This project will investigate how daily encounters with digital technologies and the sense of rapid comprehension that they require can be used to make tactile and contemplative visual artwork. Completed over 3 years, studio work will be undertaken with the goal of making art that engages with a physical experience of time in terms of the range of technologically complex and disembodied ways of communicating today.

The Thesis deals with interactions of the trachet and artist. The theoretical section contains selected educational-psychological perspective oninteraction, complemented by a sociological perspective in the kontext of the changing times of the communication world by John Thompson. The practical part narrows to specifically interact using touch, and tactile perception of visual artifacts. The real impulse comes from the work of Jan Svankmajer and interactive exhibitions of Peter Nikl. The result of this work is a set of interactive, visual haptic objects for presentation in the form of a separate exhibition.

This dissertation investigates the materiality of performative sculpture in the Americas during the long 1970s through artists Beverly Buchanan (1940-2015) and Senga Nengudi (1943). United in their disenchantment with second-wave feminism, Buchanan and Nengudi are situated art-historically in the expanded fields of (post)minimalism, conceptualism, and the Black Arts Movement. These artists realize their objects by sourcing non-traditional artmaking materials within what this dissertation conjures as a haptic imaginary—an intervening corrective to both the second-wave feminist and postmodern art imaginaries of the 1970s. Their materials expose the limitations of the visual and offer alternate models of knowing. For Buchanan’s frustulum series (1978-81), poured concrete, and later, tabby concrete, memorializes the textures of architectural sites to honor experiences of labor and displacement. Tabby concrete, a compound binding agent made of sand and lime, is a localized, inexpensive material that was often used by enslaved people in the southern United States, especially in coastal states like Georgia, which provide access to massive deposits of lime-rich oyster shells. Nengudi’s R.S.V.P. series (1977) of pliable pantyhose and sand are anthropomorphic objects originally meant to be activated; they mimic bodily expansion, endurance, and fatigue. Pantyhose, made mostly of nylon, the world’s first fully synthetic fiber, are the product of decades of scientific and economic development, whose intertwined history with World War II offers a springboard to understand the potency of Nengudi’s experiments with the garment. The artists’ materials become sites of investigation into memory, place, body, erotics, and precarity. By offering new epistemological methods of engagement that retaliate against the hegemony of the visual through their twinned interests in ruins for Buchanan, and remains for Nengudi, the artists realize a new womanist politic. Buchanan and Nengudi deploy, respectively, tabby concrete and pantyhose with sand to transmit historical and embodied knowledge. It is precisely through the activated sensorium of touch—imagined and physical—that the past is transmitted and materialized.