The haptics of memory through Moist Media: interspecies interactivity in the installation Lay Here With Me
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.33732/ASRI.6943Keywords:
Haptics, intermedia, interactivity, inter-species, Moist MediaAbstract
The New Media experience has been marked by a tendency to represent the digital and virtual dimensions of reality. However, many artists today seek a physical engagement with and through the artwork, using interactivity to bring the aesthetic experience into the realm of the tangible. Within this shift, Moist Media —the hybridization of technological and vegetal media— emerges as an opportunity to rethink the relationships formed between viewer, living artwork, and digitality, proposing affectivity and interspecies interrelation as objects of study. This article offers a reconsideration of the notion of “interspecies hapticity”, focusing on a conceptual analysis of the work “Lay Here With Me”. The installation, which provides the viewer with a multisensory experience, invites a “moist” reconnection between alterity, past, and present. It demonstrates how technology facilitates a relational experience between human and plant, whose co-touch intervenes in and transforms the work as it unfolds. Through co-creation, the installation opens a space for affective engagement with vegetal life, evidencing the layers inherent to Moist Media. This, in turn, allows us to intertwine the aesthetic and political dimensions of more-than-human relations, prompting a reflection on care in times of instability.Downloads
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