The Complexity of Touch

The Complexity of Touch continues my collaboration with artist Madi Boyd and psychologist Polly Dalton of Royal Holloway University. The project set out to foreground touch in the experience of a multimedia installation which also included sound, visuals and scents. The sound itself was designed to be felt as well as heard, using a sub-woofer to create low frequency vibrations alongside ten cymbals placed, facing upward, on the floor, which produced the remaining sounds. Transducers attached to the centre of the cymbals brought them to vibration to supply the higher frequencies. The audience were encouraged to touch everything in the space including numerous ceramic objects some of which also transmitted low frequency vibrations. We viewed the fragility of these encounters as a contract of trust between the artists and the public, moving away from the norm of only allowing tactile interaction with very limited materials. As in most of my installations, the sound is controlled by a generative max/msp patch that selects material according to a set of structural rules which allow and disallow certain combinations of material and develop the form through time. Resonant frequencies sourced from the instruments through a feedback process were used alongside processed bell recordings created during a residency at ZKM Karlsruhe, using techniques developed in previous work. While principally responsible for sound I was involved in the planning of all elements of both the artwork and experiments that informed it. In these a trial group was presented with tactile, sonic and visual stimuli of different levels of complexity and asked to evaluate their experience in a questionnaire. While principally conceived as a parallel activity, addressing the same question from both scientific and artistic perspectives, the results influenced the temporal design of the sound and variations in the attention demanded by it.