How Can Art Reach Out and Touch Us?

A primer on haptic tech innovation and new possibilities for access in dance — from dancer, choreographer and product designer Laurel Lawson

I. “Disability is an art.” — Neil Marcus

The history of dance and disability is fraught.

I refer to disability here as an identity, as personal and political practice. This is divorced from the medical model, which uses disability as a means-tested umbrella term for impairment, and from the social model, which examines the systemic and neglects the personal.

There have always been disabled artists, but a climate that views disability as critical context rather than debilitation has been until recently almost nonexistent. In the United States, small pockets of artists have sprung up more or less concurrent with our disability civil rights movement, often loosely united by shared access needs. The trend of recognizing disability as culture and practice is relatively new and institutions are struggling with the related but different concepts of access, equity and justice.

Community is one source of our strength. Often difficult, the work of uniting across varied bodyminds calls for a practice of de-centering: the conscious awareness that our way of being and sensing is not the only way, and that there is no best way. Disability is an identity which encompasses us however differently we exist in the world. We know that there is no such thing as normal: there is no justification to prioritize the way one person moves or communicates above another. Justice requires a shared commitment to bridging our radically different ways of being.

The multiple and varied experiences of disability offer fertile ground for artistry. What can we create when we decenter our individual, inherently limited preferences? What might we choreograph when we value each new embodiment that enters the room? The experience of difference and multiplicity of em(mind)bodiment is largely unique to disabled people; thus we claim the artistic fruits of infinite variety.

II. Reach out and touch someone

Experiencing performance visually is embedded in English. We go “see a show.” We sit at a remove and watch performers onstage. We are comfortable in the clarity of our respective roles and social scripts. And yet, there is tension between the passivity of viewing and artists’ goals of communication and interaction. Great art should change everyone involved.

Dance communicates primarily through movement: both large, like thrilling lifts or dramatic falls, and small, like the emotional nuance of the turn of a head or crook of a finger. Dancers train for thousands of hours to accurately communicate through this language of the body — and then we further augment the performer’s body with various technologies which create immersive and spectacular effects. Examples include wearable technologies such as the ballet dancer’s pointe shoe or aerialist’s unitard and environmental technologies such as lighting and projection, music and sound effects. Do these seem, well, low-tech? Behind the scenes, they are controlled by carefully programmed software cues and hardware ranging from a single laptop to racks of servers backstage. The hour or two we enjoy is the tip of an infrastructural iceberg.

And still, these widely used technologies cater to only two channels of perception: vision and hearing. Critics of ocularcentrism remind us that vision is our perception of reflected light; it separates the perception of a thing from the thing itself, creating objectification. There is safety in this perceptual, physical and psychological distance. Dance is a kinaesthetic art, transmitted most directly through taking on movement. To decrease separation we should turn to another sense: touch.

Touch is the most universal of our senses and the most biologically necessary: we do not thrive without skin contact. Many forms of perception live in our skin, with complex and individually different sensitivities in how and where our bodies experience touch. Kinaesthesis and proprioception are the truest senses of dance: the perception of our body in relation to itself and the space around us. Touch is devastatingly intimate, a direct form of knowing; someone close enough to touch us might be a threat or a lover. How can art reach out and touch us?

III. Haptic technology

You are likely familiar with haptic feedback: it’s the tiny vibrational blip with which your phone rewards you for interaction. It’s fast, effective and goes almost unnoticed except for the quick dopamine hit. But the potential of haptic experience goes far beyond this tiny affordance. Haptic is not quite the same thing as touch: it has specifically to do with our perception of objects. We can manipulate those perceptions by changing how our skin and muscles react using vibration or electricity. We can change the shape or texture of a physical object, create objects that don’t physically exist or imagine the conversion of ideas into something you can feel.

Towards a practical approach, haptics could be imagined as the intersection of touch and sound: after all, sound is our perception of vibration in air. Just as we use technology to augment the performers’ body, we can augment our receptive capacity. If you were seated onstage, you might feel secondary effects like the vibrations of the soundtrack from the speakers, from dancers landing on the floor. How might we imagine an experience of dance that is crafted to be felt?

IV. Practical Experiments

This is where I began my own explorations. Having experienced various kinds of vibration-based therapeutics, I had direct knowledge of how precisely calibrated vibration and tiny spurts of electricity can trick mind and body into perceiving intangible objects or imaginary movements. I wanted to explore three ideas: direct interpretation of sound; translation of proprioception; and communicating complex and abstract ideas.

VibraFusionLab is based in the city of Hamilton just 45 minutes west of Toronto. Founded by hard of hearing artist David Bobier, they are among the field leaders in developing new devices to record and transmit touch-based content. I met David at a gathering of international access tech leaders, and, through the screen, his snowy beard and twinkling brown eyes gave him the look of an impish, endlessly inquisitive wizard. Vibrafusion’s projects include devices held or worn by each audience member through human-scale constructions which can play recorded content or interpret bodily movement from artist-worn devices on the fly.

With Vibrafusion’s guidance, I assembled a simple implementation for Kinetic Light’s Wired (2022), an aerial meditation on barbed wire created and performed by disabled artists. Audience members hold a strand of wire which carries the show’s soundtrack interpreted into vibration. The music was vibration-ready: half of it created by a hard of hearing composer, half by a disabled composer working in layered sound and rhythm. The result was a striking and artistically communicative experience.

Kinetic Light, an intersectional disability arts company, espouses a practice of many entry points into our work. Audiences could have this haptic experience in combination with watching the stage or listening to the multi-track audio description delivered through the Audimance app. First tested in Wired’s Chicago and New York premieres, this technology proved so popular and powerful that we quickly adopted it for our other shows. And yet this only begins to touch (lightly upon) the potential of this new medium.

V. Centering disabled joy

Making art that values and centers disabled knowledge and joy means centering people with direct experience. We can find leadership in the medium of touch in DeafBlind practice. Created by and in DeafBlind community, Protactile is a language of the skin: perceived through touch, pressure and proprioception. It is distinct from tactile ASL (American Sign Language), which attempts to use touch and various forms of haptic feedback to translate visually-centered ASL to a nonvisual form. Protactile grew out of personal and cultural imperatives for direct experience, connection and communication.

Meaning never develops in a vacuum. We interpret language and art based on our cultural context, and we modulate our understanding according to the medium of our experience. Protactile and other touch-centered systems often use multiple interpreters to communicate complex meaning and rich aesthetic experiences. Small clusters of people form in space, self-organizing cells which blur the distinctions between artist, interpreter and audience. This might suggest challenges for larger audiences or smaller venues, and this is exactly where disability-centered technology can serve as a way to extend and amplify our artistic intentions. What can we reimagine when art is contextualized through touch and consensual, collaborative co-creation?

When access is segregated from the practices of creating and experiencing art, it’s easy to fall into a worldview where access is finite and scarce. If we consider that all forms of experience are equally valid, it becomes clear that access is part of the creative process and that both artists and audiences are necessary collaborators in performance. Tactile and kinaesthetic techniques and technologies are an excitingly direct way for dance and movement artists to share work across bodies and media, whether as literal as a shared proprioceptive encounter, or as abstract as a concept vibrated through a novel artistic language which blends physical, created and extended realities.

This piece is part of Immerse’s 2023 issue centering disability innovation in documentary and emerging tech — presenting perspectives from artists, activists, scholars and technologists at the vanguard of storytelling and disability justice. You can find other featured stories and more information about the issue here.

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