Serge Bouchardon graduated in literature from La Sorbonne University (France). After working as a project manager in the educational software industry for six years, he wrote his dissertation on interactive literary narrative and is currently Associate Professor in Communication Sciences at the University of Technology of Compiegne (France). His research focuses on digital creation, in particular digital literature, but also net art and video games.

BRIEF STATEMENT ON WORK

It may seem paradoxical to propose an artistic web-based creation on touching. One cannot touch directly: touching requires in this case a technical mediation such as a mouse, a microphone or a webcam. This touching experience reveals a lot about the way we touch a multimedia content on screen, and maybe also about the way we touch people, objects in everyday life.

The internet user has access to five scenes (move, caress, hit, spread, blow), plus a sixth one (brush) dissimulated in the interface. He/she can thus experience various forms, various modalities of touching:

1. the erotic gesture of the caress with the mouse;
2. the brutality of the click, like an aggressive stroke;
3. touching as unveiling, staging the ambiguous relation between touching and being touched;
4. touching as a trace that one can leave with a finger dipped in paint;
5. touching from a distance with the voice, the eyes or another part of the body.

This immaterial work stages aesthetics of materiality.
This work requires headphones, a microphone (for “blow”) and a webcam (for “brush”).