PHANTOM FEELS

[MEDIUM] TOUCHDESIGNER & MEDIAPIPE
[YEAR] 2025

(This is a version of the project made for SPACE Publications’ spotlight series. The original project was created for IML-418: Sensory Design.)
Phantom Feels is an interactive media project that explores the sensation of nearly touching something—but never quite making contact. In an installation environment, the viewer is seen/sensed by a digital system that uses Touchdesigner and MediaPipe to track hand movement and gestures to activate a soft, reactive “digital membrane.” This membrane will visually respond to their body but never offers physical feedback. Touch is always suggested, but never fulfilled. It’s about presence, proximity, and the uncanny, phantom-like spaces in between.

This project explores three key categories: installation art, digital performance, and inclusive design.

New media scholar Laura U. Marks defines haptic visuality as the act of "touching with the eyes,” a mode of perception where the body feels through visual closeness, not physical contact. She wrote, “I prefer to describe haptic visuality as a kind of seeing that uses the eye like an organ of touch” (p.79, 2004). How can a flat surface, for example a screen, transform the audience from “viewers” to “touchers” and immerse them in tactile sensations without physically breaking the barrier? Marks offers the sensory systems of proprioception, which is often referred to as the “sixth sense” and is the awareness of our bodies’ positioning in space, and kinesthesia, which is our bodies’ awareness of movement, when demarking the difference between haptic visuality and optical visuality. Optical visuality is distant, detached, and analytical; it emphasizes clarity, depth, and separation between the viewer and the object, and thus lacks a tactile element. In contrast, haptic visuality is intimate and embodied; the viewer’s gaze “lingers on the surface,” as Marks puts it, rather than penetrating it (p.81). This kind of looking invites tactile empathy, a sense of feeling through vision. It blurs the boundary between “seer” and “seen,” turning visual contact into soft pressure, or even a caress. It is important to emphasize that our proprioceptive and kinesthetic systems are not activated through haptic visuality, but rather simulated through this lens.

Interestingly, the link between vision and touch has also been explored by neuroscientists. An example of this would be the research on mirror-touch synaesthesia, particularly in the phantom limbs of amputees. A phantom limb is the sensation felt in a missing limb, as if they were still attached to the body. In a 2013 study by Goller et al., nearly a third of participants reported feeling tactile sensations in limbs that no longer existed, simply by watching another person be touched. These sensations ranged from gentle pressure to pain, and were located on the phantom limb or the stump. This study, along with Marks’ haptic visuality, demonstrates that touch isn’t just physical. It’s also visual, empathetic, and often imagined into the body.

Works Cited

Goller, A. I., Richards, K., Novak, S., & Ward, J. (2013). Mirror-touch synaesthesia in the phantom limbs of amputees. Cortex, 49(1), 243–251.
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cortex.2011.05.002.

Kinnamon, L. (2019, January 19). On making haptic drawings & accordion fold books: Stephen Vincent. Women & Performance.
https://www.womenandperformance.org/ampersand/ampersand-articles/on-making-haptic-drawings-accordion-fold-books-stephen-vincent.html

Marks, L. U. (2004). Haptic visuality: Touching with the eyes. In Framework: The Finnish Art Review (No. 2, Fall 2004, pp. 79–82). FRAME.
https://artinpublicspheres.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/09/framework-innovation-and-social-space.pdf.

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