Touch is a fundamentally human gesture that reflects not just our capacity for compassion and care, but also of resistance and aggression. Touch is an important device in the performing arts – musicians have a certain touch on their instruments, and dancers in contact improvisation use body collisions in their choreography.

In the contemporary everyday however, touch has been appropriated by the technologies of late Western capitalism, making human contact normative and reductive. Smartphones use touchscreens and biometrics to identify and track us. The nature of this interaction remains poor as it takes place on a Cartesian plane and only allows access to screen-based media. Digital touch, the new project Technologies of Touch argues, is brittle and lacks subtlety. How can we recover the sensuous, expressive dimension of touch?

The research project Technologies of Touch, funded by the DFG (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft) and the AHRC (Arts and Humanities Research Council in the UK), led by Berit Greinke, ECDF Professor for Wearable Computing at the Berlin University of the Arts, Ariane Jeßulat, Professor for Music Theory also at the UdK Berlin, and Atau Tanaka, Professor of Media Computing at Goldsmiths, University of London, investigates both historical and contemporary forms of physical and interpersonal touch in musical performances — developing novel wearable technologies in the process and making sensory communication accessible for research and artistic communities.

The results will develop new views for the design of future touch technologies, particularly in the areas of social interaction, inclusion, and digital culture. Using music as a starting point, the project sets out to provide a deeper understanding of the significance of touch in today's society.