Read more
List of contents
- Introduction
- 1: Daria Martin: Introduction
- Feeling In
- 2: Vittorio Gallese and Carolee Schneemann: In Conversation
- 3: Jamie Ward: The Vicarious Perception of Touch and Pain: Embodied Empathy
- 4: Patricia Pisters: Orchestration of the Senses in Yellow: Eisenstein's Fourth Dimension, Memory and Mirror-Touch Synaesthesia
- 5: Christopher Pinney: Ocular Objecthood in India and Beyond
- 6: Giuliana Bruno: Surface Encounters: Materiality and Empathy
- Expanded Embodiment
- 7: Michael Banissy and Elinor Cleghorn: In Conversation
- 8: Siri Hustvedt: Becoming Others
- 9: Laura Marks: I Feel Like An Abstract Line
- 10: Anthony Chemero: Synergy and Synaesthesia
- 11: Brian Massumi: The Art of the Relational Body: From Mirror-Touch to the Virtual Body
- Intimate Otherness
- 12: Thomas J. Csordas and Trisha Donnelly: In Conversation
- 13: Fiona Torrance: Four or Five Jaws
- 14: Wayne Koestenbaum: Trance Notebook #2 [nerdy questions about exact pitch]
- 15: Mark Leckey: Prp4AShw
- Double Sensation
- 16: Catherine Wood and Sha Xin Wei: In Conversation
- 17: Massimiliano Mollona: Fieldwork's Double. When images and people meet at the margins
- 18: Daria Martin: Empathy's Ghosts
- 19: Rabih Mroué: Double consciousness / Double shooting
- 20: Judith Hopf and Joel Salinas: In Conversation
- Mirror-Touch Reader
- 21: Daria Martin: Mirror-Touch Reader
- Glossary
- Index
About the author
Daria Martin, artist, has researched mirror-touch synaesthesia since 2008 and made it the centre of three films: Sensorium Tests (2012), At the Threshold (2014-2015), and Theatre of the Tender (2016). Martin's films, which have been exhibited around the world, aim to create a continuity between disparate artistic media (such as painting and performance), between people and objects, and between internal and social worlds. Solo exhibitions include ACCA, Melbourne; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; the New Museum, New York; the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Kunstalle Zürich; and Tate Britain. Martin is currently Professor and Head of Artistic Research at the Ruskin School of Art, University of Oxford. : In 2018 she won the Film London Jarman Award for "creating an eclectic and expansive body of work that has explored everything from dreams and mythology to technology and feminism".
Summary
People with mirror-touch synaesthesia feel a physical sense of touch on their own bodies when they witness touch to other people and often to objects. This book brings together essays and conversations by prominent neuroscientists, anthropologists, artists, art theorists, curators, film theorists, and philosophers, to explore this phenomenon.
Additional text
Mirror-Touch Synaesthesia, in bringing together leading neuroscientists, artists, philosophers and experiencing synaesthetes, is of equal importance to the fields of science and the humanities, shedding new light on in-feeling (empathy) and its vital relevance to contemporary life and culture. The book reminds us of how, even in our period, which is characterised by accelerated scientific discoveries, cross-disciplinary exchange and the contribution of artworking and philosophy to science and its methods, in this case to neuroaesthetics, is increasingly crucial and far-reaching, leading to implications for future research in terms of social, cultural, and ethical critique.
