Introduction: Telehaptics

In June 2020, the last of seven “101” festivals of technological art, called 101.All in One, was held as an online conference instead of St. Petersburg, Russia. It aimed to explore the aesthetic conditions and affordances of pandemic isolation, and to historically contextualize the specific type of virtual presence this isolation suggested.

The notion of telematic communication — transmitting messages at a distance — immediately came to mind. Additional immediate observations concerned the possibility or impossibility of sending touch over distance, and ways of simulating either touch or the experience of it. A sender and a receiver of such telehaptic messages also presented a case for inquiry.

It is interesting to discuss telehaptics (the mediation of touch at a distance) in the artistic context, mainly because it is impossible to mediate touch at a distance. To do so, one would need to rebuild the whole reactive environment and populate it with other subjects enabled with agency. Yet, nothing is more desirable than to break the law of reality and attempt to bridge the distance between the ontological orders, the living and the dead included.