Mirror-Touch Synaesthesia

Thresholds of Empathy with Art
Erscheinungsjahr 2017
ISBN: 978-0-19-876928-6
Verlag: Oxford University Press

Buch, Englisch, 400 Seiten, Format (B × H): 173 mm x 249 mm, Gewicht: 957 g

The neurological condition synaesthesia (the mixing of the senses) has for over a century provoked thought about new ways of artistic seeing.

In 'Mirror-Touch Synaesthesia: Thresholds of Empathy with Art', a recently discovered manifestation provides a lens through which to re-examine contemporary art experience. People with mirror-touch synaesthesia feel a physical sense of touch on their own bodies when they witness touch to other people and often to objects. The condition is a rare yet recognizable form of heightened physical empathy: present in just 1 in 75 people, it is associated with an overactivation of the near-universal mirror (neuron) system. Mirror-Touch Synaesthesia places mirror-touch, a social synaesthesia, at the center of dialogue between neuroscience, the humanities, and contemporary art theory and practice in order to explore, for the first time, its powerful potential as a model for the embodied and relational spectatorship of art.

Mirror-Touch Synaesthesia brings together essays and conversations by prominent neuroscientists, anthropologists, artists, art theorists, curators, film theorists, and philosophers, as well as mirror-touch synaesthetes, and through proximity, and cross-disciplinary dialogue, dissolves barriers not only between disciplines but between theory and experience. Essays and conversations find common ground not only in quantitative but also qualitative accounts of mirror-touch; the editor has conducted the first set of in-depth, semi-structured interviews with mirror-touch synaesthetes, which is available in excerpted form in the volume's appendix. This collection of thirteen conversations constitutes a performative project at the boundary between art and science that invites contributors to reconceptualize the ways that artworks invite us into relational, co-constitutional forms of spectatorship. Critically refiguring arguments about the 'social turn' in contemporary art that reject the traditional viewer as passive, Mirror-Touch Synaesthesia expands the possibilities of what art we might call 'participatory', and enriches debates around the social agency of perception. In these essays, the blurred thresholds in mirror-touch between sight and touch, and between self and other, are redrawn for an interdisciplinary readership as newly sensitized boundaries between image and action, art and life.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Martin, Daria

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Theater- und Filmwissenschaft | Andere Darstellende Künste Filmwissenschaft, Fernsehen, Radio Filmtheorie, Filmanalyse
• Geisteswissenschaften Philosophie Ästhetik
• Sozialwissenschaften Psychologie Psychologie / Allgemeines & Theorie Psychologische Theorie, Psychoanalyse Psychoanalyse (S. Freud)
• Geisteswissenschaften Kunst Kunstformen, Kunsthandwerk
• Sozialwissenschaften Psychologie Allgemeine Psychologie Kognitionspsychologie Wahrnehmung
• Naturwissenschaften Biowissenschaften Biowissenschaften Neurobiologie, Verhaltensbiologie
• Geisteswissenschaften Philosophie Moderne Philosophische Disziplinen Philosophische Anthropologie

Inhaltsverzeichnis

- Introduction

- 1: Daria Martin: Introduction

- Feeling In

- 2: Vittorio Gallese and Carolee Schneemann: In Conversation

- 3: Jamie Ward: The Vicarious Perception of Touch and Pain: Embodied Empathy

- 4: Patricia Pisters: Orchestration of the Senses in Yellow: Eisenstein's Fourth Dimension, Memory and Mirror-Touch Synaesthesia

- 5: Christopher Pinney: Ocular Objecthood in India and Beyond

- 6: Giuliana Bruno: Surface Encounters: Materiality and Empathy

- Expanded Embodiment

- 7: Michael Banissy and Elinor Cleghorn: In Conversation

- 8: Siri Hustvedt: Becoming Others

- 9: Laura Marks: I Feel Like An Abstract Line

- 10: Anthony Chemero: Synergy and Synaesthesia

- 11: Brian Massumi: The Art of the Relational Body: From Mirror-Touch to the Virtual Body

- Intimate Otherness

- 12: Thomas J. Csordas and Trisha Donnelly: In Conversation

- 13: Fiona Torrance: Four or Five Jaws

- 14: Wayne Koestenbaum: Trance Notebook #2 [nerdy questions about exact pitch]

- 15: Mark Leckey: Prp4AShw

- Double Sensation

- 16: Catherine Wood and Sha Xin Wei: In Conversation

- 17: Massimiliano Mollona: Fieldwork's Double. When images and people meet at the margins

- 18: Daria Martin: Empathy's Ghosts

- 19: Rabih Mroué: Double consciousness / Double shooting

- 20: Judith Hopf and Joel Salinas: In Conversation

- Mirror-Touch Reader

- 21: Daria Martin: Mirror-Touch Reader

- Glossary

- Index

Über Autor(innen)

Daria Martin, artist, has researched mirror-touch synaesthesia since 2008 and made it the centre of three films: Sensorium Tests (2012), At the Threshold (2014-2015), and Theatre of the Tender (2016). Martin's films, which have been exhibited around the world, aim to create a continuity between disparate artistic media (such as painting and performance), between people and objects, and between internal and social worlds. Solo exhibitions include ACCA, Melbourne; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; the New Museum, New York; the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Kunstalle Zürich; and Tate Britain. Martin is currently Professor and Head of Artistic Research at the Ruskin School of Art, University of Oxford.: In 2018 she won the Film London Jarman Award for "creating an eclectic and expansive body of work that has explored everything from dreams and mythology to technology and feminism".