Kunstmuseum Bochum, Kortumstraße 147
From 02–04 July 2025, the third annual conference »Sensing/Touching Virtuality« of the Collaborative Research Centre 1567 »Virtual Lifeworlds« will take place at the Kunstmuseum Bochum. This year’s conference is dedicated to the sensory and tactile potential of virtual worlds. The goal is to explore the role of virtuality as both a means and an end in the exploration, construction, and design of worlds through touch and sensory interaction.
Please register to participate: https://l.rub.de/38d05e02
What happens when we attempt to touch virtual objects? How does virtuality, in turn, touch us? How does tactility from the discrete alphabet to the Jacquard loom and electronic switches form our virtual life worlds? Which other modes of experiencing mundane aspects of virtuality through the senses and sensors are possible? How do these various modes operate, and how do they interact? To what extent is virtuality both a means and an end in the exploration, construction, and design of worlds through touch and sensory engagement? What possibilities and risks emerge from the manipulation of virtual objects and virtual environments?
These questions form the core of the thematic focus of the third annual conference oft he CRC 1567 »Virtual Lifeworlds«, which will explore questions of »Sensing/Touching Virtuality«. Whereas the visual properties of virtual lifeworlds are often highlighted in scientific analyses, the acts of sensing and touching which are central to the relation between body and affect, are less commonly considered.
A variety of micro-practices imply mediated scenarios of future forms of cooperation and living-together. These practices, along with those discourses on sensory technologies and tactility in which they are interpreted, evaluated, and constructed – whether framed as escapist or transhumanist –, play a major role in speculations about possible lifeworlds. Even when detached from different uses of media, these speculative ideas about possible lifeworlds underline the crucial role of sensing and touching as fundamental dimensions of the experience of virtuality and fascination with the virtual.
To approach the complexity of those issues more systematically, the conference program follows a logic of scaling. First, we engage with proximal phenomena, what happens close to the body (Tactile and Textile Data). Second, we address the medium range of the domestic realm of habitation and furnishing and the communal spaces and public spheres of buildings and institutions (Domestic andCommunal Environments). Third, we consider questions of survival from a global perspective (Affected and Affective Ecologies).
Touch and tangibility can be observed in the proximity of corporeal interactions with technologies of the virtual. These observations are the starting point for theoretical reflections in textile thinking or haptic media studies. However, textility does not only imply the physicalizatio nof data and interface design but also the networkedness of sensory modalities and the relation between text, image, and other data formats.
The virtual becomes the environment where it integrates into the ambience of daily routines and affordances that answer to specific needs of users. This involves attention and care, efficiency and design, as well as arrangement and comfort in virtual realms. In this context, the texture of surfaces and contact zones plays a particularly central role.
The whole range of acoustic perceptions also takes place in this medium range. The question of tactile experience as an alternative means of community building (tactile communities) in environments where care is provided for a community, is central to understand the interplay between visibility and tactility in communal environments.
Virtuality can serve as a medium to visualize the impact of human actions on a planetary scale, for example through simulations. In the virtual, however, effects can also be rendered sensible punctually; and the hope invested in this sensibility lies in the capacity to convey the ethical significance of contemporary entanglements undeniably. As problematic as the production of concernedness with the help of empathy machines may be, the endeavor still raises the important question whether sentimentality and affection can be considered a supplement to the model of instrumental rationality in science, and whether they can be propped as such with the help of media of virtuality.
Karin Harasser: Tasting skin. On cross-sensorial perception and vulnerability
The lecture takes Titian’s late painting »Marsyas« as a starting point to reflection the role of the sense of touch in the perception of taste. As the sense that most clearly addresses the issue of vulnerability, the sense of touch is intricately entangled with questions of power. With taste, on the other hand questions of incorporation come into play. Eating, being eaten and the legitimacy of pleasure is at stake. If, as biology has now established, the perception of a hot taste is achieved by tactile receptors, what does this mean for our thinking about tactility, proximity and distance, own and other?
David Parisi: »Designed for masochists«: Ideologies and Materialities of the Technohaptic Real
A recent partnership between OWO and game publisher Ubisoft attempted to bring realistic touch sensations to several of the publisher’s games, including Assassin’s Creed Mirage, The Crew Motorfest, and Ghosts of Tabor. Using OWO’s Haptic Gaming System, a shirt with 10 electrodes distributed around it, players would be able to feel everything from a gust of virtual wind to the stab of a digital knife to the rumbling of wheels on a digital racetrack. OWO’s shirt is the latest in a long series of efforts at adding realistic touch sensations to existing audiovisual media systems, a tradition that extends back at least to arcade machines of the early twentieth century (see Spear the Dragon, 1928). In this talk, I suggest that we can understand these efforts as attempts to concretize a technohaptic real: a not-quite-real tactile simulation produced through the application of computer-controlled stimuli to the various senses of touch. This technohaptic real is simultaneously a discursive and material construct. Discursively, it emerges as a product of recurring tropes in haptics marketing that elevates touch to the status of audio and visual media by promising a similar – or analogous – level of fidelity of the mediated to the real found in sound and image reproduction. Materially, it is enacted through complex stimulus mechanisms that target the tactile system in an effort to re-create the sensations produced through contact with physical objects. However, the tactile system is an impossibly variegated assemblage of nerves situated at different layers in the skin, making the precise targeting of these nerves continually challenging (see Biswas and Visell, 2019). Despite the maturity of Computer Haptics – a field of study devoted to developing and refining these stimulus mechanisms, established in the 1990s – there’s still little consensus on which stimulus mechanisms and configurations function best at enacting the technohaptic real; the OWO shirt uses electricity, the bHaptics virtual reality vest (2020) employs vibration, and the TN Games 3rd Space Vest (2007) used pockets of compressed air distributed around the torso. Each device falls necessarily short of delivering on its promise of haptic realism, with the sensations they produce instead betraying their own artifice. And while marketing rhetoric positions haptics alongside computer graphics and sound as an equal participant in the project of creating a sense of realism, technohaptic sensations depend on visual and audio cues to indicate the objects and events being represented for touch. The technohaptic real, then exists in a state of tension between its implicit critique of the inadequacy of audiovisual media and its persistent dependence on images and sounds to serve as the sensory lattice for realistic computer-generated touch.
Wanda Strauven: Textil eCoding Before/Beyond Jacquard
Following the suggestion of textile scholar Ellen Harlizius-Klück, this talk will counter the common story that the invention of the Jacquard loom was fundamental for the emergence of computational thinking and binary coding. If the Jacquard loom was able to inspire non-weavers, such as Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace, it was mainly because it visualized, by means of its punched cards, the binary basis of weaving and mechanized the scanning system that previously took place in the brains of the weavers. On the one hand, I will propose to think of weaving as a hands-on coding system in which engineering skills and hand (and digit) gestures are combined. From the earliest wrap-weighted looms and draw looms, this principle was already in play and further finds its epitome in the »radical software« work by women weavers such as Charlotte Johannesson, Pae White, and Margherita Raso. On the other hand, I will focus on other forms of textile technologies (such as sewing, cross-stitching, knitting, and embroidery), which are used as coded systems, both literally and metaphorically, as a form of hands-on activism. The screenic surface of these haptic practices becomes a »fabric of information,« which is often related to a fundamentally feminist/activist agenda. I will discuss interventions that put domestic practices on display, in the public sphere, highlighting their sensorial sense/meaning. From Annabel Nicolson’s Reel Time (1973) to Maria Lai’s Legarsi alla montagna (1981), from Maja Bajević’s Women at Work (1999-2001) to Erin M. Riley’s The Affair (2020), from Małgorzata Mirga-Tas’s Re-Enchanting the World (2022) to SOLANGE’s »as-long-as« stitched sentences (ongoing), the scope of this paper will be to map a wide range of threaded writing practices, that is, physical writing systems involving threads, touch, and texture, that invite us to shift from textile thinking to textile activism.
Stefan Kammer: Tactile/Tactful Philology
The philologist’s love of the word is not only bound to his eyes and mind. From the beginning, both his practice and his desire have had a haptic, tactile dimension, and this did not change even after the printing press began to transform manuscripts into texts. Usually, a series of philological tools indicate that and where the philologist has laid hands on his object: diacritical marks, glosses, commentaries. Sometimes a striking comparison even reveals the darker aspects of this philological tactility: After use, the manuscript rolls off the philologist’s desk like a »squeezed orange,« Richard Bentley has remarked; Walter Benjamin’s portrayal of the critic as a cannibalistic lover may be considered as a late echo of such tactile attention. My paper turns to these sides of philology on the eve of its modern career and asks to what extent they are mirrored in the controversies about the philologist’s tact around 1700.
Jessica Hemmings: Subjective and Ephemeral: the olfactory properties of cloth
Expanded sensory understanding of textiles often emphasises the role of touch. Far less frequently acknowledged is recognition of the olfactory properties of cloth. In historical examples, such as Harris Tweed and Imperial Muslin, scent offered one way to authenticate (and manipulate) associations with a textile’s production methods or origins. In literary sources, the scent of textiles can indicate an unreliable narrator – palpable only to some – or act as a powerful reminder of bodily intimacy. In contemporary examples, artists such as Ernesto Neto and Doris Salcedo deploy scent for the emotional resonance it can evoke, but viewers’ accounts of their olfactory experiences often vary dramatically. Together these examples exemplify the underestimated presence of scent in textiles, but also pose considerable challenges when attempting to capture what is arguably the most subjective and ephemeral of the senses.
Kristin Marek: »A stitch in time saves nine«. Virtus and touch in needlework and art
While Raphael’s Sistine Madonna in Dresden, known as a masterpiece of the artist as »il Divino«, becomes an icon of the Germans and, even more, a symbol of an art that can only be explained by artistic genius and Virtus, thousands of young bourgeois daughters sit at home in their parlors embroidering, knitting, sewing and lace-making. Since the 18th century, the history of needlework has above all been the history of the physical discipline and intellectual curtailment of women. A multitude of contradictory norms are associated with needlework, which virtuous girls are expected to fulfill from the earliest days of childhood: not to work, but at the same time to be busy, to sit still and yet be busy, to be concentrated but not to think. If all virtus is to be exorcized from the daughters of the bourgeoisie through needlework, virtus simultaneously becomes the central moment of artistic creativity within a patriarchal aesthetic of genius.
Against this background, the lecture explores the questions of how virtus (which originally meant male prowess) and, derived from this, virtuality in art actually stand in contrast to mere manual labor, and what role »touch« plays within this complementary relationship.
dgtl fmnsm: On Virtual Healing
In this workshop, philisha_kay and allapopp invite participants to spend an hour and a half exploring virtual healing and experiments for its accomplishment.The workshop will begin with an exploration of the performance Virtual Healing Hub by dgtl fmnsm, a queer-feminist collective working at the intersection of digital realities, emancipatory technologies, and political imaginaries. This workshop examines the common decoupling of body and technology. Through joint practical exercises and scenes from the Virtual Healing Hub, participants will explore emancipatory methods of engaging with the technologies that shape our digital selves. The focus will lie on questions such as:
Together, we will design speculative presents in which technology fosters connection, pleasure, and healing for all bodies.
Paneldiskussion
Virtuality is tangible and unruly, it shapes the perception of time and space and the intra-actions of audiences and visitors, practices and affects of participants, things and environments. How can virtuality be understood through the latent and touching moments of an artistic VR-installation, the documentary challenges of film and the curatorial decisiveness of an exhibition? What significance does virtuality have for speculations about possible worlds?
Together with Roger M. Buergel and Ute Holl, we discuss questions of sensorium and affect, documentation and bodily experience as an artistic strategy for a profound critique of colonialism in the work of Maya Deren, which is currently on display in an exhibition at the Kunstmuseum Bochum (Truth Has, In Reality, Never Been Ours). Together with Simon Speiser, who will present their work Touching Clouds in the frame of the conference, we will discuss what a virtual object can be in both a digital and pre-digital sense, as well as the issues addressed in the work concerning the intertwining of intimacy and violence in the reception experience of VR.
Johanna Seifert: Virtuality and Sensing in Prosthetic Technologies
Prostheses have always been tied to the domains of sensing and tactility, both at the level of sensory perception and material technicity. Thus, prostheses are not only material artifacts that replace a biological body part; rather, they represent sensory extensions of the body space through which the environment is perceived in a technically mediated manner. Prostheses, thus, function as media of sensing (senses), while their specific materiality is based on sensor technologies (sensors) that measure bodily signals and translate them into technical commands.
However, prosthetic technologies often face two problems: firstly, the fact that the technical systems cannot always be sufficiently embodied and incorporated, and secondly, the phenomenon of phantom sensation. In this context, virtual technologies are being introduced into the field of prosthetics, with the aim of improving prosthesis use by combining visual and tactile stimuli. In doing so, virtual technologies not only take into account the fundamental virtuality of body perception, but also emphasizes the tactile and haptic dimension of body-prosthesis interactions.
Against this background, the talk will examine the interplay of virtuality and sensing in the context of prosthetic technology, taking into account the associated processes of cooperation between body and technology.
Urs Stäheli: Virtual Odours: More-than-Human Imagination in Perfumery
Scent is often described as the most immediate of the senses, yet perfumery has always been a practice of delayed presence, structured by lists, classifications, and molecular compositions that translate olfactory imagination. This paper examines how virtual technologies have entered olfaction, not as a rupture, but as an extension of the more-than-human assemblages that have long structured perfumery.
Perfumers have historically worked through olfactory lists - of ingredients, accords, and molecular palettes - that stabilize and negotiate the volatility of scent. AI-driven systems such as Osmo build on these listing practices, using machine learning to predict olfactory qualities and generate new molecules. Rather than simply »digitizing«or »virtualizing« scent, these technologies operate within analog/digital assemblages, where the logics of indexing, classification, and combinatorics shape the machinic generation of fragrance materials. If classical perfumery was structured by formulaic listing and artistic idiosyncrasies, how does AI-assisted perfumery intensify and reconfigure this practice?
Maren Haffke: Spectral Listening
In her book Sounding New Media - Immersion and Embodiment in the Arts and Culture Frances Dyson traces a multitude of aural metaphors through discourses of virtuality and remarks: »audio shares with [digital] media a metaphysics of the virtual« (Dyson 2009, 5). While the immersive properties of audio are often linked to notions of embodied space and »the feeling of being here now« (Dyson 2009, 4) the media of acoustic reproduction have long been part of discourses around absence, loss, and the non-linear temporalities of revenants and ghosts. Virtual audio, actualising sounds from the past and the future, is haunted and haunting. Focusing on examples of virtual audio as ways of ›making-present‹ the talk will explore listening as »spectral sensing«(Searle 2020, 171) enabling »intimacy with distant bodies and events« (Searle 2020, 171).
Yvonne Volkart: Sensing Like a Plant
In my book »Technologies of Care. From Sensing Technologies to an Aesthetics of Attention in a More-than-Human World« (2023) I argument, that, in order to overcome our dominant system of extractivism, and to take part in the co-composition of another world, we have to develop technologies of relation to the ecological, and that art can play a crucial role in this. With technologies I mean »technology« based techniques, but also, more in general, aesthetic practices of paying attention to the non-human world, artistic methods which help raise sensibility to the non-human and »our« human dependence on it. Following Natasha Myers, I speak of »becoming antenna«, and of counterappropriating this, because, in the course of capitalist history, these ways of sensing have been stolen from us. In my current SNSF-project »Plants_Intelligence. Learning Like a Plant« my focus shifted from artistic technologies of attention to the senses/technologies of plants: plants, especially flowers, so Emmanuele Coccia, are antennae by definition. How are plants in the world, how do they compute and perform, decide and act, grow and extend? Which technologies and methods make the ways of plant sensing palpable? Can VR technologies make us sensing like a plant? Referring to two different VR-projects of artist-researcher Rasa Smite I take up these questions, and ask what the artistic-aesthetic adoption of VR technologies might open up.
Jason Archer: Phantom Figures: Encounters of the Haptic Hologram Kind.
Two technologies are converging – midair haptics and digital holograms – in service of a project not only to materialize touch but to program it. In this presentation, I will present work from myself and my colleague Thomas Conner, from the University of Tulsa. The work examines the emergence of haptic holograms to interrogate the sociotechnical construction of liminal sensory experiences that defy easy categorization as either tactile or visual. Bringing together theories of touch and haptics with the media philosophy of Vilém Flusser – namely, his concept of the »technical image« and his own thinking on embodiment and gesture – we posit the notion of the »technical material.« The projection of 3D objects into space not just visually but haptically, mixes up ideas, representations, experiences, and ontologies about the continuities and incongruities of images and objects. Just as viewing a digital image means viewing a computed abstraction, so does touching what these systems calculate and produce as a surface. The resulting new experiences are of something other than a hologram or even an image – they are unique liminal spaces for the production and experience of new sensory experiences and ways of knowing.
