The lecture offered a philosophical reflection on touch as a sense that has long been overlooked in aesthetics and the arts, yet is increasingly coming to the fore in contemporary installations and in museum practices aimed at greater inclusivity.
The neglect of touch is reflected not only in the limited vocabulary available for describing tactile experiences, but also in the restricted understanding of how this sense can enrich aesthetic experience. Luca focused on the multimodal and phenomenologically rich character of tactile experience, emphasizing its cognitive, affective, hedonic, and aesthetic dimensions. He then turned to the role of touch in everyday aesthetics and to the question of what we actually perceive and appreciate through touch. The lecture culminated in a discussion of artworks in which touch is central, and in the proposal of the term “haptic arts” as a distinct category encompassing works that rely on cutaneous, proprioceptive, and kinesthetic experience for their realization and appreciation.
Luca Marchetti is a postdoctoral researcher on Enrico Terrone’s ERC project ‘The Philosophy of Experiential Artifacts’ at the University of Genoa; his work in aesthetics and philosophy of mind focuses on tactile experience, virtual reality, pictorial perception, architectural experience, and the appreciation of non-human animals’ minds.” The talk “Haptic Arts and the Aesthetics of Touch” draws on joint work with his colleague, Camilla Palazzolo.
