Abstract

Online presentation

Keywords: Participatory performance, Haptic visuality, Heterotopia, Telecommunication, Synaesthesia, Glitch

In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, we have been adapting as fugitives of this accidental encounter with an “untouchable” virus, while being rendered into the shared virtual arena, where our discursive bodies are situated within, embedded in and tele-commuted to. Our increasing dependence on online interaction and video conferencing during the pandemic is not only facilitating social connectedness, but also contemplating the question: How to elongate our somatosensation and echo the embodied experience of touching through the incorporeal virtual connectivity? This essay focuses on the embodied nature of tele-synaesthesia performance, its potential effect of forging a rhythmic connection from one sensuous modality to another, and the concurrent emergences of glitch and internet latency as non-verbal cues of internet-situated communication. In reference to Laura Mark’s theory of haptic visuality, where vision triggers a tactile experience in the body; Naomi Bennett’s concept of virtual touch, in which an affective sensory response of touch can be elicited through non-tactile senses, Paul Sermon’s artistic production of Telematic Quarantine (2020) and Pandemic Encounter (2020), that telepresents the stories of self (isolation), and in relation to Michel Foucault’s concept Heterotopia in the context of internet-situated performance, I examine the performance work I have been developing during lockdown since March 2020: The Best Facial (2021), supported by Centre for Digital Media Cultures Research and School of Art Postgraduate Research at University of Brighton, a number of sessions of 25-minute 1-to-1 participatory tele-synaesthesia performances that take place on Zoom, where I become a virtual aesthetician and use telepresence to perform meditative virtual facial tactics, and to make tele-contact improvisation upon the surface of the participant’s face to trigger tactile experiences through haptic visuality, virtual touching, and auditory fantasization.

• Ada Xiaoyu Hao (China/UK). I’m an artist-researcher, born in China and currently doing a practice-based Ph.D. in the Doctoral School of Art & Communication, at University of Brighton, UK. My practice is situated within performance practice, using role-playing and fiction as methods to trigger and explore the emergences of spatial-temporal ‘heterotopias’ (spatial otherness), in relation to the futurity of human beings under the veil of “becoming multiple”. I’m interested in exploring ways to renew individual subjectivity and to embody a speculative envisaging of what the human body could be or become. During such diffractive process of becoming, the performance space becomes a virtual site where social attitudes and cultural identities are negotiable. My recent research output includes a digital peer-reviewed visual essay for The International Journal of Creative Media Research’s Digital Ecologies: Fiction Machines (Issue 5), digital collaboration with British Art Studies’ Issue 13, and a peer-reviewed article for the Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art 2021’s Special Issue: ‘The World, Two Meters Away’. Current PhD Projects: https://aproductionofmultiplebecomingsofsubjectivities.cargo.site/Desktop
  Artist website: https://www.adahao.org

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