The Materiality of Touch: A Haptic Encounter with an Object
Haptics is the science and technology related to the sense of touch. It can be described as a perceptual system, consisting of ‘cutaneous’ receptors within the skin and ‘mechanoreceptors’ embedded within the muscles and joints, the kinaesthetic articulations of the body (Lederman and Klatzky, 2009). The sense of touch is located within the flesh of the body and in the body’s position and movement in space. Between my sense of vision, physical touch, and the less-defined proprioceptive sense of the body in space, I give form to myself and to the material things in the world.
Touch is an embodied, dynamic process which acts as a fundamental hinge between us, the subject, and the objective world. Drawing on the phenomenology of touch in which writers such as Derrida and Merleau-Ponty define the haptic encounter through a language of dynamic materiality, I examine touch through my own material language.
In the photobook Touch, I imagine a haptic encounter with an object, told through a series of images constructed within a model room. For me, the model is a space in which touch, as a process mediated by material and spatial stimuli, might be staged, visually and materially. In other artworks combining print, sculptural and digital processes, I examine the limits of touch, from the dichotomy of object-subject relations, to the liminal surface of the screen and the virtual image.
Touch (photobook), digital print on silk, plywood, cotton thread, digital print on Shi-Oji paper, marble. 2025
‘After all, we grasp the unity of our body only in that of the thing, and it is by taking things as our starting point that our hands, eyes and all our sense organs appear to us as so many interchangeable instruments. The body by itself, the body at rest is merely an obscure mass, and we perceive it as a precise and identifiable being when it moves toward a thing’
— Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Phenomenology of Perception
Even before I extend a hand, I am aware of a touch as if it was already contained within my fingertips. Laura Marks uses the term 'haptic visuality' to describe eyes which function like organs of touch (Marks, 2002, p. xii). My eyes trace a texture and it is sensed, felt, even tasted. There is something primordial about this, almost what Marks describes as the ‘wetness of the encounter’, something unashamedly grounded in sensuous matter (Marks, 2002, p. xvi). The materiality of touch must be envisioned through the medium of flesh, such is the embodied process of touching both on the surface of and inside our bodies.
‘The body of the perceiving subject is given form and content through its experience of surrounding objects. These surrounding objects reflect and affirm a body schema which is gradually built up through this interaction; a mapping of both body and surroundings in relation to one another.’
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— Cathryn Vasseleu, Textures of Light
Touch (photobook), digital print on silk, plywood, cotton thread, digital print on Shi-Oji paper, marble, projection. 2025
Inside a room, I encounter an object and reach towards it, my extended fingers slightly curved at the outermost point of my hand. I think the graspability of the world is what grounds me. Not that I need to hold on, as if the world were some prop. These walls, floor, those peripheral things, this object; they include me. In their inclusion, I find points of orientation on their surfaces, and I am tethered to these points in space. I orientate myself through this matter in space, just as I am too, matter in space. Not disembodied, not an obscure mass, but embodied flesh, outstretched.
Touch (photobook), digital print on silk, digital print on Shi-Oji paper, marble, projection. 2025
These points of orientation sit along contour lines strung and intersecting across each surface. In the pages of Touch, projected grids map the surfaces of the room and its objects, gradually alighting on a smaller grid, paper furred at the edges. In the materiality of touch, fibrous grids mark the point of contact between the subject and object and suggest clinging nerve endings, something rhizomatic in nature and intent.
‘We have long been struggling between the tactile and vision, the eye that does not touch and the eye that touches, like a finger or lips’.
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— Jacques Derrida, On Touching - Jean-Luc Nancy
Touch (photobook), digital print on silk, digital print on Shi-Oji paper, projection. 2025
Even before my fingertips meet the object, I am seduced by its materiality. Its potential qualities hang there as if on a loose hinge, like a sense-mirage. Merleau Ponty writes that embodiment is the condition of being ‘caught in the fabric of the world’ (2004, p. 16). and it feels as my fingers almost-touch, that I am being held by the finest fibres, linkages to the other. So the optical becomes haptical through my embodied understanding of materiality. Marks’ term 'haptic visibility' seems to, at least textually, grapple with our distinction between the tactile and vision, Derrida’s ‘eye that touches, like a finger or lips’.
Touch (photobook), digital print on Shi-Oji paper, marble. 2025
Touch (photobook), digital print on silk, plywood, cotton thread, digital print on Shi-Oji paper. 2025
Cathryn Vasseleu gives visibility itself a tactile materiality, referring to the texture of light, writing: ‘texture refers not only to the feeling of a fabric to the touch, or the grasping of its qualities, but also to the hinges or points of contact which constitute the interweaving of the material and ideal strands of the field of vision.’ (Vasseleu, 1998, p. 30) In the images below, the furred grids are, again, suggestive of these points of contact between the subject and object of touch. However, there is an indeterminacy in the sparse focus of the photograph which perhaps questions the actual consummation of touch and keeps us poised on unbreached surfaces.
‘And there with my hand, I touch the inside of my body by "feeling through" a surface.’
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— Jacques Derrida, On Touching - Jean-Luc Nancy
Digital photograph, 2025
With one extension, my outermost fingertip touches the surface of the object. The materiality of touch must include all surfaces; not only the outer surface of my skin, but its inner counterpart, its underside, the skin within. The object’s surface, of course, has its own within and without, which is perhaps colder, more mysterious, but arguably no less active. I touch the object through my body, and the object touches back. This ‘reversibility/reflexivity of flesh’ is a reverberating movement which ‘flexes, inflects, and reflects itself’ (Derrida, 2005 p127). Vasseleu describes this as ‘weaving back and forth, the world becomes a texture in which the subject sees both from inside and from inside-out’ (1998, p. 30)
Here, I close my eyes and tilt my head towards the light cast from an indeterminate source on my left. To see from the inside is to see through a surface, a kind of fleshy lens constituted of the skin’s inner lining. The digital silk print, which was displayed as part of my installation Tentative, is a material imagining of this carnal lens, the curtain-like swathe of silk acting as a staging device for the other works. Although lightly gathered at an edge, as if drawn back by a cautious hand, the work is unashamedly visual, and acts more in the way of a screen. When considered alongside the model exhibition in the photobook Touch, there is a playful theatricality about the work, as well as an important, seemingly divergent leap toward the digital.
Tentative (installation view)
Digital silk print, steel, Japanese woodcut print on Shoji paper, pewter, colour monitor, wooden plinth, resin with pigment 2025
Touch (photobook), digital print on silk. 2025
'The ambiguity of perception that is carried into our sense of self should logically be carried over into objects as well, yet this is not our experience. It is not objects that are ambiguous but our perceptions of them; nor are objects troubled by their own ambiguity’. ​​
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— Peter Schwenger, Tears of Things
Digital scan of ink on Kitakata paper, 2025
In seeing and touching the object, I am more than ever aware of my own impressionistic state compared to the perfect completeness of the object before me. Much of my ambiguity is grounded in these points of contact; where my fingertips touch, I am touched back. Not one consummate act, but an oscillation in which I am subject one moment and object the next. Located within the skin of my fingertips, the interior lining and exterior surface become interchangeable. Vasseleu writes: ‘Merleau-Ponty transforms the concepts of interiority and exteriority into the indeterminate surfaces of a Moebius strip.’ She describes the body as a ‘hinge; an articulation of the world; an entre-deux’ (1998. p. 23).
Compared to the resolute solidity of the object, I seem to quaver from the edges outward, or inward; both seem possible. Derrida writes that ‘as soon as it is touched, sense certainty turns to chaos, to tempest, and every sense to disarray. Body is certainty startled and shattered. Nothing is more properly of our world, nothing more foreign to it’ (2005, p. 38). In this liminal state, I find that I have only language, a language of I and it, a language of difference, of naming: this matter and that matter. This language is mine, but, as Schwenger writes: ‘the object calls out that language from us’ (2006, p. 7)
‘Our perception, in the context of our everyday concerns, alights on things sufficiently attentively to discover in them their familiar presence, but not sufficiently so to disclose the non-human element with lies hidden in them. But the thing holds itself aloof from us and remains self-sufficient… a resolutely silent Other.'
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Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Phenomenology of Perception
Touch (photobook), marble. 2025
I don’t want to impose, and yet my finger rests on the object’s smooth and, now that I think of it, cool surface. I can’t make any progress on this surface; it is hard and unbreachable; that it’s pressing back is the only suggestion that it acknowledges me. The resistance is full-body, though it is felt from both within and without, located in a pad of pressure which seems to materialise as I consider if it might not be good for this or that purpose, if possessed for this or that means.
Touch (photobook), marble, resin with pigment. 2025
In understanding the materiality of touch, we should reckon not only with our own embodied materiality, but also with that of the material world. We must acknowledge an equivalent agency, complexity and generativity of matter, which aligns itself to the material ethics of New Materialism. The undisclosed self-sufficiency of the object is neither sinister not inert, nor is it waiting to be ‘ready to hand’ for manipulation according to human purposes’ (Coole, 2015). To relate to objects in this way is to give potential to the touch act as a precedent for control, possession, or consumption. I have to admit to searching the surface for buttons or indents, something which with to unlock or wield the thing.
'We can only touch on a surface, which is to say the skin or thin peel of a limit. To touch at the limit’.
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— Jacques Derrida, On Touching - Jean-Luc Nancy
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Tentative (film). colour monitor, wooden plinth, resin with pigment. 2025
Derrida’s phrase ‘to touch at the limit’ is to describe the material limit of surface, which might reference the solidity or breachability of the physical object, but which also speaks of ‘skin’ or ‘peel’. In The Virtual Window, Anne Friedberg describes a ‘second-order materiality’ that of the image on a screen which exists in reality, but only on the surface, a ‘liminal’ materiality (2006, p. 11). Friedberg describes this surface as a window or a membrane, ‘where surface meets depth, where transparency meets its barriers’ (2006, p. 2). That is, the reflective/reflexive surface which acts as the limit between subject and object.
There is a sense that I may go no further, an insufficiency to my approach. Merleau-Ponty expresses this as our sense organs betraying a shortfall, a falling short of full comprehension. For Schwenger, even the fullest investment in the object is insufficient, and this shortfall precipitates a loss, a melancholy. If it is melancholy I feel, it is rooted in a disconnect between my desire, my dependency and the object’s self-sufficiency. As Schwenger writes: ‘the object’s indifference makes the dependence entirely ours’ (2006, p. 6).
In the film installation Tentative, I cast my fingertips in pigmented resin and placed them on the surface of a screen, acting as crystallised traces of touch, abject, but also alluring, appetising, like jelly sweets or buttons. I use them to garnish the surface of the object, a playful, almost ornamental gesture. In the installation, it is the screen which appears to be the ‘object’ of touch; the hand presses upwards and seems almost to stroke the screen rather than attempt to breach its surface.
‘There is never any pure, immediate experience of the continuous, nor of closeness, nor of absolute proximity’​​
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— Jacques Derrida, On Touching - Jean-Luc Nancy
Tentative (film). colour monitor, wooden plinth, resin with pigment. 2025
I press myself against this thing until its edges print themselves on my flesh, but there can be no integration, no mixing of matter. Matter keeps us at a threshold. Derrida proposes that touch is ‘without contact’. He writes: 'it does not carry out any fusion or identification, not even any immediate contiguity’. He continues: 'We have to dissociate any association of touch with immediacy. There is no continuity, no closeness or absolute proximity' (2005, p. 119).
Like the screen and the photographic surface, the material quality of pure contiguity is a plane of smoothness; 'It is the smooth and not the striated space that this haptical continuism finds’ (2005, p. 126). This ‘pure smoothness’ is, for Derrida, the ultimate ontological union of object and subject. Imagine, to touch to such an extent as to break through these limits, to push through one’s own skin to merge, liquid-like with the object; to become a part of it; absolute knowledge is ‘inherence’ (2005, p. 145). Though to try for this would be to admit to a longing for escape from my own embodiment, by proceeding toward or perhaps returning to the inanimate state. Freud describes this in Beyond The Pleasure Principle as ‘an instinct not to be dead, but to shut off, a longing for an anterior state of things, the state of being a thing.’ (Schwenger, 2006)
In the film installation Tentative, the moving image of the hand strives towards, but never meets, the resin fingertips, and the screen itself becomes the object of touch, the material limit. Here, the virtual touch is presented; virtual meaning ‘acting without agency of matter’ (Friedberg, 2006). However, it is clear that the virtual image, the film and the photograph, in whichever technologised form, has its own materiality. It is in this ‘second-order materiality’ of the virtual image, I find the language of surface and liminality which defines the reflective/reflexive nature of touch.
​ ‘Images are mediations between the world and human beings. Human beings ex-ist, i.e. the world is not immediately accessible to them and therefore images are needed to make it comprehensible.’ ​
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— Vilém Flusser, Towards a Philosophy of Photography
Digital photograph of image on colour monitor. 2025
This lucent, granular, new order of thing, is both disconcerting and enticing in that I seem to gather it together with my eyes, and then just as quickly, it dissolves, only for me to re-materialise it. Ruth Pelzer-Montada, in the essay Notes on the Surface of Print, describes the print as a ‘condensed composite’ which ‘induces a micro haptics that we can characterize as a surface in excess’ (2008, p.86). Depicted in the photobook Touch, the object becomes increasingly granular, pixellated, and digital in appearance. In the changing state of the object from its draped curtain-like form, to what could be a shard of marble, to the luminous digital print, these final versions exist on the particulate level of the digital. Their surface has a textural, woven quality reminiscent of Vasseleu’s description of light as ‘cloth or interlaced fabric’ which, like the virtual image, is dimensionless, neither its object not its texture can be felt (1998, p. 30).
Digital photograph of image on colour monitor. 2025
As I situate myself in the expanded field of print, my work has become increasingly about proving that images are objects; print is a site in which the digital can become inherently physical, and the physical can become inherently digital. As a material model for touch, the composite nature of the print seems to align with Derrida’s characterization of the haptic’s ‘smooth space of close vision; its orientations, landmarks and linkages are in continuous variation. It operates step by step’ (2005, p.126). Moreover, the reflexive surfaces of the exterior and interior skin, what Vasseleu envisages as ‘ the indeterminate surfaces of a Moebius strip, (1998, p. 23)’ are reminiscient of the reversed/mirrored nature of the print which Kathryn Reeves, in The Revision of Printmaking associates with the dual nature of images, and a lack of fixed meaning (1999, p 72). Barbara Balfour, in The What and the Why of Print, celebrates the digital and physical capabilities of print, claiming the ‘receptive and protective membrane of the skin’ as a model for what she terms print’s ‘porosity’ in being able to absorb other media (2010, p. 92).
To have a material encounter with an object is to remain on the surface, but to envisage that object in a print is to re-materialise it, as Flusser writes to ‘reconstruct the abstracted dimensions’ (2000, p. 8). When Flusser writes that ‘Images are mediations between the world and human beings,’ (2000, p. 9) he recognises their role in our embodied interactions with the material world. Moreover, he acknowledges the limits of this interaction, writing that the world is ‘not immediately accessible’ and ‘images are needed to make it comprehensible’ (2000, p. 9)
In using my own language of materiality to ‘embody’ the sense of touch, I aim to provoke an engagement with both the material world, and with ourselves as being ‘in the midst of things’ (2015, p 45). Recognising our responsibility of power, as well our fragile dependence on material systems; these are aspects of materiality which invite ever more active discourse. In this critical juncture in which human and material agencies interact at their limits, I think that any situation which puts us in the midst of things, even virtually, and however playfully imagined, might be the start of us feeling our way.
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