Touched Matter: material explorative approaches to investigate tactile relationships with responsive materiality

This thesis explores the mundane nature of tactile relationships with touchscreens, focusing on their material qualities through experimental approaches. The research addresses the question: What do we touch daily that is responsive to our touch? In the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, the study examines the significance and physicality of touchscreens and other responsive materials, including conductive threads, to understand their impact on tactile interaction. The pandemic's restrictions on physical interactions highlight the changing nature of tactile engagements, as well as the risks associated with contamination through touch and mundane contact with touchscreens. The research is a practice-led inquiry concerning the tactile relationship between skin and touchscreens. Through material interventions and explorations in gallery and workshop settings, the thesis examines the interactions between the body and touchscreen as an embodied encounter (figure 1). Moving beyond the user-device relationship, the study is framed by the concept of 'intra-action,' which is explored through practice-led methodologies. The study focuses on the residual traces left on touchscreens, considering them as not merely passive objects, but as active participants. This research adopts a New Materialist perspective, where the touchscreen is viewed as a material agent, and the person is seen as a nervous, responsive matter, in physiological and philosophical terms. The research contributes to understanding the tactile relationship with technology by identifying four key themes—Conductive, Broken, Wet/Soft, and Cared—that emerge from material explorations. These themes convey the diversity of encounters between the body and touchscreen, prompting a reconsideration of the everyday tactile engagements we have with responsive technologies. This work makes an original contribution to knowledge by examining the sensory and material dimensions of touch in relation to the materiality of e-waste, thereby expanding the discourse on embodied interaction with technology at the intersection of Art practice and Neurophilosophy.