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Posted by u/joegibbs a year ago
Ask HN: Where are all the touch-based art forms?
For every major sense but touch there's a major form of art.

For vision, our most dominant sense, there is literature, painting, sculpture and film.

For hearing there is music.

For smell there is perfumery.

For taste there are the culinary arts.

Touch seems like the odd one out - it's playing second fiddle to taste in food, and to appearance in sculpture and clothing. You only very rarely find some artwork where the main draw is the tactile experience. Why is this?

Freak_NL · a year ago
Literature is not really art appreciated through vision. It is a mental exercise. Reading by seeing the text is just one form of uploading the text into your brain; Braille and audio are two others. The layout and appearance of the text can add to the experience, but this is mostly¹ not required except to make reading the text as relaxed and comfortable as possible.

For a blind person sculpture can surely be as engrossing as for a sighted person.

1: Notable exceptions exist; e.g., House of Leaves.

soneca · a year ago
If think listening audio books is a significantly different experience than reading a book. The narrator’s voice always add interpretation to the text, no matter how neutral they try to be. A monotone voice change how you interpret a character shouting or distressed.

It might be a less intrusive interpretation of a written book than, e.g., a film adaptation. But it’s still very different from reading it.

Braille, I presume, it’s the same. Nothing interpreting the words except your own mind.

drewcoo · a year ago
Well . . . maybe literature began orally but was experienced through some kind of group "individual imagination."

And maybe today it's transmitted (when not by computer) in dead-tree tomes but, again maybe, the transmission is not the thing. Maybe the play is the thing. Or the story is. Whatever.

For blind people, non-sequential events and non-serial stories exist. In fact, just like unfortunately distractedly-sighted people, that's most of real life. I realize seeing all sorts of ADHD stimuli might lead you to think you're "more aware," but everyone has an ability to process reality, which happens in real time simultaneously in many places at once.

zachrose · a year ago
I think it has to do with what you’re considering as artwork! There’s a traditional distinction between “fine arts” and “applied arts.”

Fine art, like painting, is almost definitionally not supposed to be touched.

Applied arts include fibers (knitting, weaving), ceramics, jewelry and metalwork, etc. Stuff that’s meant to be pleasing and functional.

Whether something should be touched is almost _the thing_ that moves a field from one category to the other.

Applied artists, and their product designer cousins, will spend a lot of time exploring and pursuing tactile qualities.

drewcoo · a year ago
Absolutely textiles!

And if woodworking isn't some kind of tactile art, why do people always want to touch wooden furniture or art? Always. Just watch it happen. I'd like to know if that's how all apes react or just we.

I would argue that food "mouth feel" is pretty important (as is the feeling of eating with hands - that's something to turn into art for a third of the planet daily and the rest of us on lucky occasion).

Arguably, whatever's going on with haptics in VR is art. Even if it's porn. Porn is almost as good for spreading art as it is for spreading tech!

dahart · a year ago
Touch based art forms are everywhere, the question’s premise is wrong. Textiles and clothing and industrial and consumer product design around touch experience abound. Linens and car interiors and furniture and kitchen utensils and even all hand tools are all meant for touch and you can find high end artists focusing on the touch experience and selling expensive bespoke products. These are every bit as much art as perfumery and culinary arts. Kids museums and science museums have touch exhibits all the time, even art exhibits on occasion do too. The making of musical instruments is an art form dedicated to a product that is enjoyed and experienced by the player through touch as much as sound.
navane · a year ago
A nice watch. Luxury fabric. Quality objects: cutlery, handles on your doors and cars, your pots and pans. These make the entirety feel cheap or expensive.
eimrine · a year ago
Martial arts, Kamasutra, Dvorak layout, Braille display, anti-fake measures on banknotes.

Sculpture is underpreciated by you, have you tried to build at least a basic brick wall? This process involves almost no sight and a lot of touch.

futureshock · a year ago
It’s called sex. There’s no way to mass produce it, but it’s not called the art of seduction for nothing. Massage also qualifies in my book.
havelhovel · a year ago
"When questioned about the relationship between art and sexuality, Pablo Picasso once replied, 'It’s the same thing.'"

https://time.com/archive/6671960/sex-in-the-city/

futureshock · a year ago
Oh I do believe he thought that!

He had this style of portrait he liked to do of women and their distorted faces. It seems so surreal and imaginative, but in a way, it’s not at all. Picasso painted exactly what he saw in bed with these women. Close up he saw double images of their face from two angles, a bit grotesque if you think about it, but then sex is a bit grotesque as well;)

https://www.anothermag.com/art-photography/gallery/8122/pica...

josephfung · a year ago
The way clothing feels is a large part of the experience. So arguably fashion is not just vision, but also touch.

Also, 4D theatres where they add motion, wind and water to enhance the experience.

Arguably, amusement park rides are all about messing with your sense of touch (proprioception, balance, etc)

hypertexthero · a year ago
Drawing https://www.drawright.com/

Native American basketweaving https://www.sfomuseum.org/exhibitions/woven-legacies-basketr...

Renaissance sculpture https://www.collezionegalleriaborghese.it/en/collezione/scul...

Origami https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Origami

Pottery https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2018/02/master-potter...

Textiles https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Textile

Dance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dance

Etc. Anything you make with your body, really, so also typing and literature :)

Two books I like about art:

The Hand - How Its Use Shapes the Brain, Language, and Human Culture by Frank R. Wilson https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/191866/the-hand-by-...

The Creative Act: A Way of Being by Rick Rubin. This one speaks about how anything you do can be considered a form of art. A book with positive vibes. https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/717356/the-creative...

matt_morgan · a year ago
Sculpture can be tactile. I know it's not purely tactile, but thinking of it in that way is becoming a lot more common (eg at the Louvre). And then I went to find a URL for the tactile dome at the Exploratorium in San Francisco (https://www.exploratorium.edu/visit/tactile-dome) and it turns out there are lots of tactile galleries now:

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=tactile+gallery&t=fpas&ia=web

keiferski · a year ago
Yeah it's probably worth mentioning that many historical sculptures were meant to be touched, not simply looked at in a protected gallery.