Touching Software: The Enthrallment to Touch

touching-software

Technology has educated human beings to incorporate new gestures into their communication. These may initially be perceived as strange but then become part of a contemporary universal language. Touch screens have taken this language to a whole new level, triggering us to touch our phone on average more than two thousands time per day. But these gestures, inextricably both intimate and public, have not found a definitive way to be aesthetically represented. “Touching Software” by Ben Grosser is an artwork dealing with this aspect from an ideal public imaginary perspective: the web television series. Grosser assembled a supercut of touch-based interactions from the popular TV series House of Cards, unsurprisingly with no voices heard and various evolving strategies to render the content. It is a difficult rendering of intimacy, as the screen is always oriented to the protagonists’ faces, but the expressions and gestures viewed become suddenly both empathic and iconic.

 

Ben Grosser – Touching Software