This article explores the phenomenon of telehaptics, considered at the intersection of concepts of distance, sensation, and imagination. It delves into the complexities of touch as both a physical and psychological sense that indicates the threshold between one and the other, at once connecting and separating. As an aesthetic experience, telehaptics implies self-reflexivity of sensation informed by the awareness of the apparatus of perception as the mediating component, which is pre-and trans-subjective. Through examples like Marnix de Nijs's TAST and Michel van der Aa's opera Upload, I investigate how telehaptic interfaces and artistic interpretations create a paradoxical interplay between presence and absence, where the acts of sensing transpose one into the realm of abstract thought and imagination. Seen this way, telehaptics offers a unique form of shared presence that bridges physical and virtual realms while underscoring the inherent separation and mediation in human communication, opening an experience beyond distance.
This article examines cognition, identity, and agency as distributed across biological, microbial, and algorithmic systems. It challenges the notion of the individual by framing humans as holobionts-complex assemblages of human cells, symbiotic microorganisms, and increasingly, machine intelligence. Through interactive installations such as Scatter Surge, Enteric Consciousness, Paparazzi Bots, and Augmented Fish Reality, the work explores interspecies communication, embodied perception, and the co-evolution of humans and intelligent machines. These projects foreground touch, sensory illusion, and microbial processes as central to experience, while interrogating how telepresence and algorithmic systems reshape perception and cultural identity. The article ultimately questions where cognition resides within this expanded ecology and calls for a rethinking of symbiosis in an era where biological and artificial systems increasingly converge.
In this article, I examine the virtual haptic dimension of early video artworks by Vito Acconci, Douglas Davis, Bill Viola, and Sanja Ivekovi & cacute;. As the term "virtual" suggests, the sense of touch in these works is not physically real but rather an illusion constructed through scene manipulation and performative engagement of the artists behind the video camera. I introduce the term dis-sensing to highlight how the works of these artists disrupt (dis-) the conventional limitations of sensing the world through video, typically confined to the domains of sight and hearing. Through illusion, these artists have been able to "cheat" the viewer's perception of what video can convey to the senses, challenging its conventional interactions with the humanbody beyond eyes and ears. My interest in reinterpreting these works within an expanded sensory framework arises from pandemic observations of telepresence via videoconferencing platforms. When not used for work-related purposes, these platforms were employed to "stay in touch" with friends and relatives through simulated affective spheres. This idea of creating the illusion of touch was already present in early video art of the 1970s, through techniques of engaging the haptic feeling of viewers without actually using touch.
Our contemporary sense of telepresence stands as a selective aggregate of earlier technologi-cal assemblages and their attendant practices. The term carries with it traces of the past in the form of claims and half-realized desires. A closer look will reveal continuities, of course, but may also help to contextualize and even un & not;settle the nature of some of the more persistent desires. Telepresence offers more: a heuristic device to talk about the root-word 'presence.' For textual-ists, it offers tangibility; for historians, it offers precedent; and for the more phenomenologically minded, it offers a wealth of affect. The tangibility of practice, and the situational embeddedness of anecdote and language, together suggest that the his & not;tory of telepresence has something substantial to offer our understanding of presence.
This article explores the possibility of being in multiple places at the same time through telehaptic art. By analyzing projects such as Stelarc's Ping Body, Karen Lancel and Hermen Maat's Touch My Touch, and David Bowen's Tele-present Wind, it examines how mechanical and digital interfaces translate remote actions into local sensory experiences. This reversed space creates a closed sensorium that makes the consequences of remote actions tangible, whether through simulated touch, physical pain, or ecological feedback. Ultimately, telehaptic art challenges the logic of acting at a distance by bringing the impact of those actions from there to here.
This collection of connected statements is generated primarily from the artist's projects and performances presented at the 101.All in One Festival of Technological Art, sponsored by the Art & Science Centre at ITMO University, St. Petersburg, in 2020. They interrogate is-sues of embodiment, agency, and individuality in an age of excess and indifference. These performances explore designing alternative anatomical architectures, reimagining and reconfiguring the body augmented, amplified, and extended with instruments, machines, and computational systems. They are merely aesthetic gestures rather than pseudo-scientific pursuits that might serve some medical or utilitarian outcomes. They are more about gen-erating affect rather than accumulating information. They are not about human prowess but rather exposing the body's psychological and physical parameters. Having realized the body's profound biological inadequacies, there is a desire to attach and insert technology into the body. Technology is no longer merely a container of the body but now becomes a component. These projects and performances problematize what a body is, how it performs, and what it means to be human. The human is an unstable construct that historically is always becoming something other, both in form and function, with its mechanical augmentation, sensory extensions, and computational amplification. What it means to be human is per-haps not to remain human at all-neither in a physical form nor in a phantom apparition.
This work stages an open discussion between artist Gwenola Wagon, philosopher Pierre Cassou-Nogu & egrave;s, and Marie, the character who represents them both in their film Virusland 2020. The film, a diary of the lockdown in France during the first year of the pandemic, is composed of found footage and videoconference recordings. The two authors-or rather, the three figures involved in this discussion-reflect on the role of filters as multipliers of personality and on the new forms of bodily experience that digital dispositifs bring into being.
In his final period, Roland Barthes desires a new form of life that would enable him to be more attentive to the present moment and to time and change. In this period, since he wants to keep writing, he is also looking for a new form of writing-neutral writing as a counter-part to neutral living. This study examines Barthes's late penchant for neutrality against the background of his intellectual evolution. It argues that in his final period, Barthes's writing is an unusual, transformative practice that facilitates his neutrality by helping him shift his perspective on his current life without altering anything about it.
Often known as "the poet of things," the 20th-century French poet Francis Ponge (1899-1988) gives voice to mute things in his prose poem collection Le Parti pris des choses (1942). This article reexamines Le Parti through a brief critical history-from phenomenology and textualism to recent new materialist readings-to argue that "objectification" in Ponge functions not as reduction, but as a condition for inter-subjective happenings. Focusing on "inter-subjects" in Ponge's thing-poems, this article reframes the word-object binary as the ongoing action and condition of language, manifesting as ex-pression: a porous, outward-reaching medium shaped from within by nonhuman things.
Uncertainty and ambiguity are central dimensions of play. In video-game design and experience, they are dramatically amplified by the material uncertainties built into digital technologies. This article explores the ways in which contemporary fiction imagines and negotiates the ambiguity of digital play. Building on Brian Sutton-Smith's play theory, I examine how the literary imagination invokes, combines, and opposes many of the discourses that coalesce around play in contemporary culture. Discussing fiction's engagement with both video-game design and larger gamifying trends, I show that play serves as a complex signifier of creative freedom, spiritual aspirations, but also moral crisis and loss of agency. My two examples-Gabrielle Zevin's Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow (2022) and Richard Powers's Playground (2024)-frame the ambiguity of digital play in relation to different forms of vulnerability: personal anxieties relating to illness and disability in the former novel, fears of ecological crisis and AI-driven societal collapse in the latter. The epistemological and affective challenges of play are thus primarily understood in interpersonal terms in Zevin's narrative, whereas Powers links them to the novel's formal "trick" of a covert AI narrator.
Paolo Giordano's novel, The Solitude of Prime Numbers (2009), seemingly a coming-of-age romance, mixes narrative with the language of mathematics. The two protagonists, Alice and Mattia, are equaled to two twin prime numbers: solitary and isolated numbers, close to each other but separated by a single number. Similarly, they are united by the same differ-ences, attracted to each other, but never truly together because divided by an insurmountable obstacle. Giordano's fiction is a window into the twenty-first century, a space in which individuals are kept apart (or together) by waves of solitude, silence, and marginalization.
Earworms maybe experienced as a minor irritation or as a vampiric possession. In the latter case, the rhythm of an earworm obliterates the "personal rhythm" that the psychoanalyst Theodor Reik maintained is present in each individual. That personal rhythm begins with the mother's heartbeat, followed by the cadence of the mother's voice, the structures of one's native language, and the social dynamic. Because this personal rhythm has accompanied us throughout our life, we no longer hear it. But when it is obliterated by the reiterated rhythms of a song, the victim can no longer sleep, work, or even think.
