Through these InTouch project we have investigated digital touch interactions between people, and between people ‘machines’, and explored both face-to-face touch and remote touch at a distance. Across the project case studies, we are treading new methodological ground. The project team is interdisciplinary, enabling a rich and complex perspective on our case studies. We have established significant inter-disciplinary collaborations, with colleagues in Social Sciences, Art, Performance, Design, Neuroscience, Computer Science, Human Computer Interaction, and we are working with colleagues in Industry and the Museum sector. These collaborations have enabled us to successfully bring together theories and methods from different disciplines and traditions in order to develop new ways of, and tools for, conceptualizing and studying digital touch technologies. We use these methods to attend to digital touch as it is being developed, incorporated and imagined in labs, design and artistic practice, and in everyday life.
Through the case studies and a portfolio of publications, and artistic outputs, we have theorised the ways in which touch is digitally mediated, how it is supplemented, extended, heightened or enhanced, and in some contexts reconfigured. We have offered an extended view of touch beyond ‘direct’ skin-to-skin human stimulation, to include internal touch, direct touch, proximal touch and environmental touch. We have explored the consequences of this in relation to social norms of touch, notions of presence, absence, and connection, the sociotechnical imaginaries of digital touch, touch regulation and the ethics of touch.
