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"Touch reorients us to the fundamental condition of being - to the inevitability of others, human and nonhuman. In touching, we are most vulnerable because we are always also being touched back. The analogy that Merleau-Ponty uses in his posthumously published work, The Visible and the Invisible (1964), is this: when my one hand touches the other, which one is doing the touching, and which one is being touched? We have eyelids; we can pinch our noses and shut our ears; but there are no natural skin-covers. We cannot turn off our sense of touch. To be a human in the world is to be tactile, to always be touching and touched with every single pore of our bodies. Advertisement "

"CalArts opens its Digital Arts and Technology Expo, and one project is continuing to pique our interest in bio-orchestras. "Cultivating Frequencies," a collaboration among music technologist Colin Honigman and designers Sean Chen, Marc Dubui, and Wen Han, is turning a garden into a generative music machine, including a interactive element that turns the individual plants into-touch sensitive instruments."

"As visitors strolled through a recent display of Madame de Pompadour's coffee grinder, an 1840s Sèvres porcelain coffee set, tea canisters, sugar bowls and other European decorative arts at the Detroit Institute of Arts, the scent of roasted coffee beans arose in one room. Bach's "Coffee" Cantata played in the background. Not far away, cocoa pods were not only on display but also meant to be touched. In the final gallery, a tasting station offered two kinds of liquid chocolate, one adapted from an Aztec recipe and the other from an 18th-century French formula. Museums usually aim to offer a feast for the eyes, but this Detroit museum had much more in mind for "Bitter|Sweet: Coffee, Tea & Chocolate," which just closed at the institute. Officials, who used art objects to illustrate how the introduction of those beverages to Europe in the 16th century from Africa, Asia and the Americas changed social and consumption patterns, wanted the exhibition to be a banquet for all five senses."

The Expressive Body: Memory, Devotion, Desire (1400-1750), an exhibition at the Norton Simon Museum Contemplates sacred and secular bodies in painting and sculpture, and how our bodies as viewers interact with them, the show is a perfectly timed refresher on the importance of physicality in art.

"Stimulate your sense of taste, touch, smell and hearing in this immersive art experience at Tate Britain."

"Using bone conduction, a technology developed for hearing devices, the touch echo installation transmits sounds of the cities which were devastated in the 1945 carpet bombing in the Second World War, through the arms of the visitors when they rest their elbows on the balustrade and hold their ears closed."

"A textile map plays back field recordings when touched."

Five ways of mapping the world. One story about people who make maps the traditional way-by drawing things we can see. And other stories about people who map the world using smell, sound, touch, and taste. The world redrawn by the five senses.

"Why can't you see in outer space and why can't you hear in a rainforest? A conversation, with sound illustrations, with the composer and sound artist Francisco López in advance of his performance at EMPAC in Troy, New York on April 28, 29, 30, 2011. Touching on his past and future creations and experiments including a 2001 work for the now inaccessible Brooklyn Bridge Anchorage interior and even a recording of our Clocktower clockworks. Plus a a profile of his remarkable new project, SONM (Sound Archive of Experimental Music and Sound Art), in Murcia, Spain."

Oorwonde is an interactive aural installation in which the visitor becomes a willing 'patient' to hear, feel, influence and manipulate the soundtrack of a fictitious operation. Speakers, electro-magnets, vibrator motors and piezoelectric disks entwine with the human body, creating a unique composition and performance. Based on Bernhard Leitner's philosophy that "listening is understood to extend to all parts of the body and sound to touch a deep nerve", Oorwonde explores the concept of bodily hearing as multiple elements target different body parts. Hearing is no longer restricted to the ears.

"The International Ambiances Network aims at structuring and developing the research field of architectural and urban ambiances. It wishes to promote the sensory domain in the questioning and design of lived space. This sensitive approach of the built environment involves all the senses (sound, light, odors, touch, heat,…). Such a network favors multisensoriality and pluridisciplinarity (human and social sciences ; architecture and urban planning ; engineering and applied physics). It is open to a wide variety of profiles and includes research activities as well as design, teaching or artistic ones."

""When I'm on location, it's a totally solitary activity. You put some headphones on, and at that moment, nobody can hear the world like you can." Chris Watson is talking to me over Skype from his home in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, explaining the details of a soon to be released smartphone app, which contains a cherry-picked collection of his sound recordings made as far back as the 1990s. Many originally appeared on CD (via Touch, who now also have an iPhone app), but Watson is enthusiastic about finding new formats such as this for his work. "The app is going to be used by individuals, and that means there's an individual at either end of the chain," he says. "I like the idea that wherever you are, you can drop into this environment." "

"For an exhibition at the Hessel Museum of Art, the artist wired five groups of corn plants to five music devices, forming a biofeedback system. Control signals were generated by measuring the electrical resistance of the plants' vegetable tissue, which in turn activated the MIDI synthesizers. Viewers were encouraged to interact with and touch the plants, which affected the sounds being played. The audience and cornfield were not just participants but actors, acting together-in concert-to produce the work."

"The performative sensory environment Displace 2.0 takes place in the building of the recently dissolved platform TAG in the Hague for the 2012 TodaysArt festival. Displace 2.0 puts your sensory experience in the foreground. Groups of visitors progress through the three floors of the TAG building, encountering a series of environments and experience sensory-based actions that intermingle the senses of smell, taste, sight, sound and touch. At first, these sensory modalities are separated from each other, but then they grow over time to cause intense, almost hallucinatory sensations merging to the point of saturation."

"Interview with Robert Dudzic August 9, 2018 by Jim Stout Leave a Comment I recently had the privilege to speak with Robert Dudzic and, during the course of our casual discussion, we touched on topics such as his thoughts on the creative process, how to gain access to sites and the power of inspiration."

This CD consists of geothermal recordings of vibrations in the ground around the area of Krisuvik, Geysir and Myvatn in Iceland. The recordings have been carried out using accelerometers inserted into the earth at various places around the geysers, mapping the sonic aspects of volcanic activity at the surface of the earth."

"Jana Winderen is an artist, widely known for her recordings that reveal sounds from hidden sources - oceans, ice crevasses, glaciers - using a variety of technology, from high quality hydrophones to ultrasound detectors. Her work is published on Touch Music (same as Chris Watson) and her biography boasts of a long and impressive list of art installations."

"To engage with the notion of musicality in Agnes Martin's work, Pace Live presented performances by the musician Laraaji and members of the group Gang Gang Dance amid the recent exhibition Agnes Martin: The Distillation of Color in New York. The performances highlighted the ways that the legacies of Martin's distinct visual language and philosophies about art making have touched some of the most innovative musical artists working today."

Vibrations conducted through a person's bones produce the uncanny sensation of low sounds emanating from within the body. The New York-based artist Sergei Tcherepnin draws on this effect in Stereo Classroom Chairs (2015), mounting a transducer to the underside of each wooden seat on which visitors are invited to sit. When not attached, a transducer plays sounds quietly, at a level that is almost inaudible. When its surface touches another object, however, the material characteristics of that object filter the sounds in various ways. Here, Tcherepnin's audio composition travels through the body of each sitter with a physical intensity. The chair amplifies the composition, while the sitter acts as the filter, amplifying low-frequency sounds and muffling higher frequencies.

"During the Covid-19 pandemic, comparisons have often been drawn between lockdown measures and prison, yet people with lived experience of prison have countered that such domestic confinement bears little resemblance to the pains of imprisonment. These different viewpoints suggest that the general public has little understanding of what happens behind prison walls. This blogpost considers how prisoner writing can describe prison to the non-prisoner reader (i.e. a reader who does not have lived experience of prison), bearing witness to the carceral experience. Drawing on examples of short stories about prison, written by current or former prisoners, I examine how these writers recreate sensory aspects of prison in their writing. Carceral texts commonly recount the sights, sounds, touches, tastes and smells of prison; but, in my experience of reading and analysing prisoner writing, it is the depiction of prison sound that is most powerful and affecting. In this blogpost, I examine how prisoner-writers translate the speech and sounds of prison into written form, to convey the carceral experience to those outside prison walls."