Prototypes
Hapticotopia is a research project materialized in an art installation with focus on haptic faculty, using several multimedia technologies and exploring multisensoriality. Reducing the sense of vision to a minimum, the project investigates how the skin, the largest organ of the human body, can function and be considered the sensory basis for the development of synaesthetic experiences.
The projected installation dispenses to a great extent with the use of the sense of sight, managing to expand and strengthen the perception and interpretation of reality through the other senses, namely the acoustic and tactile, discussing their reciprocity
By stimulating these other senses, from a phenomenological point of view, subjects, rather than observers, participants have the opportunity to expand and intensify experience and, consequently, reality.
The central question of the PhD project, to know if there are \”images\” independent of the sense of sight, opened the field to the notion that aesthetic experience does not depend only on physical objects, but results from the relationship and combination of complex perceptive and cognitive phenomena, including the sensorial and emotional ones, but also the poetic, operative and conceptual ones.
Focusing on technique, this thesis is organised in two parts: the first part consists in an essay, and the second part refers to the project itself. Both parts complement each other: theory and practice are interdependent, crossing themselves in the multi-sensorial apprehension and in the hermeneutics of art. In the conclusions both parts are contrasted and concerns and lines of future development are exposed.