Touchable Speculation: Crafting Critical Discourse with 3D Printing, Maker Practices, and Hypermapping

so much to touch

In my archival research of human-computer encounters at my university over the years, I have come across endless images (clip art, photography, etc.) that centralize touching between computers and humans. So often, computer-themed documents utilize pictures of disembodied hands on computers, smiling humans posing with their hands on keyboards (“working” or not), human hands on keyboards typing, touching screens, touching mice. Do you touch your computer more than you touch other people? What about your “phone?”
                                   
Touch is deeply politicized. Touch informs the erotic, the productive, the intimate, the nurturing, the violent. Think, too, of all the phrases regarding the connection between touch and sexuality, ownership, purity, and control. I think specifically of the scene in Moulin Rouge! in which the Duke, a very wealthy and powerful man, objectifies and claims ownership of another person when he explodes, “I JUST DON’T LIKE OTHER PEOPLE TOUCHING MY THINGS!!!” When the Duke signs the contract to buy the Moulin Rouge, he stipulates that Sateen, a courtesan, "belongs" to him. Later, when Sateen evades, once again, having sex with the Duke, the overseer quells the Duke’s anger by singing him Madonna’s lines, “Like a virgin, touched for the very first time!” in the attempt to entice him by the idea of a “pure” Sateen who has been washed “clean” by religious repent.[1] 

Coming from a flat ontological approach, technoencounters inform and reveal human-human interaction. Interactions between humans and computers both replicate and perpetuate human-human interactions. How are we, and how are we not, like the Duke? For these reasons, exploring technoencounters also reveals human encounters. Human-computer relationships reflect human-human relationships, and vice versa. Is it possible that how someone talks to Alexa or Siri may both reflect and reproduce how they talk to a human woman, for better or for worse?

I wonder how these themes, especially in regard to touch, shape the technoencounter, and how that technoencounter thus reproduces and replicates touch protocols among humans. Touch is the polluter of the value of our things. There is fear, anxiety, and displeasure around the idea of shared computers. For instance, hand sanitizer dispensers often come to live in computer labs. We can also think of handwashing stations installed at "touch" exhibits at various museums. Perhaps the draw that has turned all public technoencounters into privatized ones is the desire for (technological) monogamy. How do you react when a stranger (or maybe anyone) touches your phone, your computer?
 
Unanswered Questions:
►How does the touch screen limit the usability of the computer? What are the implications of other kinds of interactive interfaces (e.g., gestural; vocal)?
►How does power operate in relation to who can touch and who is touched, especially in terms of intersectional positionalities informed by race, class, gender, sexual orientation, ability, age, etc.?
►How does touch, specifically the haptic sense, relate to cultural “progress” and other modes of communication (verbal; written)?[2]
►How does ideology (including, but not limited to, capitalism) shape our relationship to things, both human and non-human, specifically in relation to ownership, possession, and commodity?
►How do notions of public and private space oversee our public and private computing? How do “publicification” and “privatization” shape computer use, spatial design, and interaction?

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[1] Baz Luhrmann, Moulin Rouge!, DVD (Twentieth Century Fox, 2001).
[2] Here, I am thinking specifically of McLuhan’s work. See: McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man.

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