Making and Touching

After having my personal academic tutorial with Lee, I was a little shaken. I very much had an idea of where I thought I was going with this project, a touch log of sorts, but I hadn’t made much.

I am fascinated by the gestures that we make on our phones, and I have been thinking about the touch component for a while. However, I hadn’t really considered mapping the idea of touch and gesture onto painting, which Lee pointed out is all gesture. Too, painting is compelling to me for the exact opposite reason that physical interactions between our hands and our phones are. In painting in the traditional sense, every single gesture is made permanent. The work you see is a product of the amount of time a person has sat in front of a canvas and touched it. However, in the case of the phone, we touch this object thousands of times a day, and there is no physicality to the result. Or, there is a physicality, a gross oily fingerprint that you can see on a black screen. In both cases, the action is touch, and the outcome is visual, which is a bizarre divide. However, painting’s touches are inherently physical, and they are precious based on the intent and impression of those touches. Whereas there is a certain nothingness to the tapping of a screen.

I have attempted to explore logging touch in a couple of different ways. I ended up scrapping the Adobe AfterEffect and by making some physical things. I used a piece of acetate over a video of myself touching the phone on an iPad and created a bit of a topographical map of touches for about a minute’s worth of touching on my phone.

I also did a similar procedure by copying the gestures with white paint on a phone sized area of my sketchbook.

I hated this, but I may try to layer up more paint on it. I am thinking about expanding this idea of copying the gesture of the phone to a larger surface, but perhaps these little experiments will transform into something much bigger. I have been using quite a literal scale of the size of the phone because I find the scale quite intimate. However, I am interested in the magnitude of the touches, so perhaps scaling up will reinforce that point.