‘I want to introduce online touching’

That is why artist Karen Lancel is carrying out research into how we can have the same feelings of trust and togetherness with another person online as when we meet in person.

“Artists design experiences,” said Frances Brazier back in 2011 in an interview with Delta. The knowledge generated by these experiences is crucial for designers of participation systems, said the systems engineering professor. Designing experiences is exactly what Karen Lancel is doing in her doctoral programme in Professor Brazier’s group. She uses performance-art projects with names like E.E.G. Kiss, Saving Face, StalkShow, and Tele_Trust to seek the link between looking at a screen and actually touching the other person.

As an artist and non-engineer, how did you become interested in ICT and online forms of interaction?
“This has interested me since the early 1990s. As an artist I work together with my husband, Hermen Maat. We’ve known each other a long time, and it turned out that, independently of each other, we were working on the same things. Art is often one step ahead. As artists, it is often easier for us than for engineers. We are able to get on and make working prototypes that we can use with a public audience. We don’t have to pass through a process of research, applying for patents, and production. We can work more intuitively.”

What do you make?
“We design social laboratories. Our work is about how we communicate, and we are making increasing use of machines – computers, tablets, and smartphones – to do so. How do we live with these machines? And how do I experience you and me if I meet you via a screen? There is no reciprocity, no form of reflecting each other’s behaviour, as happens in the physical world. That reflection of the other person’s behaviour is necessary to be able to understand and trust each other. How do you trust your own observations of the other person via a screen? And how can you make designs that deal with this? That is something we are exploring through our projects. We work with the general public and seek to give a sensitive and critical reflection of what we are researching.

What is the purpose of your research?
“We want to introduce forms of online touching and proximity that give a feeling of trust and togetherness. We want to make a sensitive social space via the screen.”

Screens create distance, so how do you use them to make a sensitive social space?
“Media extend our bodies in time and space, but prevent touch. Social sciences and philosophy describe how face-to-face connection, body language, and touch make up basic elements for being able to synchronise and trust, and are therefore essential for our social ecosystem. A screen creates both distance and global proximity. It is all about how we experience the collective, ‘augmented’ social space via screens, in a process of reciprocity. A social space becomes more sensitive if you can feel it, visually and through touch. Among the notions I use are those of optic visualisation and haptic visualisation from Laura U. Marks. The former means seeing, controlling, and fixing at a distance, and the latter, a look that feels and synchronises. I look for the sensitivity in that exploratory look, in combination with rituals designed by us for touching and sensor technology. If ICT moves too strongly towards the control aspect, that of surveillance, then there is no haptic look. We do not know who is on the other side of the screen, or camera. The surveillance society is not a sensitive environment. Reciprocity and a balance between the optic and haptic look are needed for trust.”

You work in China a lot. Why there, particularly?
“This year, we were artists in residence at the Tsinghua Art and Science Media Laboratory at Tsinghua University in Beijing. There is a great deal of interest in China for our work. The playfulness and the dedication of our projects appeals to the people there. Another reason is that it is art with a pragmatic component. It is about how you live with others, which is a major theme in China. Chinese society was and is primarily organised collectively, although it is becoming more and more individualistic. People are looking for ways of coping with that. In any case, we work a lot at an international level. Things are currently moving very quickly, but fifteen years ago our work would really have raised eyebrows. There is now an increasing fascination for the interaction between body, observation of the social space, and technology. That is interesting and exciting, partly because people in other cultures have a different attitude to looking at and touching each other. We are bringing knowledge of this field together.”

During your most recent project, E.E.G. Kiss, people with EEG headsets were able to kiss each other. Their kisses were converted into two graphs using the data from their brain activity. What do the graphs mean?
“Neurological research into social reciprocal experiences is a new field. E.E.G. Kiss brings together the earlier cases that we carried out. I now have a treasure trove of data. How do I put that into an academic perspective? Are the assumptions that I have made correct? I am in the process of assigning meaning. Can I convert the data into a haptic experience, and how would that work? For example, are we going to mimic the kiss with prosthetics or a brain implant? Or convert it into sound? The Digital Synesthesia Group of the University of Vienna has asked us to convert the kiss data into sheet music.”

If it works, everyone will want to use it. Good business.
“Artists’ ideas are often taken forward by others. Uploading a kiss could be useful for the industry. It is likely that someone will make an awful lot of money from it – someone other than me. I hope to be part of any subsequent development, if things get to that stage.”

How do people react when they see their kiss appearing as a graph on a screen?
“That can sometimes be very moving. One woman said to me, ‘those data are a portrait of my intimate relationship with my husband’. The graphs show a combination of brain activity and time. My husband and I also kissed – we then asked the public to say something about what they saw. In our analysis of their answers, we hope to find out what matters to people. Incidentally, the graphs all look very different; they are unique. And they don’t say anything about the state of your relationship.”

What is it like to be a non-engineer at TU Delft?
“My PhD supervisor Frances Brazier and co-supervisor Caroline Nevejan say that science needs artists. As an artist, I too need other people. I always work with people from outside the art world. Interactive art works require a great deal of knowledge of technology, which I have, but I don’t do programming myself, so for that, I work with engineers. There is a lot of overlap. I, too, think in terms of models. Moreover, we are all engaged in the development of innovative technologies and we are all future-oriented. I spend one day a week working on my doctorate and am not employed by TU Delft. I also work on my art and teach.”

What, for you, is the added value of a PhD in relation to the research that you could have carried out purely as an artist?
“The PhD puts my research into a framework, and adds clarity and focus. I am learning to work using academic methods and am learning how to use academic language. I can bring intuition and experience to TU Delft as part of my design method. When it comes to development based on experience and designing for experience, my knowledge is ahead of the game.”

In your projects, ICT and people are very closely intertwined. Is that what we really want? Shouldn’t we actually use less ICT rather than more?
“E-health is becoming more prominent, in care for the elderly, for example. Sensors on the body, which maintain cloud-based information on that body, are becoming increasingly commonplace. If something is wrong, you see it very quickly. The elderly are often lonely, as are children who spend a long time in hospital. What if you can offer them a digital touch experience? There are very many people who find that an appealing idea. It is only then that questions on how all this affects privacy are raised, for example. Our reasoning is this: the intrusion of privacy has already happened, and the development of ICT cannot be halted. What we can do is help make sure that it becomes something positive. There is no escaping these new forms of communication. Whatever position you adopt, you have to deal with it. But I am critical of ICT that invades privacy, which is why I would like to make other proposals that offer viable alternatives.” 

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Karen Lancel spends one day a week working on her doctorate at the Faculty of Technology, Policy, and Management. In addition, she works together in Studio LancelMaat with her husband Hermen Maat, designing performances and installations which function as an ‘artistic social lab’ where the public takes part as a ‘co-researcher’. They have done this in Seoul, New York, Melbourne, London, Istanbul, Paris, Amsterdam, Shanghai, and other places. Lancel completed a Bachelor’s programme in visual arts at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie, followed by a Master’s in theatre and dance at DasArts theatre school. Between 2005 and 2008, she was head of the interactive media department at the Frank Mohr Institute in Groningen. She then worked for three years in the Artistic Research, Theory and Interpretation research group at the Amsterdam School of the Arts. Her most recent project, E.E.G. Kiss, was created in collaboration with the Participatory Systems Initiative TU Delft, Tsinghua University Beijing, TNO, the Baltan Laboratories & Holst Centre Eindhoven, and is supported by the Mondriaan Fund.