Touching Glass or Touching Grass?

Staying in contact with attention

Friends!

Every extension is an amputation, Marshall McLuhan writes. Plainly put, the device that augments us diminishes us, too. This aphorism is figurative, of course – McLuhan was writing about TV, not bonesaws – but its central insight could not be more literal: While the mystifying powers of digital technology appear, increasingly, to be abstracted from the physical world, at the end of the day, every tool acts back on the body.

The smartphone is a sense machine, and in the umwelt of the interwebs, not all senses are equal. Sight and sound travel swiftly online; through our handheld window, we can look and listen to just about anything or anyone, anywhere. Taste and smell, in contrast, have largely resisted the incursion of our gadgets, though tech entrepreneurs are trying their best to clear that hurdle. With all respect, I wish them other, more fulfilling, pursuits: It’s unpleasant enough hearing about Elon Musk’s X. Imagine if you had to smell it.

And then there is touch, our achey amputee. It used to be that to use things you had to feel them: the heft of a dictionary, the tactile scratch of graphite, even the sticky key on your keyboard. Now all of that is disappearing behind the smooth glass of our screens. We’re like mimes trapped in invisible boxes – running our fingers along the transparent surface of the world and never breaking through.

In this issue, we’re thinking about the relationship of tech and touch. Furry cups and competitive massage await below; read on! And if you’re on the east coast amid these driving flurries: stay warm, stay safe, and remember the restorative powers of a warm mug against one’s skin.

Haptically yours,

Peter Schmidt

Editor-in-Chief

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Visions of Attention

An archive of images and mini-essays on the myriad modes of attention

The Furry Cup

Meret Oppenheim, Object (Le Déjeuner en fourrure), 1936

At one end of the table sits Henry James’ “crystal clean… great empty cup of attention.” At the other, Surrealist artist Meret Oppenheim’s great furry cup.

The idea arose from a joke that Oppenheim exchanged with Pablo Picasso. Over lunch, Picasso noticed Oppenheim’s fur-lined bracelet and remarked that anything could be covered with fur, even “this cup and saucer.” Oppenheim responded by shouting: “Waiter, a little more fur!”

Her piece perfected the Surrealist strategy of making everyday objects alien through juxtaposition. How often do you notice that most objects you touch in modern life are smooth? From grazing your wrist on a lacquered wooden desk to tapping on the placid screen of your phone to holding the polished chrome of subway handles, utilitarian objects seem designed to eliminate friction. The Surrealists sought to garner a new consciousness through creating “objects in crisis” (a term used by André Breton) from the midst of petite-bourgeoisie existence.

One can also interpret the comment from Picasso, an iconic playboy, to the 23-year-old Meret Oppenheim, as a gendered dig. (This becomes even more believable if one considers the account in which Picasso professed to like “other things that are covered with fur.”) How did Oppenheim respond? By letting the object of enjoyment grow wild, transforming fur from a symbol of luxury and femininity to an uncomfortable reminder of beastliness. She famously extended this strategy of subversive excess to her other tactile pieces and her collaborations with fashion designer Elsa Schiaparelli. Touch provokes the dangerous thrill of intimacy and contamination. When you touch something, it touches you back.

— Haena Chu

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Stuff for Study: Touch Type

Readings and other resources for continued learning on attention and politics

• What would a world without push buttons look like? — Rachel Plotnick for Aeon

• Inside the world of competitive massage — Sarah Larson for the New Yorker

• The last days of handwriting — Christine Rosen for The Guardian

• Touching moss and encountering time — Nikita Arora for Aeon

• Stepping on Yoko Ono’s art — Sarah Cowan for MoMA Magazine

— Czarina Ramos

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IRL

Photography by Shanaz Deen

• Sat, February 28th: Join us for an Art Programs screening and discussion of Latin American cinema with Ana Begoña Armengod. We will view films from Tercer Cine (“Third Cinema”), a movement born in Latin America in the 1960s. Sign up HERE.

• Tue, March 3rd: In our IRL seminar, explore AMBIENT MUSIC as a technology of attention. We’ll listen closely to how these works are constructed, how they unfold through time, and how they reorient (or disorient) our bodies and minds. Enroll HERE.

Find more workshops, events, and gatherings here!