Toucher / To Touch

• CreatorSerge Bouchardon, Kevin Carpentier & Stéphanie Spenlé
• Year Published2009
• Originally Published AtAuthor's Site

Published originally in 2009 at the author's website, "Toucher"/"To Touch" was featured in the ELO's Electronic Literature Collection 2 published in 2011. About the work the authors write: "It may seem paradoxical to create an online work on touching. One cannot touch directly: in this case touching requires a mediating tool such as a mouse, a microphone or a webcam. This touching experience reveals a lot about the way we touch multimedia content on screen, and maybe also about the way we touch people and objects in everyday life. The internet user has access to five scenes (move, caress, hit, spread, blow), plus a sixth one (brush) dissimulated in the interface. She can thus experience various forms and modalities of touching: the erotic gesture of the caress with the mouse; the brutality of the click, like an aggressive stroke; touching as unveiling, staging the ambiguous relation between touching and being touched; touching as a trace that one can leave, as with a finger dipped in paint; and, touching from a distance with the voice, the eyes, or another part of the body. This supposedly immaterial work thus stages an aesthetics of materiality."--From Electronic Literature Collection 2