The Dizzying Feeling of Touch
Performative Reading Group, 2020
Ofri Cnaani and Georgia Perkins in collboration with Sirius Arts Centre and Miguel Amado
How does touch manifest in a contactless world, in an age of hyper-connectivity? How do the physical, emotional and political aspect of touch meet across networks? What are the new measures of closeness?
Artists Ofri Cnaani and Georgia Perkins use Karen Barad’s 2012 essay ‘On Touching – The Inhuman That Therefore I Am’ to question what it means to touch beyond close proximity, and collectively discuss ways in which we are already touching, intra-acting and dynamically entangled to one another.
In collaboration with Sirius Arts Centre, Ireland, Cnaani and Perkins are hosting three safe-distance performative reading sessions that emerged from ongoing research about gesture, space, connectivity, and technology.
In three 1.5 hour Zoom sessions, they are engaging in a series of topics drawn from Barad’s text to provoke contemplations as to how we experience our bodies in relation to contact and confinement as well as how we think through the mediation of an online territory and its formation of touching infinite others/beings/spaces/times.
We read:
Karen Barad, On Touching – The Inhuman That Therefore I Am
Tavi Meraud, Iridescence, Intimacies
Karen Sherman, The Glory Hole