Six
works from the Angewandte Vienna explore different ways of touching the world through play with objects and through the living,
changing matter of bodies. A shared question runs through them all. What happens when we get in contact, how does it affect
the surroundings and ourselves?
Playthings of Touch brings together
six works from the Universität für angewandte Kunst Wien that share a single conviction. Understanding does not begin with
observation, but with contact, whether that contact is direct, withheld, or felt only as a trace of what has been touched
and taken away. Across these works, knowledge is something reached by touching, squeezing, holding, and being changed by what
is held, or by what remains just out of reach.
Some of the works treat the object as a plaything, not a toy, but
something turned over in the hands and understood through play rather than analysis, where the act of handling becomes a way
of thinking. Play becomes a method of inquiry here, a way of approaching difficult questions, from artificial intelligence
and power to history and complicity, through the body's direct, haptic encounter with an object that acts back. Others turn
to the body itself as living, changing matter, looking at scientific models that render the invisible tangible, living cultures
whose growth and decay mirror planetary ecological processes, or hybrid figures suspended between human, machine, and material,
present mostly through what they leave behind or refuse to fully reveal.
Together, the six works ask what happens
when we make contact, and what is left when contact does not occur. What can a plaything teach us about power, and what can
a withheld touch teach us about the body.
Participants:
Experimental Game Cultures
(Prof. Margarete Jahrmann)
- It-didn't-rain-that-day_TREE OF THOUGHT — Margarete Jahrmann, Stefan Maier,
Stefan Glasauer, Thomas Brandstetter, Alex Hackl
- (A)I love you, we're the same — Catherine Spet
- Small
Goals Big Pains — Navid Javan Shojamofrad
Transmediale Kunst (Prof. Jakob Lena Knebl)
- Untitled,
Unformed — Cristian Anutoiu
Art & Science (Prof. Virgil Widrich)
- Found in Translation
— Dunia Sahir
- metabolic_girl — Camille Belmin
