Category Archives: Touch or Haptic

Margaret Seymour, Walking in the Colour Field: Local and Remote (2018)

“WALKING IN THE COLOUR FIELD: LOCAL AND REMOTE (2018)
ArticulateUpstairs, Articulate Project Space, Leichhardt, Sydney.

WALKING IN THE COLOUR FIELD is an interactive artwork that takes place both inside and beyond the gallery. By wearing a specially designed sensor armband, two ‘remote’ participants who are simply going about their daily lives determine the colours displayed on the largest screen. The smaller screen responds to changes inside the gallery. Its ‘local’ colours are affected by viewers passing in front of the adjacent painted panels. Placed in public view but communicating across multiple sites, WALKING IN THE COLOUR FIELD echoes the way that public and private spaces are increasingly entwined through mobile technologies.

WALKING IN THE COLOUR FIELD was presented in FOOTSTEPS IN THE CORRIDOR, the final exhibition in a series curated by Nadia Odlum on the theme of Navigation.” (credit)

Diane Borsato, Touching 1000 People (2001-2003)

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Touching 1000 People

Performance intervention and photographs

2003

I read a study that suggested that when people are subtly touched, it can affect their behaviour and well being. For a month I went out of my way to delicately bump, rub past, and tap 1000 strangers in the city. I touched commuters, shoppers, cashiers and taxi cab drivers on the street, on the metro, in shops and in museums. The exercise was like a minimalist performance. I was exploring the smallest possible gesture, and how it could create an effect in public.

The action was performed for one month in various locations in Montreal in 2001, and repeated for ten days across the city of Vancouver in 2003.

EXHIBITION HISTORY

Vu, How To Draw Winter, Solo Exhibition, with catalogue essay by Amish Morrell, Winter 2006, Quebec City

Artcite, The Moon in my Mouth, Solo Exhibiton and Visiting Artist Talk at University of Windsor, Spring 2006, Windsor, Ontario

Truck Contemporary Art in Calgary, Sleeping with Cake, in ‘Mountain Standard Time: Festival of Performative Art’, Fall 2005, Calgary

Mois de la Photo, How to Eat light, Solo Exhibition curated by Martha Langford at ‘Occurrence’, Fall 2005, Montreal

CAFKA – Contemporary Art Forum Kitchener, Solo Exhibition as part of ‘Peace of Mind’, 2005, Kitchener, Ontario

Gallery TPW, Warm Things To Chew For The Dead, (Solo Exhibition), during Contact 2004: Toronto” (credit)

Carolee Schneeman, Labyrinth (1960)

“I had composed my first live outdoor event, Labyrinth, 1960, after a tornado blew through our fragile cottage in Illinois, bringing down trees and raising mud, dirt, and rocks from the streambed. Friends were invited to follow instructions written on cards to crawl, climb, and interact with the landscape. The passage was initiated by my cat walking through a smashed kitchen window, in acceptance of this altered space. As a landscape painter, I recognized this gesture as breaking the traditional frame, which would soon lead me to develop movement principles within the Judson Dance Theater.” [credit]

Paige Tighe, Walk with ME Project (2012-14)

From Tieghe’s press release:

A Desire for Connection: “I began the project in LA out of a sense of frustration about the terms of everyday touch in America,” says Tighe. “I was having a massage, and as the massage therapist began working on my hand, all I wanted to do was hold her hand. Not out of a romantic impulse, but from a simple desire for connection.”

“What does it mean to live in a culture where people hug hello only rarely, almost never kiss each other on the cheek in greeting, and hardly ever take another’s hands unless they’re sleeping together? And what would it mean and feel like to hold hands in public with people who’ve volunteered to experience that connection? I decided I was going to hold hands and walk with as many people as I could.”

As they walked with Paige, her partners spoke of their dreams and aspirations, worries and plans while holding hands.

Tieghe also has an artist book documenting one iteration of the project.

Reg Carremans, Pathscape (2012)

Reg Carremans (1981-) is a Brussels-based visual artist mapping the self and the environment through different media, to encourage critical introspection, (self-)awareness and reflective thought. Interested in humans as geographical beings (walking, landscape, environment, place, territory, cartography), and the artist and artistic processes (identity, basic actions, economy).

“Pathscape is a canvas walk for Sideways, a month-long itinerant initiative for contemporary art and culture. August – September 2012 | Belgium | Walks, canvas patchwork” [credit]

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“Reg Carremans is a landscape painter who makes his work through walking or rubbing against the environment in which he is in. He was the only Belgian artist to complete the 375km Sideways 2012 Walking and Art Festival route, using canvas on the soles of specially adapted walking boots to gather multiple impressions for a series of ‘landscape paintings’ displayed en route.” [credit]

Okwui Okpokwasili, Market Thrum (2016)

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Okwui Okpokwasili led a 9-person walk that explored the making of an “embodied collective” in the charged landscape of the South Bronx. Facilitating a multi-sensory exchange with each other and the space, the group slowly walked through the Gold Coast Trading Company (an African market) and worked toward an expansive group practice of dynamic movement. No previous dance experience was required.

Click here to see photos from “Market Thrum.”

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” “It a people market!” a woman shouted as nine of us slowly followed Okwui Okpokwasili through Gold Coast Trading Company in the south Bronx.

She was telling us this wasn’t our market. It is a place where Africans shop, gather, and commune. It wasn’t our place to create art. One of our participants — an African American woman — tried to explain our mission. The woman disappeared and left us to our ritual.

Walls of Bounty, Ajax, Goya, and West African spices hovered over us as we weaved our way through the market’s maze. Prior to entering the market, Okpokwasili explained women would cleanse the roads to the market, and we were symbolically going to do the same at Gold Coast Trading Company. At a walking meditation pace, we moved together as much as a unit as we possibly could contain.

But what if a space and its owners do not want the roads to their market cleansed? What if they have a special place in their neighborhood in which Americans do not visit? As participants, we became performers for people who didn’t want a performance. They were confused, concerned. But we never felt unsafe.

One man, in a green cap with a red star, stopped and stared. He grinned, seemingly getting it, turned around, and headed down another isle.

But to other customers and employees, the ritual seemed sinister. Maybe it was a ceremony to bring bad juju. That’s what the market’s owner suggested to Okpokwasili after the walk as we stood outside and waited for her to finish negotiating with him.

Shalom said someone told him, “This is an African market. Not an American market.”

Outsider. Infiltrator. Other. For a change, I was placed in the uncomfortable position of feeling unwelcome.

Okpokwasili grew up in this neighborhood, and she wanted to share something from her childhood. The smells, the energy, the malts, and chin chin awakened a childlike joy in her. All she wanted to do was share a special experience in a special place with a small special group of people.

In the end, Elastic City decided it best not to return to the market and disturb them again. The remainder of Okpokwasili’s walks trekked through the Harlem Market.”

 

Francisca Benítez, “Property Lines, New York” (2008)

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76 floor rubbings
made on the sidewalks of New York
18″ x 24″, graphite on paper, 2008
Edition of 3

There are seventy rubbings in the series and they were installed as a grid on the wall, with varying dimensions depending on the location. The simple act of tracing in this set of walking-based drawings asks questions about borders, public versus private space, and how people mark space.

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“Francisca Benitez (b. 1974, Chile) lives and works in New York. Recent solo exhibitions include Cuchifritos Gallery + Project Space, New York (2014); Museo de Artes Visuales, Santiago, Chile (2013); Die Ecke, Santiago, Chile (2011); and Nada.Lokal, Vienna, Austria (2009). Notable group exhibitions include Mapping Brooklyn, Brooklyn Historical Society and BRIC House, Brooklyn (2015); Efemérides, Museo Histórico Nacional, Santiago, Chile (2014); Pier 54, High Line Art, New York (2014); One Minute Film Festival 2003 – 2012, MASS MoCA, North Adams, Massachusetts (2013); The Street Files, El Museo del Barrio, New York (2011); and Contaminaciones Contemporáneas, Museu de Arte Contemporánea da USP, Sao Paulo, Brazil (2010). Her work has been featured in major international exhibitions including the Bienal de la Habana, Cuba (2015); Lisbon Architecture Triennale, Portugal (2013) the Beijing Biennale, China (2009); and the LA Frewaves 10th biennial of film, video and new media, Los Angeles (2006).” (credit)

Tim Knowles “From Windwalk – Seven Walks from Seven Dials” 2009

multimedia installation: helmet, sail, wall drawing and monitor

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“Tim Knowles creates photographs, films and abstract drawings by undertaking walks. Knowles’s working methods are deliberately improbable, idiosyncratic and inventive. He makes use of chance in innumerable ways, ensuring that the outcome of each walk is unknown in advance. As the critic Jessica Lack has written in The Guardian, 11 June 2009, his works are “generated by apparatus, mechanisms, systems and processes beyond the artist’s control”. They are “akin to scientific experimentation, where a situation is engineered in which the outcome is unpredictable. There is a poetry, English eccentricity and wit to the work”.

For ‘Walk On’ Tim Knowles presents an excerpt of a larger work, showing one of a series of seven walks made from Seven Dials, London. Each of these walks is guided solely by the wind as Knowles steadfastly follows a windvane mounted on a helmet worn on his head. He has no ability to affect the windvane and simply acts as a servant to the system he has devised. The wind takes him on a meandering route, at times blown directly down a street, at others caught in eddies repeatedly circling on street corners or joining the city’s other debris down some cul de sac. His meandering path collides with the rigid structure of the city; his route tracing out buildings, railings, ventilation shafts, parked vehicles and other boundaries. Knowles devises a new method of exploring the city and reveals how the wind moves through and is shaped by its structure.”

Carmen Papalia, Blind Field Shuttle (2010-)

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a blind man leading a row of walkers

Carmen Papalia, Blind Field Shuttle (2017)

In 2010–in response to the failures that I experienced as a recipient of disability support services–I started resisting support options that promoted ablest concepts of normalcy and self-identified as a nonvisual learner. The choice was in line with an effort to distance myself from marginalizing language like “blind” and “visually impaired”, and helped me realize the position that I occupied as a liberatory space. Using my nonvisual senses as a primary way of knowing the world lead to Blind Field Shuttle (BFS), an experience in which groups of up to 90 people line up behind me, link arms, and shut their eyes for the duration of a roughly hour-long walk through cities and rural landscapes.

Conducting BFS helped me exercise my nonvisual senses and find a community with whom I could develop a critical methodology for engaging nonvisual space. By 2012 I considered BFS a form of practice-based research and produced a series of nonvisual tours that aimed to uncover the unseen bodies of knowledge in fields influenced by visual primacy. One engagement–at the Guggenheim in 2013–was a touch tour that set a precedent for me to make further work about the potential for critical haptic engagement to become a viable practice within contemporary art and criticism.

Now I perform BFS as a way to demonstrate my proposal for Open Access (2015), a relational model for accessibility that centers considerations of agency and power in relation to the social, cultural, and political conditions in a given context. When performed as part of the Open Access movement building campaign–an ongoing tour across the US, UK, and Canada–BFS establishes an organizational space where participants model trust and mutual support while practicing new, process-based systems of access together.

sensory map

Blind Field Shuttle has been initiated in Portland OR in 2010, Blind Field Shuttle has taken place in: London UK, Sligo IE, Vancouver BC, Surrey BC, Kelowna BC, Ottawa ON, Regina SK, Oakland CA, San Francisco CA, Los Angeles CA, New York NY, Hudson NY, Beach Lake PA, Haverford PA, Greensboro NC, Louisville KY, Boston MA, Cambridge MA, Chattanooga TN, Ann Arbor MI, and Baltimore MD.)

The Blind Field Shuttle Walking Tour by Carmen Papalia on Vimeo
Practicing Accessibility by Jacqueline Bell in Field Journal
Creative Conciliations by David Garneau on Conciliations.ca
Blind Orientations: Walking, Stumbling, and turning Towards New Points of View by Amanda Cachia in catalog for “Long Time No See” by Carmen Papalia
Heightened Perception by Jennifer Van Evra in Forecast Public Art

Janine Antoni, “Touch” (2002)

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a woman walking on a tight rope aligned with the horizon

Janine Antoni, Touch

“The idea of Touch derives from Moor (2001), a work in which the artist created a rope out of her and her friends’ belongings; the artist has said that while she intends to walk it, she also questions the impulse. Touch depicts a literal balancing act in order to suggest the state of perfection that many people strive for, including herself. Antoni has said, “Touch is about that moment or that desire to walk on the horizon,” a location that represents hope and the future. She explained that she wants to walk in “this impossible place, a place that cannot be pinpointed … on the line of my vision, or along the edge of my imagination.” Since the viewer’s involvement is a crucial element in her work, Antoni asks us to imagine ourselves in her situation and contemplate the meaning of the horizon when she is absent from the scene. As the artist teeters but never falls, she accepts and almost embraces a state of imbalance.”