Touchscreen Archaeology

Front matter

£ De

ARCHAEOLOGY

Touchscreen Archaeology

Part One: Touch As Media Practice

A Little History of Hands-On Film Spectatorship 53 Two Founding Myths of the Early Film Spectator

The Early Rube Films

Ali Barbouyou and Don Quixote

Michel-Ange’s Lure or Pretend Play

The Avant-Garde Rube of the 1920s

Expanded Cinema Rubes

The Technological Rube of the Twenty-First Century Today's Children as Rubes

Early Museum's Hands-On Ethos 83

Please Do Not | Touch It

The Early Museum

The User of the Cabinet of Curiosities

The Exhibitionary Architecture of the Modern Museum The Museum Touchscreen

Futurist “Tactilism” and Tactile Tables

(Non)interactive Tactile Art

The Art of Touchscreen Gestures

Sketching, Zapping, Pinching, Clicking, Thumbing 117

Hand Gestures, Hands-On Gestures

A Praxeology of Media Gestures Performing/Animating Hands

Hands-On TV Watching

From Zaptitude to Zoomtitude To Pinch Is to Seize with Love The Clicking Hand Cursor Thumbelina’s Gesturality

PART TWO: SCREEN AS TOUCHABLE OBJECT Hands-On Screenology 151

Between Surface and Interface

Screen's Etymological Lineages

Some Notes on the Electronic Touchscreen Post-Scriptum: Early Media Screens

Manually Operated Optical Toys 187 Mischievousness

From Handheld to “Handled” Optical Devices

The Philosophy of Toys

Object Lesson as Early Model of Hands-On Teaching Tactile (Media) Pedagogy

The Image as Screenic Surface and Interface 223 Screen's Cues for Action

The Notion of the Screenic Image

From Data-Based to Multi-Purpose Image

From Windowed to Screenic Viewing

The iTouch Generation

The Neo-Spectators of Relocated Cinema Do-It-Yourself Cinema

Conclusion: | Touch, Therefore IAm 243

References 247

Foreword

Untimely as it might seem, this book invites the reader to delve into a century-long history of tactility in the arts and media. In these strange times when people are asked to keep distance from other human beings due to the spread of an invisible pathogenic agent and when touching displayed objects in public is considered risky and even transgressive, | propose to study historical and contemporary hands-on media practices as playful and meaningful acts.

| would like to emphasize that the present book was written well before the coronavirus pandemic. Its conception thus predates the safety measurements of social distancing, wearing facemasks and latex gloves, and not touching touchscreens. Yet | revised the manuscript during the early days of the pandemic’s outbreak, more precisely during the first strictly regulated lockdown in Italy, and finalized it when so-called second waves hit populations worldwide. Even if these experiences did not affect the overall concept of the book, I cannot circumvent the subject and ignore the current distrust in touching (screen) surfaces and nurturing social contacts.

The pandemic is topical to the content of this book, as it urges us to rethink the activity of screen touching, somehow reversing the logic of the touchscreen as a screen that must not be touched. Indeed, as I will briefly address, the global health crisis had direct consequences for the use of touchscreen-based devices

in museums. And when discussing manual gestures in terms of communication, | also needed to acknowledge that the handshake, for instance, underwent a change in meaning in response to COVID-19.

On the other hand, the interest of this book lies precisely in the excavation of changing meanings, of topoi that return as unique instances throughout history, with a renewed or altered function. | propose to think of the touchscreen as a low-tech, touchable media object, as a surface and interface that existed long before computers and smartphones. Today’s touchscreen, potentially contagious, is only one of the occurrences of what constitutes the object of knowledge for my media-archaeological quest.

January 2021

Introduction: Is This a Touchscreen?

In the beginning, touch; at the origin, the medium.

Michel Serres

Three Opening Anecdotes

In the spring of 2012, | visited the then-recently-inaugurated Eye Filmmuseum Amsterdam in the Netherlands and tried out the Video Flipbook machine installed in its basement. This machine allows visitors to make a personalized flipbook by recording a short selfie video, saved as a sequence of still images, that can be printed and assembled for a small fee in the Eye Shop. At that time, the interactive installation consisted of a wall with screens on the front and back: one screen serving as a preview of the recording and another displaying the first images of the videos that various people had just recorded. Above the outward facing screen was a caption that warned: “NO TOUCHSCREEN” (fig. 1a-b). The sign was attached with transparent tape, in a rather provisional way. | assume the staff realized only after the museum opened that the setup was inviting people to touch the screen, probably because the individual images looked like clickable icons.

[Figure 1a-b] Video Flipbook Machine, Eye Filmmuseum Amsterdam. From author’s personal archive, May 2012.

| was struck by the historically reversed situation, whereby a 13 “high-tech” but not touch-based video screen was incorporated into a setting for creating a “low-tech,” century-old media toy,

a flipbook, that required active touch to create the illusion of movement. The kineograph, as the flipbook was patented in 1868, came also to be known as “thumb cinema” in reference to its manual operation: it can be browsed from front to back with the right thumb and from back to front with the left thumb, while its flipping movement can be stopped at any page, so that a detail can be indicated with the finger. Thanks to its small size, it fits perfectly in your shirt pocket. The flipbook as portable, pocket-sized and hands-on cinema is in stark contrast to the fixed built-in computer screen that cannot be touched. Yet the warning sign

of the Video Flipbook machine is also clearly symptomatic of a change in our screen culture, of the fact that the touchscreen is becoming the default technology for screens and that we need

a new term to indicate the non-touchscreen or non-touchable screen, which is, obviously, not necessarily obsolete. In a similar vein, after the introduction of the CD in the music industry, the LP was no longer called “record” (or record album) but persisted and made its revival as “vinyl.” What could be such a new/old name for the non-touchscreen? Can we think of a comparable connection with its (original) materiality?

In autumn 2014, another museum visit, while not resolving this terminological matter, inspired further reflection on the ontology of the touchscreen. Accompanied by a group of young children, | happened to drop in on a temporary exhibition organized by the independent artist collective Casagallery at the Resistance Museum of Bologna in Italy. At the entrance of the exhibition, entitled /nfiltrazioni (Infiltrations, October 7-17, 2014), stood a huge round cactus covered with cutout paper eyes, which were all pierced, one by one, by the cactus spines. It was fascinating to see how the kids were immediately attracted by this spiky artwork, entitled Una storia (A story, 2014), by Federica Barbieri. Two little girls could not resist touching it. They did so in a very delicate way, as if they wanted to caress the cactus (fig. 2). Or maybe they were just curious to find out if it was a real cactus, if it was hurting despite its “huggable” appearance. And, of course, it did hurt. But it was not an ordinary cactus they were touching: it was a cactus with innumerable eyes that were looking back at them. When | posted a picture of this “encounter” on Facebook, one of my friends, besides referring to Un chien andalou (1929) by Luis Buñuel, also made the following astute observation: “Touch screens that look back at you.”

[Figure 2] Una storia (2014) by Federica Barbieri, Museo della Resistenza, Bologna.

From author's personal archive, October 2014.

Are these cutout paper eyes indeed touchscreens? Why would one call them that? Because of their materiality and the fact we can touch them? Or rather because of their (painful) feedback and the fact they are looking back at us? To be sure, the artwork questions—even pokes at—the culturally established hierarchy

1 Jan Teurlings on my Facebook wall, October 16, 2014.

of the senses, that is, Western ocularcentrism. In fact, over the 15 course of not only Western history but also each human life,

the first and primal sense of touch is constantly disciplined by

and subordinated to the other senses and, in particular, vision

(as the mind’s eye). Yet here the eye is literally pierced, evoking

indeed the indelible image of the razor cutting the eye in Un chien andalou. In Buñuel's film, seeing becomes painful, it becomes

(again) an embodied act; likewise, in Barbieri's artwork, seeing becomes a form of touching, with each eye functioning as a

screen—a screen to get your finger pricked.

The last and most personal of my three opening anecdotes

goes back to the summer of 2011, when my husband gave mea first-generation iPad as a “symbolic” gift, that is, as a companion and hands-on study material for my historical research on the touchscreen.? However, this “true” touchscreen device did not survive the journey, turning out obsolete and dysfunctional before | even started writing this book. Yet it served its purpose and triggered the Dutch working title for my ongoing research project: “aaienpet.” This untranslatable term was coined by my then three-year-old daughter, who almost instantly “confiscated” the iPad from me. At first, she called it the “present you got from Daddy,” but very soon it became her “aaienpet.” Morphologically speaking, the term can be split in two parts: “aaien” and “pet."3 Yet the language-game, which functions only in Dutch, is limited to the first segment: for my daughter, it was not evident to connect the “i” of iPad to the first-person singular of English grammar which she was not yet familiar with at that age, but instead it resonated well with the verb “to caress,” which in Dutch is aaien (pronunciation: /'a:is(n)/). Because of the phonetic similarity between the English “I” and the Dutch “aai,” it is very likely that

2 Elsewhere, | have used this third anecdote in an anonymous way as an illustration of Wittgensteinian language-game (Strauven 2019, 37).

3 As for the latter part of the term, there is no connection to be made with the English noun “pet,” since a pet in Dutch means “cap.”

the little girl gave her own interpretation to Apple's name for the electronic tablet, namely: it is something to caress.

Objects, Users, Gestures

Of the three opening anecdotes, only the last tells us about

what is generally considered today to be a touchscreen: a display screen of an electronic device (computer, tablet, smartphone) that registers a user's input by detecting the touch of

a finger or stylus on its surface. While Merriam-Webster and

the Cambridge Dictionary still disagree on the correct spelling

of the term, “touch screen” vs. “touchscreen,” its meaning is undeniably connected to computer technology. According to Merriam-Webster, it is “a display screen on which the user selects options (as from a menu) by touching the screen,” while the Cambridge Dictionary defines it even more unequivocally as

"a computer screen that you touch to get information, buy something, etc." The challenge of the present book lies largely in opening up this restricted interpretation of the term, by exploring connections, in particular in terms of hands-on usage, between “low-tech” (nonelectronic) screens and “high-tech” (digital) screens. In response to this provocation, one might object that | should not confuse the “touchscreen” with the very broad notion of “touchable screen,” the latter indicating a screen that can be touched and the former specifying, more precisely, one that must be touched. As media scholar Nanna Verhoeff points out,

The aspect that most clearly distinguishes the touchscreen from other screen devices such as the cinematic screen, or the television screen for that matter, is the fact that spatial proximity of the screen not only can involve the user's body, the screen must be touched in order to navigate within the screen interface. (2012, 24)

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/touchscreen#h1. 5 https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/touchscreen.

Yet, as | would like to argue, the same can be said about the flipbook, which must be activated to generate a short moving image sequence. If no act of touching is taking place, the series of consecutive still images will remain immobile—even more, unseen. And even though the image carrier here is made of paper, its close connection with early cinema and viewing machines such as the Mutoscope places it in a history of visual display devices, if not directly of “media screens,” a notion that will be further explored, both etymologically and historically, in this book.

As | will explain in more detail later in this introduction, my scholarly engagement with century-old and up-to-date tactile media devices, which | propose to consider under the common heading of “touchscreens,” is embedded in a media-archaeological framework that operates both backward (into the past) and forward (into the future). By combining a McLuhanian method of seeking the old in the new with Siegfried Zielinski’s “anarchic” approach of hitting upon the new in the old, my aim is to bring about a productive dialogue between the early and late history of tactile media, not in terms of a one-to-one equation but rather as mutual transparency. Critically arguing against a linear and teleological conception of history, as well as the notions of old media's obsolescence and new media's newness, this study focuses on a wide variety of objects that function as “nonhuman actors” in the act of touching. Even if this study is not conducted intentionally in light of science and technology studies, | follow here Bruno Latour's definition of “actor”:

An “actor” in ANT [actor-network theory] is a semiotic definition—an actant—, that is something that acts or to which activity is granted by others. It implies no special motivation of human individual actors, nor of humans in general. An actor can literally be anything provided it is granted to be the source of an action. (1996, 373)

The flipbook, to continue with the same example, is the source of an action that consists in using our thumbs to turn its small pages; it directly inspires such a hands-on action and also has a certain impact insofar as it makes something happen: it turns a series of still images into one continuous moving image. This potentiality (or agency) is inscribed in the object itself.

In this book, | am interested in interactions between human and nonhuman actants that constitute concrete actions of touching, whereby it is often technological devices that invite and incite human actions. As for instance in the second opening anecdote, it is the cactus artwork that exerted a force of attraction on the two girls, who, at their turn, became part of the artwork asa

live experience or “encounter.” The cutout and pierced paper eyes became “touch screens that look back at you” through the (inter)action of touching. In this context, |am less concerned with the artist as actor, in this case Barbieri, who, present during our visit, witnessed and luckily tolerated the girls’ “illicit” act of touching the artwork on display. The “encounter” that matters for my argument is between the artwork and the museumgoer, or more generally between the object (as nonhuman actant) and the user (as human actant).

Such a dyadic model is chosen on purpose with a view to a

“thick description” (Geertz 1973) of object-user encounters as meaningful events, which all take place in a larger Foucauldian dispositif—ranging from a disciplining instance such as the museum or the movie theater to the governmentality of digital, data-based media. The book’s scope is not to offer a critical analysis of today’s control society and the algorithmization of “computational capitalism” (Stiegler 2019), even if the last chapter will propose a redefinition of the image in terms of data information, operation, and surveillance. At the risk of being too naive, | want to counterbalance the typical doomsday scenarios of digital media's impact on society and culture, by focusing on the playful dimension of hands-on media practices.

As will become clear throughout the book, | am especially inspired by children’s mischievous actions of touching screen-based media and art installations. Instead of making too 19 quick assumptions about a cause-and-effect relationship with their early familiarization with touchscreens, | believe it is more productive to see in the child’s approach a reversal of the “look, but don’t touch” rule—a typical adult exhortation that children prefer to ignore in favor of an ingenuous exploration of the borders between touchable and non-touchable, interactive and noninteractive. The child is a seemingly naive user, who is in fact an expert in the pretend play and who shares some behavioral patterns with the so-called rube figure of early cinema, to which is dedicated the first chapter of the book. The rube is a clumsy countryman who does not know how to behave in the modern city and who, when visiting a moving picture show, jumps on stage and touches the film screen. What makes the rube a comical character is that he has failed to internalize the “look, but don’t touch” norm and is not only acting like a man of dubious judgment, but like a child. But this is precisely the reason why | take the rube figure as my guiding thread in order to recover the tactile potential of cinema as a screen-based media experience. My sympathy for this apparently unsophisticated character is the basis of Touchscreen Archaeology, because it is the rube’s “undisciplined” attitude that prompts a change of mindset or perception. Just as children adopt and expand the paradigm of the touchscreen to other media and non-media environments in their forms of play, the rube extends a nineteenth-century tradition

of hands-on interaction and manual operation of media devices, ranging from optical toys to coin-operated viewing machines. To be sure, this early cinema figure also had a different “disciplining” function, as | will discuss in Chapter 1, but for the moment | would like to stress the concreteness of the rube’s act of screen touching. | consider both the child and the rube as users (or human actants), whose hands-on gestures become in this study the guiding principle for shifting from (a history of) visual media to (a history of) tactile media.

Their hands-on, touchscreen-like gestures are processes, that is, actions that take place. These gestures can range from tender caressing, as suggested by the term “aaienpet” coined by my daughter, to quick page thumbing, as in the case of the flipbook, to curious poking or pricking, as in the cactus art interaction, to tearing down the calico film screen, as in the case of the rube films. Pointing, pinching, scrolling, swiping, zooming, zapping, clicking, etc., are all actions to be added to a lexicon of screen touching gestures.® My interest lies, thus, in touching as a gesture, a process or an action. While the technicity of gestures will be at the center of Chapter 3, it can already be stated that the book is less about touch as one of the fives senses and more about the active verb “to touch.” Belonging to the “sphere of action,” as Giorgio Agamben argues, gestures show us the process of the action; they mediate concrete encounters, among human beings (which is not the scope of my research), as well as between objects and humans, between artworks and children, between screens and rubes, and so on (as is the central topic of this book). In his Notes on Gesture (originally published in French in 1991), Agamben defines the gesture as the “communication of a communicability” (2000, 58). Following distinctions made by ancient Roman writer Marcus Terentius Varro, he suggests that the gesture is not an end in itself, like making (facere) or acting (agere), but rather reveals or carries out (gerere) the process of such actions and therefore functions as a form of pure mediality. Agamben writes: “The gesture is the exhibition of a mediality: it is the process of making a means visible as such" (57).

Defining Media

As Dieter Mersch has put it, following Aristotle’s theory of perception, “it is the medium that enables perception, but at the same time the medium also evades perception,” which makes it

6 Such a lexicon can be seen as a variation on, or sub-corpus of, Jean-Luc Nancy’s “corpus of tact” (2008, 93); see also Chapter 3.

extremely difficult, if not impossible, to give an accurate def- 21 inition of the term (Hoffmann 2014, 20). Since my corpus contains many art(istic) examples, | want to point out from the very beginning that | am not concerned here with what distinguishes art from media, or what turns art into media or media into art.

| consider artworks as well as films, toys, and apps as integral parts (or actors) of media insofar as they establish an “encounter” with other actors; and as such they offer or even become a means of an experience, of a communication. This might seem to come close to the definition of media as channels for communication, as in the verbal communication model of the American political scientist Harold Lasswell.”? Describing unidirectional communication systems from transmitter (author, broadcast company) to receiver (reader, audience), this 1948 model can appear dated in that it does not account for interaction or feedback. However, it

is still useful for grasping Agamben's above definition of gesture as “communication of a communicability,” which points to a more open notion of media, clearly based on a bidirectional or interactive model of communication.

As already suggested, | prefer to think in terms of “encounter,” which implies a physical contact, not necessarily between the author (artist, filmmaker, etc.) and the audience (museumgoer, film spectator, etc.), but rather between the human and the artwork (or media device) itself. For it is the artwork (or media device) that looks back at us. “The medium is the message,”

as Marshall McLuhan famously proclaimed in the 1960s to emphasize that not only the content but also the (technological) characteristics of the medium mattered. In this context, McLuhan defined television as both a cold medium (requiring high participation from the viewer to “complete” the missing information) and a tactile medium that involves the whole body. As Klemens Gruber (2017, 225-26) points out, tactility has two

7 According to Lasswell’s model, communication can be described in terms of “who says what to whom in which channel and with what effect” (Briggs and Burke 2005, 4).

different meanings for McLuhan: on the one hand, its stand for the unity (or interplay) of the senses; on the other, it refers to the line-by-line composition of the TV image which is transferred to the viewer's perception. Notably, the Canadian media theorist described how the “scanning finger” traces the contours of things as if it were actually touching or stroking the dotted TV image (McLuhan 1964, 334). Besides the technical aspect of the cathode ray tube's scanning system, one should not forget that the TV set was still rather small in the 1960s, and therefore the viewer needed to get close.’ This is exactly what | mean by “encounter” between media device and user—an encounter not only in terms of artistic or aesthetic appreciation but also and especially in terms of physical and often hands-on interaction.

The open notion of media also fits into the book’s general framework of media archaeology. The main concern of media archaeology is not to establish what media are but rather how to deal with them. Scholars in media archeology take an interest in diverse questions, including dead and imaginary media, media artifacts and apparatuses, media (art) installations, materiality and microtemporality, media ecology, and “zombie media” (Hertz and Parikka 2012). Most media-archaeological thinkers want

to open up the concept of media beyond its institutionalized borders, without however turning its definition into a debate

on its own. The question What Is Media Archaeology? that Jussi Parikka gave as the title of his comprehensive introduction to the field points not so much to a matter of ontology as to issues of methodology. That is, the primary consideration is the meaning of the term “archaeology,” or how to do it. From the very first

8 This close encounter between viewer and TV set turned out to be hazardous for patients of photosensitive epilepsy, causing potentially harmful bodily effects such as dizziness, nausea, and epileptic seizures, which some experienced as not entirely unpleasant. On the practice of self-induction of seizures as a new form of visual pleasure, see Jancovic 2020. In Chapter 3, | will briefly discuss another less harmful example of close and hands-on TV viewing, prompted in the 1980s by the French interactive TV series Télétactica.

pages of What Is Media Archaeology?, Parikka sets the methodological agenda: “[The book] offers an insight into how to think media archaeologically in contemporary culture, and maps the various theories, methods and ideas that give us guidance on how to do that” (2012, 2).

As | will discuss in more detail below, “thinking media archaeologically” is, to a large extent, an exercise in rethinking temporalities. The present book wants to rethink the history of the touchscreen as a nonlinear, nonprogressive study of old and new media. Alluded to also by Parikka is the importance of historical layers (and entanglements between past, present, and future): “Media archaeology is introduced as a way to investigate the new media cultures through insights from past new media, often with an emphasis on the forgotten, the quirky, the non-obvious apparatuses, practices and inventions” (2012, 2).

Tactile vs. Haptic

My aim to shift perspective from visual media to tactile media concurs with W. J. T. Mitchell’s appeal to think of all media as “mixed media.” As one of the great theorists of the image, who

in 1992 coined the expression “the pictorial turn” to indicate the predominantly visual culture of the twentieth century, Mitchell declared at the beginning of the twenty-first century that, “There Are No Visual Media.”

“Visual Media” is a colloquial expression used to designate things like TV, movies, photography, painting, and so on. But it is highly inexact and misleading. All the so-called visual media turn out, on closer inspection, to involve the other senses (especially touch and hearing). All media are, from the standpoint of sensory modality, “mixed media.” (Mitchell 2007, 395)

Mitchell elucidates his point with various examples from both the media and the arts. For instance, the locution “silent cinema” to indicate the first period of cinema's history seems to imply that cinema was once a “purely visual” medium, but we know that this is a misconception: cinema was never totally silent, as films were accompanied by live pianists, orchestras, and lecturers. Sculpture is the art of touch par excellence. It is the only visual art that is directly accessible to the blind, and even if the sculpture remains untouched, there is a tactile dimension that we cannot grasp with our eyes alone. Photography as a medium that can reveal what the eye alone cannot see, translating the unseen or unseeable into a picture, is also not a “visual medium in any straightforward sense” (Mitchell 2007, 398). Even painting, according to Mitchell,

is amixed medium because it recalls the hand of the artist. When contemplating a painting, we imagine touching the canvas like the painter did. Or as Mitchell formulates it: “Seeing painting is seeing touching, seeing the hand gestures of the artist, which is why we are so rigorously prohibited from actually touching the canvas ourselves” (397). Mitchell pushes his argument even further by suggesting that vision itself is not purely visual, since it takes place through material and multisensory processes. He claims: “There are no purely visual media because there is no such thing as pure visual perception in the first place” (403).

If there are no purely visual media, are they all to be considered tactile media? What are tactile media? Deriving from the Latin tactus, the past participle of tangere (to touch), the term “tactile” implies the potential of being touched, of being perceived by the sense of touch, or even better, of being involved in a concrete act of touching. Other related notions are “tangible,” “touchable,” “touch-sensitive,” and “touch-based.” When | use the term “tactile” in this book, | refer to concrete acts of touching. Departing from Mitchell, | would not use it in relation to an untouched painting or photograph, or an untouched film screen. As a film scholar, | deliberately use the term “tactile” to distance myself from film theories about the “haptic” (or “haptical”) dimension of the viewing experience. | am referring here in particular to theories of embodied film spectatorship, which constitute a different yet very valuable line of thought, following Vivian Sobchack’s phenomenological approach adopted first in The Address of the Eye: A Phenomenology of Film Experience (1992) and developed subsequently in Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture (2004).

In this context, (feminist) film scholars have revisited Alois Riegl’s notion of the “haptic” in relation to early cinema (Antonia Lant), video art (Laura Marks), and contemporary cinema (Jennifer Barker), insisting on how the viewing process activates the memory of touch. Riegl's haptisch (haptic) refers indeed to the sensation of touch rather than the actual act of touching, which he originally indicated with the term taktisch (tactical/tactile), in opposition to optisch (optical), when distinguishing two different regimes of perception in Die spätrömische Kunst-Industrie (Late Roman Art Industry, 1901). To put it very schematically, according to Riegl's art theory, the haptic is the visual regime of closeness, and therefore of fragmentation, typical of Egyptian art; the optical, on the other hand, is the visual regime of distance, wholeness, and overall view typical of Roman art. It should be stressed that both the haptic Nahsicht and the optical Fernsicht are modes of visual perception, determining the spatial position of the beholder. However, Riegl did not use the term “haptic” in Late Roman Art Industry, but adopted it only afterward, borrowing from the field of physiology, as | will further discuss below.

In her seminal essay “Haptical Cinema” (1995), Lant discusses early cinema’s spatiality in terms of layered flatness, which comes into full play thanks to the use of painted and movable décor pieces, transparent curtains, and bas-relief-like superimpositions. Lant’s essay is inspirational for my research as it opens the path for a touch-based analysis of the early cinema screen, which Lant herself does not carried out explicitly. Instead she focuses on the Egyptian motifs of early cinema’s hapticity, which allows her to connect back to Riegl's theory of art and visual perception.’ Then, in 1998, Marks introduced the term “haptic visuality” in relation to video aesthetics characterized by low-resolution, graininess, and lack of focus. This notion has been most instrumental in reinforcing the visual dimension of the haptic: “haptic visuality”