duo turned married couple. Their role was to demonstrate features in the updated Messages app—larger emojis, animated message effects, etc. And yet, even before their visuals momentarily crashed, something was off. The demo imagined the two texting with an assortment of fictional friends, but it looked more like they were rehashing a Heartbeat conversation between themselves. The two spoke in or, No touching the merchandise. a tone that vacillated between sarcasm and aloofness, appearing to poke fun at each other for using the very In the first month of stay-at-home orders, I wrote in my features they were there to promote. When Bongiorno Notes app: “Wonder if I’m getting better at watching demonstrated the “gentle” effect (which animates the movies.” Barely leaving my home for weeks at the message as slowly filling the SMS bubble), Chaudhri beginning of the pandemic, films constituted the outer sarcastically chimed, “Sooo great, Bethany”; when limits of my experience. During that period, it really Chaudri used the “slam” effect (a stomping animation did feel as if the images on the screen were richer, the that forces the other SMS bubbles to shake), Bongiorno colors bolder, the narratives more moving. As corny as interjected, “I think you overuse that one a little bit, such constructions have always sounded to me, I felt I’m just going to say it.” These quips read as thinly like I was truly able to escape into the world of cinema. veiled complaints about their intimate lives. It was as And yet, this hyperawareness was not necessarily if, despite their mockery, the grammar of the software a preferable mode of engagement. As focused as I had infiltrated the way in which they articulated their was on small details, so too was I easily distracted by feelings to each other. minutiae. More specifically, I felt that I was attuned Of all the software updates, perhaps the most in a way that I had never been before to proximity significant change was the introduction of Digital between characters. Crowd scenes all of a sudden felt Touch. Designed as a tie-in to the new Apple Watch, like cesspools for viral infection; even dialogue closer Digital Touch promised a new form of communica- than six feet apart seemed risky. Watching Jonathan tion based on six new gestures: sketch, tap, heartbeat, Glazer’s Under the Skin for the first time, I remember fireball, kiss, and broken heart. For each Digital Touch, being more horrified by the scenes in which Glasgow the sent message replays the same series of signs/ locals step into Scarlett Johansson’s car than the scenes vibrations with the same timing, as if to simulate the where she quite literally devours them. I no longer see sender reaching out through the phone and touching movies with the same degree of definition. But I still find myself wincing every time characters touch. the recipient. When digital touch was first released, I thought it was useless and rather inane; for the most part, I only Fireball sent digital touch messages by accident, my finger or, Touch me! slipping as I went to send a regular text. But as the pandemic began and more of my relationships moved In 1968, VALIE EXPORT unveiled her performance entirely online, I found myself reaching for digital touch art project, “Tap and Touch Cinema.” In the piece, to enhance conversations with friends and family that the Austrian artist wore a Styrofoam box covering her were far away. It is not lost on me that “digital touch” naked upper body, inviting male passersby to touch is also a play on words, coming from the Latin digitus, her breasts through a curtained opening. EXPORT is meaning finger—in this sense, every touch is digital. often identified as having prefigured feminist media In much the same way, Apple’s Digital Touch offers critics who theorize the passivity of women’s bodies in a venue for considering the way in which technology cinema as sites for the projection of fantasy (i.e., the more generally rescripts communication and recon“male gaze”). EXPORT is at once the actor and director figures our relationships to sense. The air of irony that of her “cinema,” hailing the spectator with the provocaaccompanied my first forays into Digital Touch has not tion, “Touch me!” On the most basic level, EXPORT’s disappeared, but increasingly I feel that digital touches performance takes familiar tropes in cinema and accelhave left a mark on the way in which I relate to others. erates them to the point of ridicule. But on a deeper level, the performance subversively redefines the field Tap of desire: whereas cinema’s assumed male viewer or, Where would you like to be touched? could only sit and watch, the performance introduces a new sensory dimension. The Bond Touch Bracelet enables long distance EXPORT described herself as staging the first couples to touch one another, even when far apart. “immediate women’s film.” Indeed, there is something
THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT
intuitively more “immediate” and trustworthy about the tactile: we perceive images moments later than they are formed, while in touch we are seemingly able to foreshorten any such gap. But in identifying her project as itself a mode of “Cinema,” EXPORT makes a more suggestive phenomenological claim: that every sight is already an act of touch. Looking at photographs of “Tap and Touch Cinema” for the first time this year, I was just as struck by what felt relevant in the moment (the artwork’s critique of the nonconsensual nature of the gaze) as what seemed altogether disjunct. It is arguably impossible to capture any performance art piece entirely through photography. But even beyond these aspects of the performance degraded through documentation, I was confronted by effects that are more generally unavailable today—the scandalized and confused faces of the crowd, the public space of the street, touch as a medium of artistic transmission. It felt like my sense of touch had been anesthetized.
Kiss or, What happens when the touched touches back? In a chapter titled “The Intertwining—The Chiasm” of the posthumously published The Visible and the Invisible (1968), philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty forwards a theoretical overview of perception. For Merleau-Ponty, there is a certain tangibility to sight: in seeing, one projects outwards and feels the world around them. The word “flesh” comes to refer not just to human bodies, but what emerges between seer and seen. He deploys the metaphor of a handshake to suggest that there is a certain reversibility (what he calls a chiasm) inherent in the perceptive act—that is, in seeing, we imagine ourselves as seen, just as in touching, we feel ourselves being touched. Merleau-Ponty’s notion of intercorporeity (a connecting and intertwining of body) should be reassuring during this period of unmooring: it describes the interpersonal as not constituted by gaps, but instead by plenitude and connectivity. But as I drift from day to day, assignment to assignment, text to text, I feel that I am most of all aware of what is lost, what lies outside of flesh, what remains left over of touch.
Broken Heart or, Can you touch something that isn’t there? There has been a preponderance of thinkpieces about art during the pandemic, most of which center around some sense of mourning or loss. And a lot has been lost, from audiences in theaters to crowds in museums—to say nothing of the loss of lives and jobs. At the same time, there is a tendency to monumentalize loss, as in the case of the photographs of emptied city streets that predominated social media in the beginning of nationwide stay-at-home orders. But as these feelings persist even as we crawl back towards normalcy, I increasingly suspect that the sense of mourning comes not from the feeling of no longer having access to spaces that we once did, but instead to a discomfort that we have never had full possession of these spaces. The same seems true for touch. In an article published in e-flux in December 2019, Tina Campt defines touch as “the feeling generated by contact of an item /with the exterior of the skin; / to come so close to as to be or come into contact with it.” Under this definition, touch is merely a symptom of the imprecisely defined “contact” (“so close to as to be”). Like Zeno’s dichotomy paradox—to run from point a to point b you have to go halfway between point a and point b, and so forth—it is as if the space between the skin and the item is infinitely divisible and thus intractable. I had assumed that touch figured so prominently into my existence because it is now more distant than it was before. But maybe touch was never truly available in art, in media, in technology, but now more than ever feels like it ought to be. TAMMUZ FRANKEL B’22 feels felt.
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