sensate skins: unfolding an affective responsive aesthetics

This thesis explores responsive aesthetics in art installations?how individuals, through their senses, engage in meaningful, affective exchanges with a responsive artwork that focuses on touch and the body as the critical loci of reciprocity. Concepts drawn from multidisciplinary writings assisted in developing this responsive aesthetics: approaches to the body, lived experience, reversibility and intercorporeity from existential phenomenology; the construction of the self and sexuality from psychoanalytical theory and gender studies; models of responsivity, the relationships between haptic, visual and multimodal perception from physiology, human perception and art criticism. The construction and exhibition of a prototype haptic responsive installation, sensate skins, provided a means of embodying and exploring the multiple folds of responsivity and gathering engagent impressions on their lived experience.