haptic

/HAP-tik/. adjective. Relating to the sense of touch. From Greek haptomai (to touch, to adhere to, to cling) + -ic (suffix: of or pertaining to).

The emerging idea of a technologically integrated and enhanced kind of art you can touch—haptic art—shared by Madara Mason (Gallery || Instagram) caught my attention because it provides a tiny glimpse into a whole new way of envisioning an old idea and because of the tasty word haptic itself.

The first recorded use of haptic is in a 1683 volume of mathematician Isaac Barrow’s lectures with a mouthful of a title: “The usefulness of mathematical learning explained and demonstrated: being mathematical lectures read in the publick schools at the University of Cambridge.” Barrow speculates on a realm of new sciences including “Haptics, Geustics, and Olphrantics (or the Sciences of Touches, Tastes and Smells).” Sadly for Barrow, none of his new words stuck until more than 300 years later when psychologist Max Dessoir, proposed haptiks-with-a-‘k’ as the name for the study of touch, similar to the existing areas of optics and acoustics. Dessoir, unable to use Google Books or the OED to learn of Barrows’s earlier verbal virtuosity, explicitly noted that he was basing his “new” word on the Greek haptomai (to touch, to adhere to, to cling)…otherwise not only would Dessoir lose some credit, we might well be talking today about a word built on a Latin root instead, perhaps something like tactilics.

Incidentally, the root of haptomai is haptein (to fasten together). Haptein’s origin is unproven but is likely based on the notion of arcs joining in a circle. This is where we get the the modern word apse (A P S E), in astronomy the most extreme points of an eccentric orbit or in architecture the domed recess at the end of a traditional Catholic church in which the altar stands and also synapse, the junction and connection between nerve cells.

At first haptics was primarily used in experimental psychology to refer to our ability to experience the environment through touch, most often with our hands. Humans have developed an amazingly keen, and quick!, ability to identify objects and gauge their shape and material qualities by touch, called haptic perception. Most of us take this ability for granted until we lose some of it due to nerve impairments from injury or illness, the latter sadly on the increase thanks to neuropathies caused by chronic illnesses, particularly diabetes. In tragic cases of traumatic brain injuries where people have lost their sense of touch on a larger scale, those sufferers find themselves unable to perform tasks we don’t normally realize rely on touch, such as walking or lifting simple objects.

But, as often happens, the use of haptic broadened over time, coming to be used in reference to touch, in general, and even sensory activities related to touch. And then, the digital age with its attendant intensified focus on human computer interactions and augmentation, created a linguistic boom that has boosted many words and concepts relating to the human sensory experience. Haptics, particularly computer haptics—touch in digital and virtual environments—is everywhere, informing the “force touch” in phones, the vibration in video game controllers and touch pads, and the haptic gloves that feature in the strange concoction of yearning for the future and decided nostalgia that is at the heart of the book and movie Ready Player One.

Art meant to touch and be touched—haptic art—isn’t a new idea. The Bauhaus art movement in the early 1900s promoted the idea of art as an embodied experience, and much ink has been spilled, and art spaces invaded, with installations designed to question and explore our physical apprehension of art through ironically untouchable works. And, of course, art is a messy, haptic thing in children’s lives, though in traditional, non-digital forms, haptic art remains an idea too often and too easily dismissed as being “limited” to children’s art or something art snobs would like to separate and segregate into the supposedly lesser world of “crafts.” Touching a piece of art is so taboo that it’s literally big news when a museum hosts an exhibit that allows even virtual contact, as we learned a few years ago when the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum in New York City pioneered touch screens that allowed museum-goers to navigate the collection and even remix some of the designs.

Technologically integrated haptic art is starting to make itself known. Mason’s vision of conductive paint and circuit boards responding to our touch would fit right in with projects like the Intimate Earthquake Archive in Greenland which uses haptic technologies to convey, in an artistic installation, the different severities of earthquakes most people know only as numbers. Or the pioneering work of blind professor Georgina Kleege, who has designed haptic encounters for visitors to museums as various as the Contemporary Jewish Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Tate modern.

Perhaps playing with the taboos of untouchable art and working in the mostly undiscovered country of literally embodied art will redefine the art experience, allowing us to touch it and the art to touch us—and even in some cases making that experience an interaction in which we create something new along the way. And perhaps that would allow us to bring back out those childish things too hastily put away and unapologetically indulge in art with child-like delight and enjoy the resonance of craft when it involves our own hands rather than merely observing what has been created by someone else’s.