Facilitator: Ludmila Rodrigues
Language: English
Duration: 1 day, 4 hours or 2 days, 2 hours
Suitable for: artists, designers, movement researchers and other explorers curious to speculate on the future of tactility beyond current media
What is the place of touch in everyday human experience? Tactility can be considered the most elementary, primordial sense in the human sensorium, present before birth. It is the sense that cannot be deceived. We reach out and touch things in order to judge what we see. While touching, we are in turn touched – it is a reciprocal sensation. This overarching concept involves both material and emotional experience, surrounded by cultural codes and taboos. Touch constitutes a language in itself, through which we exchange subtle, fuzzy and affectional messages with each other.
Today public health concerns have rendered human proximity a threat – with touch becoming at once “dangerous” and endangered. We rely on online gatherings for working and staying in contact with friends. Although these tools offer a temporary solution, current technologies are still limited – they afford seeing and hearing, which are precisely the distant senses.
What happens to non-verbal cues, gestures and the affective dimension of human communication? How will we restore tactility in times of strict health measures and social distancing?
This workshop explores the phenomenon of tactility, its potentials and meanings while grappling and experimenting with the limitations of online media. Through experiential exercises using home-based utensils, participants will play, speculate and debate on the various facets of touch. The artist will share her on-going research and meditation on technologically assisted touch.
Ludmila Rodrigues
Ludmila Rodrigues is an artist, designer and sometimes performer, working at the intersection of sensory and social experience. She has been investigating the so-called “lower”, or proximal senses, for about a decade, creating performative situations with the audience and enhancing human communication. She is interested in the ways touch and movement can be a vehicle for learning and expression, exploring the embodied intelligence inherent to us all.
Originally from Rio de Janeiro, Ludmila has been based in The Hague since 2009. She holds a degree in Architecture and Urban Planning (UFRJ, 2007) and in ArtScience by the Royal Academy of Art (KABK, 2013).
Past dates
April 24, 2021: Online Tactile Exploration
