Performing Apps Touch and Gesture as Aesthetic Experience

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Notes

An earlier version of this essay was presented at the ELMCIP seminar ‘Digital textuality with/in performance’ on 3 May 2012 at Arnolfini in Bristol. I thank the other seminar participants, in particular Jerome Fletcher, Alexandra Saemmer and cris cheek for their input, and I also thank Jay David Bolter for extensive comments on earlier drafts.

² Marks notes the difficulty in writing about synesthetic experiences, asking, ‘How can the experience of a sound, a color, a gesture, of the feelings of arousal, anxiety, nausea, or bereavement that they evoke, be communicated in words? They have to be translated. Like synesthesia, the translation of qualities from one sense modality to another, writing translates particular embodied experiences into words’ (Marks 2002: ix). And like Marks, I, too, have to rely by necessity on verbal description – sensory translations of the sorts of experiences that my examples offer.

³ Bill Buxton (2013) points out a series of consequences of this dominance of vision over touch with respect to the functionality of touch-interfaces. Apart from the obvious that you need to see what it is that you are touching in order to know what you are doing, there are other consequences such as your finger obscuring small design details on the screen as you try to operate it, and the fact that we are generally not used to using our finger as a stylus for note taking, writing, or, after early childhood, even drawing.