Bodymaps – Artifacts of Touch


'Thecla Schiphorst Thecla Schiphorst

Bodymaps: artifacts of touch is a computer interactive sound and video installation. It confronts views of interactivity and questions the typical technological mapping which requires a point and click literal language of experience which supports notions of "ownership" and "dominance" over. This work invites relationships through an experience grounded in proprioceptive knowledge, skin sense feeling, listening through touching, seeing through hearing, together integrated through attention.

The piece uses a specially designed sensor surface, with 15 Electric Field Sensors embedded in it operating very much like 15 theramins, and 8 Force Sensitive Resitor Sensors which can detect touch, pressure and the amount of force applied to the surface.

Together these sensors lie beneath a white velvet surface upon which is projected images of the artist’s body and that of her son’s. The surface yearns for contact and tough. Its rule base is complex, and subtle, impossible to decode. Its effect is disturbing, erotic, sensual, and subjective.

Images of the body are stored on videodisk. The body of the artist [and a digitally represented body] are projected onto a horizontal planar surface. The surface is covered in white velvet creating a sensual and unexpected texture which leaves "traces" of the hand prints that are left behind. As the viewer places his hands closer to the surface or skin of the installation, a complex soundscape responds to their proximity, and movement. The image shudders. The viewer becomes participant through the sense of touch. There is no escape from entering the "third space" between objective seeing and subjective feeling.

The intention of the work is to subvert the visual/objective reationship between the object and the eye, between click and drag, between analysis and power, to create a relationship and objectivity and begs questions of experience, power and being.