Texture Matters: The Optical and Haptical in Media.

This project assesses the history, and the consequences, of a theoretical landscape that has been with us for over a century, namely the paradigm of the haptical and the optical. This line of reasoning proposes that, in seeing, the eye deploys the organ of touch as well as vision, and that works of art are constructed in relation to this dynamic. This three-year project argues for the importance of the tactile sense, and its corollary, texture, in the history of the visual media. The project examines film sets, costumes, and auditoria; the influence of textile collections and inventions of new textiles in relation to accounts of perception in the visual arts; the arrival of the remote control in television, and other devices; and the notion of the interface, especially as it pre-dates digital culture. Lastly, we tie this study of a distinction between tactile and optical faculties to current energetic efforts to evoke texture in digital media. The project researches the long and varied careers of these twinned ideas (in the work of Alois Riegl, Walter Benjamin, Marshall McLuhan, the Bauhaus Foundation course, and Vladimir Tatlin, among others), and evaluates their continued importance, offering an archaeology for our current fascination with media touch sensations. We organize the research into two strands: the historiography and genealogy of the haptical/optical pathway; and an investigation of key historical manifestations of texture understood as an integral part of media production, including the tactile cinema auditorium, film`s textures in motion, and touch at the interface of new media. Via these vectors of research, the project illuminates how the two terms - haptical and optical - grew from their beginnings as visual-cultural categories, primarily tied to quotidian design, architecture, sculpture, and painting, into evoking our very own new media environment. The research team, led by Univ.-Prof. Dr. Klemens Gruber, will draw on a number of significant archives, and a wealth of Austrian university know-how, as well as on the expertise of a foreign adviser, Prof. Antonia Lant, Ph.D. Workshops and a course will provide the testing ground for ideas en route, while the results will be disseminated through publications, a mid-term conference, and a website.

The research project Texture Matters: The Optical and Haptical in Media explored the theory and history of visual and haptical perception and the role of their interplay in the arts, media and material culture from the late 19th century until the present era of digital gadgets. The work of Viennese art historian Alois Riegl (18581905), who was also a curator of the carpet collection at the Austrian Museum of Applied Arts (MAK), served as the projects theoretical point of departure: It was proposed by Riegl that certain visual works of art address the sense of touch through their optical properties and thus, through the sense of sight, such haptic imagery can invoke the perception of touch. In the 20th century, the key mass media of Western societies became the visual media (photography, film, television). Nonetheless, some of the most advanced theorists of media have turned to the sense of touch to describe and analyze the potential of these media. Texture Matters studied three periods in the history of the optical/haptical relationship: First, the era from Riegl to the 1920/30s. Examples from this period include the development of touch panels at the Bauhaus that were used in its preliminary course [Vorkurs], and Walter Benjamins description of film as a tactile medium. Film theory has been inspired by the latter notion in many respects, as for example the work of the projects key researcher Antonia Lant (Haptical Cinema, 1995). The second period under consideration was the 1950s and 60s, when, as described by Marshall McLuhan, television contracted the world into the proverbial global village and the youth instinctively rediscovered their soft needs, fostered by the tactile quality of electronic media encompassing all of the senses. The third era was that of digital, mobile gadgets such as cell phones and tablets, the technological fulfilment of the optical and the haptical being united. Navigating the networks of social relationships through their fingers and eyes on a touchscreen, contemporary media users make persistent use of the haptical to make sense of their world. This has redefined the contemporary notion of interfaces as well as the role of the senses in media that are clearly no longer purely visual. By examining different materials (e.g. skin, fur, transparent plastics) and practices (e.g. stroking, weaving, cutting), the project extended the notion of the haptical and optical to aspects in the history of the sense of touch that the emergence of the touchscreen have made more apparent. By tracing the optical and the haptical through more than a century of media history, Texture matters has shown how theoretical thought and artistic/technological practice have finally come together.