“If I lay here; If I just lay here.
Would you lie with me and just forget the world?” 
― Snow Patrol

The stroking of hair and the gentle caressing of the side of someones face – these are gestures that we sometimes take for granted. Touch is our primary means of compassion and our primary means for spreading compassion. Touch is a language essential to what it means to be a compassionate human being.

So what happens when touch is taken away and replaced with sight instead? What happens when one can’t touch?

Both artist and participant are made to react to each other on the virtual space. It is human instinct to try. What we can then observe are people trying to connect with one another – and trying to touch the projection.

The installation, aimed at an interactive and intimate installation experience exists over ISDN Digital Telephone Network. The participants walk into a dark gallery with a bed taking centre stage. This, however, is no ordinary bed. A projection of the artist is projected onto it and he reacts to the participants in realtime, while being at a totally different location.

diagram via medienkunstnetz

Being touched and touching someone else are fundamental modes of human interaction. Human beings are all wired to connect. We instinctively feel the need to try to connect and communicate with our surroundings. In this performance installation, Sermon has successfully proven that point – most visitors to his installation touched him in one way or another. Herman Melville once said:

“We cannot live only for ourselves. A thousand fibers connect us with our fellow men; and among those fibers, as sympathetic threads, our actions run as causes, and they come back to us as effects.” 

It is interesting to note how the visitors reach to “being touched” in the third space. Although they knew that Sermon wasn’t really able to touch them when they weren’t physically in the same space, some participants actually moved away from away to avoid being “touched”. Also, when Sermon was laying still, some participants themselves try to do the touching. This induces visual delight as a “mime dance” somewhat unravels between artist and participant.

Telematic Vision was performed by Paul Sermon in 1992

and Telematic Dreaming was performed by Paul Sermon in 1993

Just an afterthought when reviewing this performance; could this technology be used to solve Japan’s increasing problem depression due to lack of touch and physical intimacy?

…or could this technology possibly accompany the visual projections that visitors see by introducing touch too: