Ask HN: Where are all the touch-based art forms?
For every major sense but touch there's a major form of art.
For vision, our most dominant sense, there is literature, painting, sculpture and film.
For hearing there is music.
For smell there is perfumery.
For taste there are the culinary arts.
Touch seems like the odd one out - it's playing second fiddle to taste in food, and to appearance in sculpture and clothing. You only very rarely find some artwork where the main draw is the tactile experience. Why is this?
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[ 3.7 ms ] story [ 124 ms ] threadSculpture is underpreciated by you, have you tried to build at least a basic brick wall? This process involves almost no sight and a lot of touch.
Examples: https://www.creativeapplications.net/?s=touch
I mean there are a bunch of gadgets that are somewhat interesting to touch, but the real stuff would require someone to do something to you (the robotics isn’t there yet to create an experience that is both interesting and reproducible).
A bunch of contemporary artists actually focus primarily on the sense of touch. A French artist for example named Myriam Lefkovitz does pieces in the dark.
Like an array of low cost transducers (maybe there's a way to multiplex the output mechanically like we do with electronics (so only 2*sqrt(N) motors are needed), but in mechanics inertia and speed should be a more significant problem)
I 6x6 matrix of solenoids for example doesn't cost much, and you could reasonably control them individually I think?
To have art deliver such signals, I guess you'd have to like being a marionette... ;-)
Massage
Keyboard/Piano
Tactile trinkets like Rubics Cube/Figet Spinners
Pottery/Sculpture
Construction
Climbing, Obstacle Courses
Cleaning/Washing
Cooking
Then again texture is half the experience of flavor in food
Touch response is pretty much entirely what sounds of pre-electronic musical instruments are, making electronic sound being simulations of touch response in a way
Fashion is also dominated by visual appeal, the uncomfortableness of women's heels for example
Because “fine art” is mostly a distinction drawn based on how distant a thing is from practical, tactile experience fornthe audience (its also why culinary arts aren't, contrary to your list, usually included), anchored in elitism that equates physical engagement as pedestrian and lower class.
If you can't put a “do not touch” sign on it, its viewed as practical art and not fine art.
For a blind person sculpture can surely be as engrossing as for a sighted person.
1: Notable exceptions exist; e.g., House of Leaves.
It might be a less intrusive interpretation of a written book than, e.g., a film adaptation. But it’s still very different from reading it.
Braille, I presume, it’s the same. Nothing interpreting the words except your own mind.
And maybe today it's transmitted (when not by computer) in dead-tree tomes but, again maybe, the transmission is not the thing. Maybe the play is the thing. Or the story is. Whatever.
For blind people, non-sequential events and non-serial stories exist. In fact, just like unfortunately distractedly-sighted people, that's most of real life. I realize seeing all sorts of ADHD stimuli might lead you to think you're "more aware," but everyone has an ability to process reality, which happens in real time simultaneously in many places at once.
unfortunately, unlike a drawing, it is hard to share awesome pots in the way they are meant to be appreciated, you do need to pick them up and see how they sound and feel... this wouldn't work out well in a museum
Also, 4D theatres where they add motion, wind and water to enhance the experience.
Arguably, amusement park rides are all about messing with your sense of touch (proprioception, balance, etc)
I'm glad people like what I make, but I do it not to say something, and rather to experience something.
https://andrewconner.com/pottery/
I think my feeling is that I believe I'd appreciate sculptures more if I could touch them. I don't need to touch a painting or a dancer to appreciate them. It's visual for me (and kinetic for the dancer). Sculptures are visual but I think I am missing out by not being able to touch them.
I'll add that, as someone who likes seeing the brush strokes in a painting up close, I'd enjoy being able to touch the texture of the painting (if it was allowed and this didn't damage the painting, which sadly it does).
If you’re exclusively looking for things where you can put your hands on stuff then maybe a petting zoo?
Touching another person is widely considered an intimate act and most of the general mainstream today are only intimate (physically, or emotionally) with their romantic partner. Broadly speaking we've lost emotional intimacy with close friends and small groups that we've had in the past.
So with that, what is the incentive for the artist to create? He can't sell his work. He can't distribute his work. Touch-based art is highly dis-incentivized in our modern western culture.
Don’t see it as reductionist, more like a callout that we’re dealing with a social feature, not some physical law.
it's essentially a trite truism/platitude. you can apply it to everything and if you don't want to delve deeper, why say it.
Incentives are things that humans create, intentionally or unintentionally. There are the selection pressure of the human cultural world but they are the opposite of natural. They are the things we can choose to change. By calling them out, we implicitly question if we should be changing them.
It can end up being a bit pseudo-intellectual on HN (say it ain’t so!), but there is a real rhetorical context in which it makes sense to talk about incentives.
I don’t find it reductionist. Incentives don’t have to be monetary. Power, status, family, morality, societal pressures, personal satisfaction, fear, all can be incentives.
Incentives are a question of what shared experience is a driving factor for a group of people.
That doesn’t remove the nuance from individuals. Just because group X lacks incentive to do Y doesn’t mean that nobody in X does Y. It’s just less useful to speak about individuals. No one cares about why my uncle Rick did whatever, but they might care why 10% of the country is doing it.
Licking and putting other people's body parts into your mouth also don't mesh well with "a monogamous culture", yet taste is a major factor in art, as in cuisine.
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=tactile+gallery&t=fpas&ia=web
Smell has perfumery, but this is a small thing compared to other art forms. Both food and perfumes also fit well into the market system and have an obvious market incentive for their propagation.
Touch-based art forms don't scale electronically (as we lack devices for implementing and sharing different touch sensations) and they don't have an obvious practical art purpose either, in the way that graphic design (for visual art) or music (for sound) does.
As a side note, I think touch is probably just as important to food as taste. Otherwise, why not just eat flavored mush?
The key word you want to look for on this is haptic art. Here's a good post about this topic, too:
https://ivanisakov.medium.com/haptic-art-7f55e995c576
Edit: I was looking into this more and came across an essay by Johann Herder, which is probably of interest:
http://csmt.uchicago.edu/annotations/herder.htm
https://www.jstor.org/stable/25622078
Part One lays out the foundation for Herder’s argument for the virtues of sculpture by distinguishing between seeing and touching. He recounts several stories of blind people who did not understand the concept of seeing to point out the fact that we see sculpture as three dimensional only because we have grown up using our senses of touch and of sight in tandem. Were it not for touch, vision would merely be a field of colors and shapes. In this distinction we find a theme common to media theory, the problem of distinguishing the ways we interact with our surroundings, while at the same time recognizing their interdependence. While Herder realizes that our understanding of sight as forms depends on our sense of touch, he would have us define our understanding of forms only through touch and forget about sight. For him, since the essence of sculpture is "beautiful form and beautiful shape," and a "physically present, tangible truth," (p. 40) to understand it only as a vision is a profanation, a grave underestimation of its potential.