THE TOUCH SHOW - Immersive Art Experience

The Touch Show was created to humanize immersive art, breaking down stereotypes and allowing people to express themselves through paint, ink, lasers, bugs, and infinite mosaics. In this exhibit, we showcase the work of 6 artists that have interpreted touch as it applies to social interaction.

ARTISTS

Zachery Lieberman
Chris Sugrue
Greg Hermanovic
Nanika
Craig Swann
L.A.S.E.R TAG remixed by Pixel

OVERVIEW

Touch is an extremely important sense for humans, as well as providing information about surfaces and textures it is a component of nonverbal communication in interpersonal relationships, and vital in conveying physical intimacy. It can be both intimate such as kissing, or platonic such as hugging or tickling. It can save lives, such as mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, the Heimlich maneuver and pushing someone out of the way of danger.

The word touch has many other metaphorical uses. One can be emotionally touched, referring to an action or object that evokes a sad or joyful feeling. To say "I was touched by your letter" implies the reader felt joy or sadness when reading it.

Touch is the earliest sense to develop in the fetus, and the development of infants' haptic senses, and how that relates to the development of the other senses such as vision, has been the target of much research. Human babies have been observed to have enormous difficulty surviving if they do not possess a sense of touch, even if they retain sight and hearing. Babies who can perceive through touch, even without sight and hearing, fare much better. Touch can be thought a basic sense in that most life forms have a response to being touched, while only a subset have sight and hearing.

Touching is treated differently from one country to another. Acceptable touch varies by cultural group. In the Thai country touching someone's head may be thought rude. Remland and Jones (1995) studied groups of people communicating and found that in England (8%), France (5%) and the Netherlands (4%) touching was rare compared to their Italian (14%) and Greek (12.5%) sample.

Stoeltje (2003) wrote about how Americans are losing touch with this important communication skill. During a study conduced by University of Miami School of Medicine, Touch Research Institutes, American kids were said to be more aggressive than their French counterparts while playing at a playground. It was noted that French women touched their children more often than the American parents.

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