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.
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.
