Touched, a penumbra keyboard projection

The underlying research for this paper recalls the development and presentation of telepresent installations ‘Telematic Dreaming’ and ‘The Telematic Séance’ from 1993. Twenty-five years on I produced the installation ‘Touched’, exhibited in the Digital En- counters Show for the British Science Festival in 2017. Techni- cally, ‘Touched’ worked in exactly the same way as ‘The Telematic Séance’, its layering of keyboard projection, text and image explores a new telematic experience of intimacy where the meaning of the type becomes dependent on the richness of touch. The paper compares this with Myron Krueger’s founding ‘Meta- play’ experiments in the late 1970s involving touching hands on a telepresent screen and the findings of the proprioceptive ‘Rubber Hand Illusion’ developed by Psychologists Matthew Botvinick and Jonathan Cohen. These comparisons concur with the phe- nomenological outcomes participants experienced in ‘Touched’ where a greater sense of empathy emerges through a shared space of mutual presence.