Touching Without Feeling: Materiality, Texture, and Screen-image

Abstract

This article analyzes two poems and a video-installation that stress the notions of materiality and texture related to contemporary Information and Communication Technology (ICT). These technologies (for example: smartphones, notebooks and the algorithms that compose their programs and applications), mediate the relationship between humans and the world (Rodríguez, 2019). Thus, they determine and mold this relationship in constant feedback with the user, through reception, consumption and data production. Concepts as materiality are complexified, as electronic gadgets merge the image with the object, creating hybrids as the screen-image (Martínez, 2016). Because of this, a reconceptualization is needed in the contemporary context of the digital culture. Thus, questions about the surface arises (Tello, 2018), about the texture of the objects mediated by digital technologies, and about how the human being relates with them via new ways of apprehend the world through the senses. The literary and artistic works to be analyzed on this article are the digital poem Zapato incómodo (Gárate, 2011), the printed poem "id" (Correa-Díaz, 2016), and the Thomas Hirschhorn's video-installation Touching Reality (2012). © 2023 Universidad de Talca. All rights reserved.