Experience of touching and feeling touched is fundamental to human well-being, of safety and trust. Being in touch with others can be emotional and spiritual, it enables space for movement and transformation: to touch, kiss, play, dance, make love, tune and breath together.
Until recently, research into Human Computer Interaction has focussed on the performative potential of technology and physiological aspects of social touch; and less on human experience. However, recent research shows that ethical aspects of vulnerability, inclusiveness, agency, autonomy, responsibility and response ability, and trust are core to human experience of technically mediated social touch. Recent neuroscience research focuses on mirror neuron activity in empathic processes through touch; on synaesthetic mirror-touch perception; and on body ownership perception in visuo-haptic motor data interaction.
Media Performance Art has started to explore digital systems for shared experience of sensory, intercorporal connections and emphatic spectatorship with human and non-human others, in various hybrid social and spatial configurations.
This thesis expands these emergent and fragmented foci in a new, interdisciplinary Art, HCI, Design and Neuro Science perspective, for distributed, hybrid, XR, online, human-agent and robot interaction.
Artists and researchers duo Karen Lancel and Hermen Maat (Lancel/Maat) work interdisciplinary in art, science, technology and society. They are considered pioneers exploring shared experience of embodiment, empathy and intimacy, identity, privacy and trust, in bio-technical entanglement with (non-)human others, in sustainable ecologies.
Lancel/Maat's works have been presented and awarded internationally, and include visual art, media art, (large-scale) participatory performances and spatial installations; theater and internet art.
Their artistic and scientific research, into social and bodily connections in complex participatory systems and mixed realities, has led to Dr. Lancel's PhD thesis at the University of Technology Delft, focussing on the question "Can I Touch you Online?".
Experience of touching and feeling touched is fundamental to human well-being, of safety and trust. Being in touch with others can be emotional and spiritual, it enables space for movement and transformation: to touch, kiss, play, dance, make love, tune and breath together.
Until recently, research into Human Computer Interaction has focussed on the performative potential of technology and physiological aspects of social touch; and less on human experience. However, recent research shows that ethical aspects of vulnerability, inclusiveness, agency, autonomy, responsibility and response ability, and trust are core to human experience of technically mediated social touch. Recent neuroscience research focuses on mirror neuron activity in empathic processes through touch; on synaesthetic mirror-touch perception; and on body ownership perception in visuo-haptic motor data interaction.
Media Performance Art has started to explore digital systems for shared experience of sensory, intercorporal connections and emphatic spectatorship with human and non-human others, in various hybrid social and spatial configurations.
This thesis expands these emergent and fragmented foci in a new, interdisciplinary Art, HCI, Design and Neuro Science perspective, for distributed, hybrid, XR, online, human-agent and robot interaction.
Artists and researchers duo Karen Lancel and Hermen Maat (Lancel/Maat) work interdisciplinary in art, science, technology and society. They are considered pioneers exploring shared experience of embodiment, empathy and intimacy, identity, privacy and trust, in bio-technical entanglement with (non-)human others, in sustainable ecologies.
Lancel/Maat's works have been presented and awarded internationally, and include visual art, media art, (large-scale) participatory performances and spatial installations; theater and internet art.
Their artistic and scientific research, into social and bodily connections in complex participatory systems and mixed realities, has led to Dr. Lancel's PhD thesis at the University of Technology Delft, focussing on the question "Can I Touch you Online?".
