Haptic/Somatic
Group Exhibition
Southern Connecticut State University
New Haven, CT
"Technology expands the human body’s ability to perceive, understand and alter the natural world. From the massive earth altering gears of the industrial revolution to nano technology moving inside of a cell, humans have developed tools to shape the world for our use in equally joyous, healing, and deadly ways. Today the powerful tools of new technology bring formerly impossible distances intimately close. We can perceive the bottom of the ocean, a distant glacier, planets in vast space, or the internal action of a facial expression. A screen sends tips of fingers across the globe, extending touch, sight, hearing and mind far beyond as well as deep inside the body’s biological perimeter. Our bodies remain flesh and bone, and yet, as emerging technology is integrated into and around our bodies, the ability to discern the physically unknowable through its powerful lens alters the somatic senses. Are these extensions of existing or new fibers of touch, sound, sight? Our complex relationship with the machines we’ve built expands and confounds our ability to comprehend, adapt, and to control its overwhelming influences, both destructive and productive. From industrial to digital, from low to high tech, these artists utilize and reflect upon how technology compresses notions of distance, agency, and intimacy, and both expands and disrupts our lives. Artists Claudia Hart, Joyce Yu-Jean Lee, and Laura Splan use recent technologies to re-envision modernist painting through AI, to illustrate pandemic data in immersive projections, and to transform the data of a frown into textile and 3D printed objects. Katherine Jackson and Christopher Kaczmarek reflect on our relationships with historic and low tech technology through a wall of tiny solar panels and broken eggshells making light levels visible as sound, and industrial oil cans memorialized as glowing glass reliquaries."
— Curator's Essay by Patricia Miranda
