Mark Paterson

Haptic geographies: ethnography, haptic knowledges and sensuous dispositions

This paper is the first overview of the treatment of haptic knowledges in geography, responding to bodily sensations and responses that arise through the embodied researcher. After Crang’s (2003) article on ‘touchy-feely’ methods identifies the dearth of actual touching and embodied feeling in research methods, this article does three things. First, it clarifies the terminology, which is derived from a number of disciplines. Second, it summarizes developments in sensuous ethnographies within cultural geography and anthropology. Third, it suggests pathways to new research on ‘sensuous dispositions’ and non-representational theory. We thereby see just how ‘touchy-feely’ qualitative methods have, or might, become.

Feel the Presence: Technologies of Touch and Distance

Haptic devices for computers and video-game consoles aim to reproduce touch and to engage the user with ‘force feedback’. Although physical touch is often associated with proximity and intimacy, technologies of touch can reproduce such sensations over a distance, allowing intricate and detailed operations to be conducted through a network such as the Internet. The ‘virtual handshake’ between Boston and London in 2002 is given as an example. This paper is therefore a critical investigation into some technologies of touch, leading to observations about the sociospatial framework in which this technological touching takes place. Haptic devices have now become routinely included with video-game consoles, and have started to be used in computer-aided design and manufacture, medical simulation, and even the cybersex industry. The implications of these new technologies are enormous, as they remould the human–computer interface from being primarily audiovisual to being more truly multisensory, and thereby enhance the sense of ‘presence’ or immersion. But the main thrust of this paper is the development of ideas of presence over a large distance, and how this is enhanced by the sense of touch. By using the results of empirical research, including interviews with key figures in haptics research and engineering and personal experience of some of the haptic technologies available, I build up a picture of how ‘presence’, ‘copresence’, and ‘immersion’, themselves paradoxically intangible properties, are guiding the design, marketing, and application of haptic devices, and the engendering and engineering of a set of feelings of interacting with virtual objects, across a range of distances.

More-than visual approaches to architecture. Vision, touch, technique

Geographys relationship with architecture in particular, and the built environment in general, is fraught with tensions concerning the embodied experience of place, and a profoundly visual bias is present. Likewise, previous geographic readings of phenomenology such as humanistic geography are now regarded as retrograde, unable to address the specificities of bodily experiences (gendered bodies, physical impairments, queer bodies etc.) when attempting to articulate architectural encounters. A worthwhile task within a more comprehensive critical geography of architecture, then, is to re-examine the experience of built spaces from a more-than visual perspective, one that attends to a range of sensory-somatic and affective experiences that include, but crucially are not limited to, the visual. In terms of material-spatial experiences and performances, and given the limitations of (especially visual) ‘representation’, we look to several parallel disciplines to investigate the role of the haptic, the optic and the somatic in the apprehension of architectural spaces. How are such haptic or ‘more-than visual’ knowledges conceptualised and operationalised, whether implicitly or explicitly, by practitioners?

‘Seeing with the hands’: Blindness, touch and the Enlightenment spatial imaginary

The centrality of the so-called Molyneux problem and its concern with blindness, touch and sight is examined here in relation to some current work in psychology and neuropsychology. From debates and correspondence in the 18th century onwards, sparked by this hypothetical question, first-person accounts from blind people were sought to bolster these philosophical speculations. The question asked by Molyneux is crucial in Enlightenment philosophy, and is discussed in a series of dialogues between philosophers such as Locke, Berkeley, Descartes and Diderot. This article shows how such a historical and philosophical moment was an attempt to draw together a psychological philosophy of sensory experience, and how its legacy concerning a spatial imaginary remains to this day.

The World through Glass: Developing Novel Methods with Wearable Computing for Urban Videographic Research

Google Glass was deployed in an Urban Studies field course to gather videographic data for team-based student research projects. We evaluate the potential for wearable computing technology such as Glass, in combination with other mobile computing devices, to enhance reflexive research skills, and videography in particular, during field research. The utility as well as the limitations of Google Glass are discussed, including its actual and potential application for teaching and data gathering purposes in the field. As such, this article constitutes one of the first instances of evaluating Google Glass as a social science research tool.

Seeing with the Hands, Touching with the Eyes: Vision, Touch and the Enlightenment Spatial Imaginary

ABSTRACT Blindness has been a topic of great interest for philosophers, and the centrality of the so-called Molyneux problem explicitly raises questions concerning visual and tactile experience of the blind. Begun as a purely speculative philosophical exercise before ophthalmic operations could be performed, the debate continues and is examined here in relation to current work in psychology and neuropsychology. From debates and correspondence in the seventeenth century onwards, sparked by this hypothetical question, first-person accounts of the blind were sought to bolster the philosophical speculations. The question asked by Molyneux is crucial in Enlightenment philosophy, and is discussed in a series of dialogs between philosophers such as Locke, Berkeley, Descartes and especially Diderot. This paper shows how a philosophical debate rooted in a distinct period in history has continued to excite the attention of those who attempt to draw together a psychological philosophy of sensory-spatial experience. In particular, the Molyneux problem concentrated on the interaction of the visual and the tactile, of hands and eyes, and how they are involved in spatial cognition. The legacy of these debates concerning the spatial imaginary of the blind remain pertinent to this day.

caresses, excesses, intimacies and estrangements1

In our progress through the hotel, we walk from outside to inside, from the public space of interaction to the foyer’s semi-public space. Come with me. The foyer, where the reception desk is situated, is an ante-chamber between private rooms and the public bustle outside. Eventually we find ourselves in our room, alone together at last, breathless, fuelled by lusty anticipation. That strange, private space which reveals our own estrangement.

Haptic media studies

We are grateful for the opportunity to share with you eight exceptional pieces that, we hope, help lay the groundwork for Haptic Media Studies (HMS). As co-editors, each of us has made touch the centerpiece of our research programs, exploring its manifestation in media, technology, philosophy, culture, and history. Paterson’s The Senses of Touch: Haptics, Affects, and Technologies (Berg, 2007) remains an influential work that serves as a cornerstone for touch-related studies across a wide range of fields, and other publications explore haptics in terms of technology, media, and methodologies (e.g. Paterson 2006, 2009). His more recent Seeing with the Hands: Blindness, Vision, and Touch after Descartes (Edinburgh University Press, 2016), by exploring the conceptual and technological histories of sensory substitution, traces the complex entanglement of vision and touch in communicative practice. Parisi’s publications on tactility, including his forthcoming Archaeologies of Touch: Interfacing with Haptics from Electricity to Computing (University of Minnesota Press, 2018) and his work on the tactile aspects of videogame interfaces (e.g. Parisi, 2008, 2014), situate contemporary haptic human–computer interfaces in a macrohistorical framework, linking them back to prior technological constructions of touch in medical electricity, psychophysics, and cybernetics. Archer’s work investigates cultural processes of tactile education around digital media, where users are asked to acclimate themselves to new habits of touching and navigating digital interfaces.

The Forgetting of touch

We like Euclidean geometry because we are men [sic], and have eyes and hands, and need to operate a concept of space that will be independent of orientation, distance and size. Lucas, A Treatise on Time and Space

Architecture of Sensation: Affect, Motility and the Oculomotor

Recent social theory that stresses the ‘nonrepresentational’, the ‘more-than visual’, and the relationship between affect and sensation have tended to assume some kind of break or rupture from historical antecedents. Especially since the contributions of Crary and Jay in the 1990s, when it comes to perceiving the built environment the complexities of sensation have been partially obscured by the dominance of a static model of vision as the principal organizing modality. This article returns to some prior historical articulations of the significance of motility in perception, retracing pathways across art history, architectural theory and the history of neuroscience to argue for an alternative model based on the movement of the eye. Along with subsystems that deal with balance and orientation, I offer parallels between spatial motifs of the interior spaces of the body – labyrinths, vestibules, chambers – and those in artefacts and the built environment that contribute to the heightened physicality of the oculomotor subject.