Book,
Touch: Sensuous Theory and Multisensory Media
University of Minnesota Press, (September 2002)
Abstract
In Touch, Laura U. Marks develops a critical approach more tactile than visual, an intensely physical and sensuous engagement with works of media art that enriches our understanding and experience of these works and of art itself. <P>These critical, theoretical, and personal essays serve as a guide to developments in nonmainstream media art during the past ten years-sexual representation debates, documentary ethics, the shift from analog to digital media, a new social obsession with smell. Marks takes up well-known artists like experimental filmmaker Ken Jacobs and mysterious animators the Brothers Quay, and introduces groundbreaking, lesser-known film, video, and digital artists. <P>From this emerges a materialist theory-an embodied, erotic relationship to art and to the world. Marks's approach leads to an appreciation of the works' mortal bodies: film's volatile emulsion, video's fragile magnetic base, crash-prone Net art; it also offers a productive alternative to the popular understanding of digital media as "virtual" and immaterial. Weaving a continuous fabric from philosophy, fiction, science, dreams, and intimate experience, Touch opens a new world of art media to readers. <P>Laura U. Marks, associate professor of film studies at Carleton University, Ottawa, is a critic and curator of artists' independent media. She is the author of The Skin of the Film (2000).
