# Touch: An open research programme

> Touch is the ongoing research strand in Vladislav OSSSO’s practice: transmitting tactile information over distance. It runs across a tactile telegraph device, an immersive room and a wearable, and treats touch as a channel of trust that cannot be synthesised.

Everything else on this site works with the eye. This strand does not. It asks whether a sensation that belongs to two bodies in the same room can be sent across a distance and still be believed on arrival.
The programme is open. It is published as it develops rather than after it is finished, and each stage is a different answer to the same question.

## 01 Tactile telegraph — In progress

A pair of devices that transmit touch rather than text. Two people, two objects, one channel. The gesture is encoded on one side and reproduced on the other as pressure and vibration, not as a picture of a gesture.

## 02 Immersive room — Planned

The same channel scaled to a space: an installation in which the transmitted sensation is distributed across a room and a group, so that touch becomes something a public can share rather than something two people hold privately.

## 03 Wearable — Planned

The channel reduced to something worn — the point at which the work leaves the gallery and enters daily use, where the question stops being artistic and starts being social.

In an era in which any image, any voice and any face can be generated, touch is the one channel that still has to be produced by a body. That is what makes it worth building infrastructure for.

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https://ossso.art/project/touch/ · ossso@ossso.art