Touch/Space: The Haptic in 21st-Century Video Art

Abstract

Through the conceptual framework of the haptic, this essay charts a striking motif in much recent video art: the co-presence of a hand touching the screen and a distinctly layered spatiality. Critically deploying various notions of the haptic culled from film and media theory and perceptual psychology, Sæther discusses Trisha Baga’s low-tech 3D video Flatlands (2010) and Victoria Fu’s immersive video installation Belle Captive I (2012) and expounds a contemporary haptic space that verges between planarity and volume, between the near and far, and that exceeds the frame to enfold us. As Sæther argues, the salience of this motif points to the split between human sense perception and the networked, computational operations of 21st-century media, and the attempt to grasp this split.