Efforts to digitize touch—to transform it into a sense capable of being captured, stored, transmitted, and reconstructed by computers—reach back to the 1960s. The widespread proliferation of these haptic human-computer interfaces, we have been told by their proponents, would eventually help restore balance to the mediated sensorium, giving touch back its vital powers as an epistemological agent.

Thus far, however, attempts to design technologies that could meet this lofty goal of mediating touch have generally fallen short. Researchers and product developers continue to struggle with a range of practical infrastructural challenges posed by haptics, including the materiality of the human tactile system, the accuracy of the various actuators responsible for generating haptic sensations, network latency issues, and the compatibility of haptic data with data encoded for the senses of seeing and hearing. This talk examines the haptics industry’s attempts to overcome these challenges by creating a new set of normative infrastructures for digital touch.

David Parisi is an Associate Professor of Emerging Media at the College of Charleston whose research explores the past, present, and possible futures of touch technologies. His book Archaeologies of Touch: Interfacing with Haptics from Electricity to Computing (University of Minnesota Press, 2018) shows how electric shock, experimental psychology, cybernetics, aesthetics, telemanipulation robotics, and virtual reality each participated in a reconceptualization of touch necessary for its integration into contemporary computing technologies. His writing on tactility has appeared in publications such as Logic, TechCrunch, Open!, ROMchip: A Journal of Game Histories, New Media & Society, Convergence, and Game Studies. Parisi is also a member of the recently established Haptics Industry Forum.

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