Reflections on bodies in lockdown: Notes on new mappings of tactility

Abstract

Over time, experiences have been made that attest to the need for proximity to the other/ to touch, as something essential to survival and to our healthy development. Touch is the first meaning we use and can be considered our first language. It is the most sophisticated of the five senses. Our skin reacts to the world, before we become aware, sweating, blushing, drying . . . Our bodies retract and our biology contracts, when we are deprived of touch. At the limit, we depress, we get sick with the lack of contact. Seeing is a way of touching at a distance, but it is through touching that we verify and confirm reality. Touch attests to the existence of an objective reality. At a time when touching represents the enemy, our parasympathetic system is now activated, during gestures that previously so reassured us—closeness, touch, hug . . . and the notion of the limit of our body fades without the boundaries defined by contact with the other. At the limit, like time, I use film making to imagine how our anatomy may change due to the predominance of a digital touch. This essay presents three films through which I speculate on how as a result of profound synesthetic transformations resulting from a growing intimacy with technology, we may see a metamorphosis of the “archaeology” of the body. The prevalence of the use of certain fingers (for scroll, swipe, pinch . . . ) in contact with touch interfaces, to the detriment of the use of the whole hand in a more humanized relationship, is just one example of what I playfully speculate may lead to mutations (Figure 1). There is a possibility arising, then, that what we gradually begin to feel, on a conscious or unconscious level, is the need to reconfigure touch, as we know it. To rethink tactility is to reposition our perception toward what surrounds us, which implies the