Tactile knowledge A lecture performance – December 2011 E LKE M ARK I am sitting sideways at the head of the group of tables, listening to the introductory words I pull the chair forward to the edge of the table where a stack of sheets of printed paper is lying waiting pause I begin to read rapidly1 1 “The more I succeed in understanding plans, ideas and concepts that have been well thought through as a mere framework, in putting them aside when a performance begins, when I start to work intently, and to allow intuition and chance encounter to carry me along from one moment to the next, the closer I feel to unintended actions – a form of working that allows scope for the unthought, creates scope for unfurling processes that evolve unpredictably, processes which I follow and accompany. A knowledge that opens itself up to anyone moving attentively, that finds potential in encounter. My horizons broaden, extend all around me, meet with points of intersection, resistance and centers of attraction in space and in my activities. If I succeed in following the rhythm, in finding the tune, in taking it up and developing it, a powerful ELKE MARK | TACTILE KNOWLEDGE | 2 I lay down the sheet of paper I have just read out on the left‐hand side of the tabletop2 coherence unfolds, one that both attracts and includes the viewer ‐ unintentionally.” The open network PAErsche, which has been active for about 1 1/2 years now and is located in North Rhine‐Westphalia, sees itself as a platform for performance art, which artists from different disciplines including dance, theater, literature, music and the fine arts join. It seems to me that with its open results, the nature of this scheme, which has no particular target product in mind, is suitable for accurately describing PAErsche’s open source sessions. Individuals open the ‘performative space’ and other actors gradually join the stage, following their own impulses. The result is an assemblage – comparable in a way to a mobile – in which the participants move and act. Elements of this interaction alternate with episodes occurring seemingly in parallel. Between one and two hours in length, these proceedings resemble the kind of research work that is not interested in confirming or rejecting any theories that might have been advanced at an earlier stage, but sees itself as an open process of “providing still unknown answers to questions which the experimenter is not yet in a proper position to ask.”1 What is special about this kind of experiment is, as Karin Krauthausen describes, “not embedded in a technique of ‘discoveries’ as part of empiricism but lies in being able to accentuate and stabilize the unprecedented.”2 She also notes that “the advantages of the experiment […] [include] not least the unforeseeable urge to change directions”3 – described by philosopher of science Ludwik Fleck as a kind of Columbus effect, where somebody looking for India ends up in America. Despite the provisional, tentative nature of these experiments the proceedings cannot be accused of arbitrariness. 2 The researchers are distinguished by a kind of ‘virtuosity’, an ability “to skillfully handle the unforeseeable.”4 Fleck and Rheinberger stress that in order to succeed in this, a certain dexterity acquired through practice is necessary. This consists not only of methods that have been well thought through and of established techniques, but also of an implicit or mute knowledge that does not have to be rationally controlled.”5 This also includes a sense of timing and a particular alertness. Pausing following a “presentiment” “without, each time, being aware of what it is that we are waiting for; instead, when we stop short and take notice (of something) that is, to begin with, not ‘something’ but ELKE MARK | TACTILE KNOWLEDGE | 3 I pull out a cuddly dog from under the tabletop3 remains unclear and is more like some kind of ambient conditions than a name”6 as Dieter Mersch describes it. Touch and tactility have been a guiding principle in my artistic activities from the outset. The sensuality of materials and their reference to the body are of central importance to my textile sculptures, performances, photographs and even my film sequences. As part of my doctoral thesis at Staatliche Hochschule für Gestaltung Offenbach, the State Academy of Design in Offenbach, I am investigating questions relating to the effects of our current‐day digital living situation on our bodies, looking at their interactions and mutual influences, particularly with regard to tactile perception. The aim: to expose the consistency of my own practical artistic activities to the challenges of theorization, not least so as to apply them to actual situations. The idea is to relate the new references resulting from this intensification process to the existing situation, to debate it and relate it to what I am basically interested in: forms of tactile knowledge. The model of the five senses has been in use since Antiquity, even though nowadays our sophisticated notions of perception mean that we could quite easily talk about more than ten senses. Restricting myself to five senses may serve to simplify the communication of personal experiences of perception. 3 It was only some 150 years ago, in the mid‐19th century, that tactile receptors were discovered in the skin, the muscles, the tendons and the joints, and electrochemical perception and processing in the brain decoded.7 Previously attributed to the ‘lower senses’, our highly sophisticated sense of touch was upgraded. The notion of perception summarized as the somatosensory system, which excludes the specialized senses of sight, hearing, taste and smell, is composed of the sensitivity of the body surface, tactility, the sensor system of the locomotor system, also known as proprioception, and of the inner organs. Comprising several layers, our skin has receptors embedded in it which register not only surface perception, but also temperature, pain and pressure. A distinction is made between three different main receptors. The epidermis contains pressure receptors that react to mechanical impact by opening small channels in their membranes with the result that positively charged particles flood in. In this way, an electrical signal is produced which is transmitted to the brain. The stronger the pressure, the larger the openings and the stronger the signal to the brain; accordingly, when the pressure is small there is no sense of perception. The smallest degree of pressure is around 3 mg, which corresponds ELKE MARK | TACTILE KNOWLEDGE | 4 I lay down the sheet of paper on the left‐hand side, on top of the previous one I slowly open the zipper on the dog’s chest4 I pull the dog’s left arm out of its furry coat5 to the weight of a down feather. By contrast, movement of the skin – for example, when a mosquito, a creature that weighs only some 2 mg, lands – is registered by the touch receptors, located deeper in the skin, which react to changes, completely independent of weight. 4 Touch and velocity receptors are activated by as little as 1 µm, which corresponds to around the thickness of one 50th of a mosquito leg. The receptors that react to the acceleration and vibration of a stimulus are located deeper still. These even register the vibrations caused by the beating of a mosquito’s wing at a distance of 1 meter!8 This extreme sensitivity of the skin, particularly in the fingertips, allows me to feel the most delicate curves that surface structures permit me to recognize, by producing vibrations. In addition to this, there is proprioception which, in combination with my sense of balance, allows me to feel the position of my body in space. Proprioception concentrates sensory impressions that are evoked by stimulating receptors in the muscles, tendons and joints. This form of perception allows me to perceive positions and the movements (kinesthesia) of individual parts of my body and to estimate weights. In combination with tactility, this makes for the three‐dimensional perception of spatial dimensions. Even when visual verification is not possible I am capable of determining my position in relation to the vertical and horizontal axes in space, front‐back, top‐bottom, right‐left. 5 Even today, these anatomical and functional findings basically tell us little about how the process of putting together the infinitely large number of individual items of information to form a whole in our brains actually works, about learning and automating sensorimotor processing; after all, alongside constantly processing and integrating information from our sensory and motor system, at the same time countless other attention‐regulating processes and procedures in my working memory are taking place, which were in turn preceded by a large number of comparative and decision‐making processes.9 Studies on tactile perception from the past decade, principally devoted to understanding passive stimulus processing, have only thrown up more questions about the ELKE MARK | TACTILE KNOWLEDGE | 5 I pull the dog’s right arm out of its furry coat6 I put down the sheet of paper I turn the dog over7 I pull first its left leg, then its right leg out of its furry coat, one after the other8 understanding of active haptic perception, whose complexity, at the end of the day, makes cooperation between different scientific disciplines necessary. The constant reciprocal effects between motor and sensory actions in information processing have led to the introduction of the phrase sensorimotor function, a comprehensive body sense which, alongside the active management and control of movements, is responsible for the continual, unconscious adaptation of the body to the requirements made of it. 6 Since the mid‐1950s, authors such as James Jerome Gibson and Géza Révész10 have increasingly focused on the aspect of active movement in the perceptional process. This has led to the distinction between the term haptics – as a sense that understands by active feeling and touching – and that of tactile perception, in which the skin is stimulated passively, i.e., without any active movement by the person perceiving. 7 Even today the definitions of tactility and haptics have remained in a state of flux and they are used in different ways, although the term haptics is always associated with an active movement which has, in fact, achieved its end when it touches something. Without this movement towards one another, bodies and objects remain isolated in space and cannot be felt. Indeed, it is by means of kinesthetic movement that I make haptic perception my own. This self‐ reference, the double information of feeling that gives me both knowledge of the outside world and information about myself is the crucial difference between man and technological equipment that cannot create a reference to itself using kinesthesia and haptics.11 There are also aspects of unconsciously touching (our own) bodies whose influence on our ability to act is currently being researched by Martin Grunwald.12 8 The sensory systems are now separated artificially so as to understand them better, since perception is in fact distinguished by the continuous interlocking, collaborating and associating of the many components that make up perception. ELKE MARK | TACTILE KNOWLEDGE | 6 I lay down the fur and the dog on the tabletop in front of me9 I put the sheet of paper on one side I stand up, I am holding the stack of paper in both hands10 Here, I have consciously portrayed the sense of touch very comprehensively in order to accentuate the highly complex functions fulfilled by our sensory and processing systems, which are the basis of our trains of thought. The automation that results from the learning process, often misinterpreted as seemingly ‘natural’, or as ‘self‐evident’ dimensions of experience, and too quickly dismissed as ‘banal’, distinguish a functioning sensory system of the kind that often only makes itself noticeable in the case of irritations and disruptions. 9 A characteristic that is also attributed to the medium and whose ‘disappearance’ has been extensively investigated, for example by McLuhan, something I shall come back to later. But I shall start with tactile cognition and knowledge generation. First described by Aristotle as a uniform sense, our sense of touch played a subordinate role from Antiquity until well into the 17th century. Over the centuries, the visual reigned supreme. It was not until the end of the 18th century, in the age of sensualism, that the sense of touch was given preference over seeing. From the early 20th century, however, with the advent of the gestalt theory, physiology and psychology, the visual again began to dominate again, and the sense of touch as a source of knowledge was downgraded.13 One exception in this context was Révész, who accorded crucial powers of conviction to knowledge acquired via the sense of touch. “The sense of touch has epistemological precedence over the other […] senses […]” is how Jens Loenhoff quotes Révész.14 10 Tactility is increasingly placed in the context of social activities, communication and interaction, since it is not possible to separate physical contact, touching and touch as a double sensation from the above. In his 1925 theory of perception, Melchior Palágyi describes active movement as a fundamental component of tactile self‐perception.15 Arnold Gehlen16 and Michel Serres17 also highlight sensorimotor perception as fundamental to attaining awareness and acquiring knowledge. In her studies, Madalina Diaconu refers to the sense of touch as a dynamic, mobile/fluid cognitive organ connected to a physically ELKE MARK | TACTILE KNOWLEDGE | 7 I climb onto the chair11 I climb onto the table12 active subject that not only extends our visual powers of understanding but that is indeed the basis of the latter. 11 For us to be able to form a picture of the whole, the location‐specific, fragmentary quality of touching renders a synthesis necessary. No consolidation processes takes place, no action of fixing, as is the case with the visual. Thus, feeling involves remaining in motion and “accordingly, tactile thinking can never aim to consolidate its fluctuating constellations of circumstances in a system.”18 Diaconu remarks further: “if tactile thinking has to abandon the metaphysical separation of the being as a core and the phenomenon as a sheath, as the subject always remains on the surface, this kind of thinking opens itself up to a different kind of depth, to an historically layered surface or to a palimpsest.”19 The doubling of perception in the simultaneity of touching and being touched and the associated experience of being both subject and object describes the decisive moment of understanding. [In his phenomenology of perception Merleau‐Ponty understands seeing as a form of touching. Diaconu elaborates Merleau‐Ponty’s deliberations on the relationship between subject and object, between the self and the other, the invisible and visible “as a chiasmus following the model of the mutual touching of hands, as a reversible relationship where the clear division of active and passive roles is torn asunder by clear ambiguity”20 and sees his way of thinking, which is not a coherent entity and has not been consolidated into a system, as ‘tactile’. To complement this, she quotes Ute Guzzoni’s deliberations on the term ‘landscape thinking’ that demand the kind of thinking which sees its concern with its contents as moving through a landscape and feeling itself to be a part of, or a moment in the latter.21 According to Diaconu the new, tactile way of thinking characterizes the relationship of the individual to his opposite number, a relationship that is no longer objective.] 12 In addition to this we should consider the important aspects of affect because it is via our tactile impressions of consistencies, resistances and depths that we perceive associated feelings, from defensive ones all the way through to those of the greatest intimacy. Accordingly, Hartmut Böhme sees “not only sensual perception but also all emotions as the progeny of the sense of touch”.22 ELKE MARK | TACTILE KNOWLEDGE | 8 I let the sheet of paper I have read from slip from my left hand I put up the chair and place it on the table, then stand on it13 I climb down from the chair onto the table14 I climb down from the table via an unoccupied chair on the left and sit down on the chair next to a member of the audience, who moves to one side15 The field of reference of the tactile also needs to be seen in the context of the radical shift in perception from the humoral body to the organic/neuronal, anatomical body in the late 18th century. 13 In contrast to the old European humoral understanding of the body in which fluid, material life was held and used, porous, uncoded, in permanent contact with the outside world, the modern body is characterized by the maintenance of the boundaries between the inside and the outside, which leads to a greater distancing from the corporeal. In modern‐day medicine it is often the case that examinations no longer represent an interaction between two bodies. Imaging equipment is interposed providing (nowadays not even with a time lapse) results from people’s insides presented on two‐dimensional screens. Tactility is no longer an external touch which is conveyed to the insides, “not even, any longer [as] a simple approach from a distance, but only [as] transformations that take place in the course of data processing from the sensory to the sensual to the cognitive function.”23 14 “For centuries the somatic ‘I’ was narrative, it could come up in the context of biology, when discussing the perils of life in one’s own times and one’s own location. By contrast, it seems evident to us today that ‘the body’ is nothing but an object that becomes apparent from descriptions, constructions and texts. We are so used to layers and layers of descriptions about the inner anatomy, its organs etc. […] that we can no longer be intuitively surprised by this implantation of text‐related imagery into the body.”24, is how Barbara Duden summarizes this process. 15 For a long time now tactility has no longer been a guarantee of body‐related communication. This experience of loss is concurrent with the development of new dimensions in technology‐generated forms of tactility. Virtual haptics and ELKE MARK | TACTILE KNOWLEDGE | 9 I stand up and walk slowly between the seated people to the back of the room16 I hand over my stack of papers to the person sitting in front of me17 robotics have developed into leading fields of science at a breathtaking speed.25 Before I look at the changes in the sense of touch in the context of digital technologies, let me start by referring briefly to something described by Walter Benjamin: the crucial process of change towards an understanding of a ‘modern’ tactility with its radical effects on our way of looking, something that has now become a self‐evident component of our viewing habits. The new equipment‐based view of the world and in particular the development of film have led to “completely new texturing of materials”26 through the camera. Although the eye remains central, the media have brought the latter so near by means of close‐ups, slow‐motion and cutting, that it touches things and the viewer can no longer draw back. “This structuring penetration of reality is the media’s tactile moment, one which also supplants the usual way of looking at surfaces,”27 is how Nicolas Pethes describes it. The equipment used by the media causes alienation and has a distancing effect by virtue of its extreme closeness. 16 At the point of utmost rapprochement, the tactile moment of touching, proximity is transformed into distance. This proximity to objects comes at the expense of objectivity, the viewer has to surrender his position of superiority. Modern tactility changes the Western theory of perception, with its hierarchical perspective. “Tactile reception is thus no longer a way of touching conditioned by the intentional interaction of hands or an authentic bodily experience, but instead a loss of the possibility of escaping from one’s environment that is approaching by means of the camera lens.”28 How naturally our present‐day viewing habits are conditioned by looking through a camera lens, how children learn patterns of perception in order to make ‘sense’ of what they perceive, was demonstrated to me extremely clearly last year by my son, who was three years old at the time, in the way he played soccer after watching a game transmitted in the context of the soccer World Cup: 17 Mom, don’t you know how to catch a ball!? ELKE MARK | TACTILE KNOWLEDGE | 10 I demonstrate in slow motion a goalkeeper sinking silently to the ground, with his mouth open and his arms stretched out I reclaim possession of my stack of papers and take a few steps18 I sit down on the lap of one of the women in the audience19 18 Children soon learn how to interpret the confusion caused by alternating extremely large and many tiny soccer players, the ever‐growing number of goals that are suddenly scored very slowly as greater detail, replays, time gaps, cuts and montages. In the context of current‐day digital technologies they are capable of far more: they design things themselves, influence them, manage them. If, in the mechanical age, reproducibility was considered something new, our present digital information society promises a creative power, which makes it possible to recreate things.29 Aspects of digitality, which derives from the act of counting on individual fingers (from the Latin ‘digitus’) something that is also directly related to feeling and to tools operated with the hands and fingers are seen by Till Heilmann as a “digital tactility”30 that can be traced to McLuhan, to which I will come back later. Objects on computer screen are controlled by input equipment in the hands of their users. Seeing and feeling are merged, symbolized by a little mouse pointer on the user interface. One’s hand is no longer controlled by the eye, feeling takes place in a figurative sense by pressing keys. Whereas, to begin with, manipulation was effected by means of keyboards via a mouse and its key functions using graphic keys, today, direct contact and control by gesture are used, with touchscreens, smart phones and tablet computers; here numeric keyboards and buttons have disappeared almost entirely.31 19 According to Heilmann, this step in the development of interface characterizes man’s dream and his “impossible wish to take charge of digital things themselves beyond the intervention of keys and interfaces, beyond the level of written and graphic/iconographic mediation.”32 Nowadays, by means of his body movements, man becomes part of the interface. In combination with seeing, our hands’ sense of touch plays a special role in hand‐to‐eye coordination. In combination with visual perception, writing and reading, it forms an important basis for our conscious processes. We owe the complex control of graphomotor movement sequences to the ability of our brain to make new associations and the resultant time saving, because in structural terms our brains differ very little from those of people 40,000 years ELKE MARK | TACTILE KNOWLEDGE | 11 I let the sheet of paper I have read from slip from my left hand I get up20 ago who could neither read nor write.33 In addition to their fine motor skills, in order to write on (two‐dimensional) paper, children must be able to structure a space or the page of an exercise book from left to right and from top to bottom, something which presupposes an ability to coordinate learned during development of a child’s movements. When we learn the alphabet it is initially the cerebrum that unconsciously controls the motor skills of our hands in order to guide the course of the individual letters and their coordination. It is only once these sequences of movements have become automatic that children learn how to write more quickly and more fluently, and to adapt the pressure of their hands. Since learning how to read and write is not genetically programmed, every child needs to start from scratch when acquiring this particular skill. However, the process does initially revert to established structures for seeing and speaking before, in a large number of consecutive learning steps and associative processes, a new ‘reading circuit’ becomes established over the entire surface of both halves of the brain. Maryanne Wolf, Professor of Child Development in Boston, points out the essential significance of this process. Reading and writing “restructure the circuits and the links between existing brain structures, use their ability to employee areas for specialization, particularly for recognizing patterns and demonstrate how new circuits are automated to such an extent that more temporal and spatial brain capacity is made available for other, more complex thought processes.”34 20 With the advent of new technologies the radical changes in the use of the hand in the writing process call for a new study of the hand’s role. In fact here, the main role of the hand will not be questioned from a motor viewpoint, but in particular with regard to perceptive processing. The natural sensorimotor experiences that are so matter of course for our generation soon hide the fact that haptic perception is so important to learning processes. Norwegian literary scholar and media expert Anne Mangen, who is researching the influences of digital technologies on reading and writing from multi‐sensory, body‐related perspectives, stresses that there is a potential that remains unreachable, when typing on a keyboard, in the fundamental associations between haptics and cognition and in the combination of stimulus‐processing centers in the brain with the writing hand.35 ELKE MARK | TACTILE KNOWLEDGE | 12 I go all the way back into the furthest corner of the room21 21 Results from the collaboration with Jean‐Luc Velay, cognition scientist at the University of Marseilles, emphasizes the role of haptics and the importance of the hands in reading and writing processes. A study compared two groups of adults. They were given the task of writing in an unknown script consisting of 20 letters. The first group wrote by hand and the second using a keyboard. Three and six weeks later checks were made as to how well they remembered the letters and how quickly they recognized correct and upside down letters. The group that had learnt using handwriting achieved better results. It was discovered that reading letters learnt through writing activates the motor speech center in the cerebral cortex. By contrast, in the group which wrote using a keyboard, little or no activation of this Broca’s area was recorded.36 Functional MRIs were able to confirm that the sensorimotor stimuli produced when writing by hand leave behind a kind of motor memory trail, meaning that the memory of what the subject had written could be more easily retrieved at a later date. This even happens when we watch people in action. We do not even have to do this ourselves. Hearing or observing an activity is often enough. It can even be sufficient to look at a familiar tool that is associated with a certain activity, explains Anne Mangen.37 Accordingly, she says that the Broca’s area is activated considerably more intensively if a movement is associated with reading. The prerequisite is that sensorimotor/cognitive networks have already been established. Other studies conducted by Jean‐Luc Velay and Marieke Longcamp have shown that motor movements considerably facilitate the recollection of letters. The advantages of practicing writing apply to both children and adults. “When our hands are guiding a pen it is obvious that the corresponding motor commands are stored in certain parts of our cerebral cortexes. Thus a memory is created for movements and tactile sensations which belongs to the relevant characters, something known as a sensorimotor memory. This assists purely visual recognition.”38 Vice versa, following this theory, letters can be recognized by means of “kinesthetic movement” of the relevant hand and finger movements. “Reading is, in fact, an inner writing process using an extended neuronal network.” […] The reason: when children learn to write they make a mental note of “the visual form of a letter at the same time as they find out how it is pronounced and the ELKE MARK | TACTILE KNOWLEDGE | 13 I go back to my starting point and stand, partly hidden by the chair, on the table22 I let the sheet of paper I have read from slip from my left hand I crouch down, my face at table height23 I draw in my head and disappear from the audience’s field of vision I leave the sheet of paper I have read lying on the floor24 unique movement necessary to write an A, for instance. When typing using a keyboard the whole thing is reduced to pressing a key.”39 This can occur by means of an unspecific, arbitrary movement of the hand. 22 Matching results can also be found in studies by two American psychologists, Karin Harman James and Virginia Berninger, who stress that children write more and more quickly by hand and develop considerably more ideas than children who have learned how to write on keyboards.40 Neurological scientist Murali Doraiswamy from Durham has even discussed the effectiveness of writing by hand in therapy for decreasingly effective memories.41 23 For the time being, the objective is still to develop legible handwriting, something that can only be achieved by means of sufficient practice. Learning how to type cannot replace the associated complex learning processes. The slow differentiation between vestibular, proprioceptive and tactile qualities when learning how to write should not be sacrificed to a way of learning that is seemingly and ostensibly quicker. Indeed, Maryanne Wolf even points to something known as delay neurons “whose only function is to slow down neuronal transmission by other neurons, if only by milliseconds. These invaluable milliseconds lend our perception of reality structure and order and put us in a position to plan and synchronize […] sequences of movements.”42 What use is the rapidity of typing if the freed‐up capacity can no longer be used for freedom of thought and creativity? 24 Since knowledge of the physiological processes involved in our sense of touch do not provide an adequate explanation of the qualities of the tactile and offer even less about what physically touching means to people, and since even articulating these processes takes us to our limits, in this practical/theoretical work the focus will be on developing an artistic ‘practice language’ for haptic ELKE MARK | TACTILE KNOWLEDGE | 14 I straighten up again25 I lay the last page on the table and sit down knowledge which includes physical and digital tactility. Has it not long been the case that we have reached the “electronic colonization”43 of our sense of touch, and need to trust the kind of “silent intelligence of touching44 described by Hartmut Böhme, one that defies access by language? 25 This brings me to the conclusion. The need and the curiosity to render the intangible and immaterial comprehensible remain. The basis for this is, not least, the sensual experiences gained from the actual tactile sensation of closeness. Will the generation that restricts these experiences (be at all able to) miss them? Let us not impoverish ourselves! ELKE MARK | TACTILE KNOWLEDGE | 15 Notes / Works cited 1 Rheinberger, Hans‐Jörg (2001) Experimentalsysteme und epistemische Dinge. Göttingen: Suhrkamp. p. 22. 2 Krauthausen, Karin (2010) Vom Nutzen des Notierens. In: Notieren, Skizzieren, Wissen im Entwurf, vol. III. Karin Krauthausen and Omar W. Nasim (eds.). Zürich & Berlin: Diaphanes. p. 11. 3 Ibid. p. 12. See also Fleck, Ludwik (1935) Entstehung und Entwicklung einer wissenschaftlichen Tatsache: Einführung in die Lehre vom Denkstil und Denkkollektiv. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. 4 Krauthausen, Karin (2010) Vom Nutzen des Notierens. In: Notieren, Skizzieren, Wissen im Entwurf, vol. III. Karin Krauthausen and Omar W. Nasim (eds.). Zürich & Berlin: Diaphanes. p. 12. 5 Ibid. p. 11, see also Rheinberger, Hans‐Jörg (2001) Experimentalsysteme und epistemische Dinge. Göttingen: Suhrkamp and Polanyi, Michael (1966) The Tacit Dimension. London: Routledge. 6 Mersch, Dieter (2002) Ereignis und Aura. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. p. 52. 7 See also Grunwald, Martin (2001) Der bewegte Sinn. Basel – Boston – Berlin: Birkhäuser. 8 All examples from 3sat nano (11.09.2008): Den Flügelschlag einer Mücke in einem Meter spüren. Online: http://www.3sat.de/mediathek/?mode=play&obj=9391 [17.11.2011] 9 Grunwald, Martin (2001) Der bewegte Sinn. Basel – Boston – Berlin: Birkhäuser. 10 See also Gibson, James Jerome (1962) Observations on active touch. In: Psychological Review, 69, pp. 477 – 491 and Révész, Géza (1950) Psychology and art of the blind. New York: Longmans Green. 11 Alarcón, Mónica (2009) mbody. September 11, 2009. Lecture at MediaSynthesisLab, Furtwangen. Online: http://verbundlabor.de/LehreUndForschung/Lopes1106 [26.11.2011]. 12 See also Grunwald, Martin (2012) Haptik: Der handgreiflich‐körperliche Zugang des Menschen zur Welt und zu sich selbst. In: Denkzeug Werkzeug. Manuelle Intelligenz und Transmedialität kreativer Prozesse. Thomas Schmitz and Hannah Groninger (eds.). Bielefeld: Transcript. ELKE MARK | TACTILE KNOWLEDGE | 16 13 See also Loenhoff, Jens (1998) Hand und Haut. In: Psychologie und Geschichte, vol. 8. Opladen: Leske u. Budrich, pp. 261‐280. 14 Révész, Geza (1944) Die menschliche Hand: eine psychologische Studie. Basel – New York: S. Karger. p. 24. 15 See also Palágyi, Melchior (1925) Ausgewählte Werke: Wahrnehmungslehre, vol. II. Leipzig: Johann Ambrosius Barth. 16 See also Gehlen, Arnold (1993) Der Mensch. Frankfurt/Main: Klostermann 17 See also Serres, Michel (1998) Die fünf Sinne. Eine Philosophie der Gemenge und Gemische. Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp. 18 Diaconu, Mădălina (2005) Tasten‐Riechen‐Schmecken: Eine Ästhethik der anästhesierten Sinne. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann. p. 77. 19 Ibid. p. 77. 20 Ibid. p. 87. 21 See also Guzzoni, Ute (1990) Wege im Denken: Versuche mit und ohne Heidegger. Freiburg/München: Alber. 22 Böhme, Hartmut (1996) Der Tastsinn im Gefüge der Sinne. In: Tasten. Uta Brandes and Claudia Neumann (eds.). Göttingen: Steidl. p. 194. 23 Binczek, Natalie (2000) Der ärztliche Blick zwischen Wahrnehmung und Lektüre. In: Taktilität, Zeitschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Linguistik, 117. p. 96. 24 Duden, Barbara (2009) Von der „Bio‐Logie“ unter anderen Sternbildern. In: Haut ‐ Zwischen Innen und Außen, Villigster Werkstatt Interdisziplinarität (ed.). Berlin – Münster – Wien – Zürich – London: Lit. p. 1. 25 See also Iwata, Hiroo (2008) History of haptic interface. In: Human Haptic Perception: Basics and Applications. Martin Grundwald (ed.). Basel – Boston – Berlin: Birkhäuser. pp. 355‐361. 26 Benjamin, Walter (1935/36) Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit. In: Gesammelte Schriften. I.2. [1974]. R. Tiedemann/H. Schweppenhäuser (eds.). Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp. p. 500 27 Pethes, Nicolas (2000) Die Ferne der Berührung. In: Taktilität, Zeitschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Linguistik, 117. p. 49. 28 Ibid. p. 48. ELKE MARK | TACTILE KNOWLEDGE | 17 29 See also Heilmann, Till A. (2010) Digitale Kodierung und Repräsentation. DVD, CSS, DeCSS. In: Kulturen des Kopierschutzes II. Navigationen, 2. Siegen: Universitätsverlag. pp. 95‐112. 30 Heilmann, Till A. (2010) Digitalität als Taktilität, McLuhan, der Computer und die Taste«, in: Zeitschrift für Medienwissenschaft, 3, 2. Berlin: Diaphanes. pp. 131‐140. 31 Till A. Heilmann (2011) Taste und Finger. Anmerkungen zum Begriff des Digitalen. July 8, 2011. Lecture at Institut für Kultur und Ästhetik Digitaler Medien, Lüneburg. Online: http://www2.leuphana.de/hyperkult/hk_20/FR1345.html [18.01.2012]. 32 Ibid. 33 Wolf, Maryanne (2009) Das lesende Gehirn. Heidelberg: Spektrum. p. 254. 34 Ibid. p. 253. 35 Mangen, Anne (2008) Hypertext fiction reading: haptics and immersion. In: Journal of Research in Reading, 31, 4. pp. 404‐419 36 Mangen, Anne and Velay, Jean‐Luc (2010) Digitizing literacy: reflections on the haptics of writing. In: Advances in Haptics, Zadeh, Mehrdad Hosseini (ed.). Wien: InTech. pp. 385‐402. 37 Ibid. 38 Velay, Jean‐Luc and Longcamp, Marieke (2007) Besser von Hand, In: Gehirn & Geist, 3. p.16. 39 Ibid. 40 Bounds, Gwendolyn (2010) How Handwriting Trains the Brain. In: The Wall Street Journal. Online: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704631504575531932754922518.h tml [16.12.2011]. 41 Ibid. 42 Wolf, Maryanne (2009) Das lesende Gehirn. Heidelberg: Spektrum. p. 251. 43 Böhme, Hartmut (1996) Der Tastsinn im Gefüge der Sinne. In: Tasten. Uta Brandes and Claudia Neumann (eds.). Göttingen: Steidl. p. 206. 44 Ibid. Translation: Dr. Jeremy Gaines