Project MUSE®: SubStance - Latest Articles
https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/189
Project MUSE®: Latest articles in SubStance.daily12026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00text/htmlen-USVol. 28, no. 2 (1999);
Vol. 29 (2000) through current issueLatest Articles: SubStanceTWOProject MUSE®SubStance1527-20950049-2426Latest articles in SubStance. Feed provided by Project MUSE®Introduction: Telehaptics
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/987816
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In June 2020, the last of seven “101” festivals of technological art, called 101.All in One, was held as an online conference instead of St. Petersburg, Russia. It aimed to explore the aesthetic conditions and affordances of pandemic isolation, and to historically contextualize the specific type of virtual presence this isolation suggested.The notion of telematic communication — transmitting messages at a distance — immediately came to mind. Additional immediate observations concerned the possibility or impossibility of sending touch over distance, and ways of simulating either touch or the experience of it. A sender and a receiver of such telehaptic messages also presented a case for inquiry.It is interesting to
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/189/image/coversmallIntroduction: Telehaptics2026-04-09text/htmlen-USIntroduction: Telehaptics2026-04-092026TWOProject MUSE®44082026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-04-09A Short History of Telepresence
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/987817
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History lurks within the word telepresence, at least in its English uses. At first glance, however, it is a surprisingly thin history, with the Oxford English Dictionary rooting its definition in an appearance from 1980 (“Omni 2 No. 9 48/1: The biggest challenge to developing telepresence is achieving that sense of ‘being there’”). The forty or so intervening years have offered a few twists and turns, culminating in the following definition: “The use of sensory feedback or virtual reality to allow participation in distant events or to aid in the remote operation of mechanical devices and instruments; the impression of being at another location produced by such means.” As we will shortly see, like a soil core
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/189/image/coversmallA Short History of Telepresence2026-04-09text/htmlen-USA Short History of Telepresence2026-04-092026TWOProject MUSE®577212026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-04-09Dis-Sensing Video: The Illusion of Touch in Early Video Art
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/987818
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This article aims to rediscover the illusion of the haptic dimension in certain early video artworks of the 1970s and examine the techniques employed by artists to evoke this illusion in the viewer. The term “illusion” is used in accordance with Laura U. Marks’s assertion that touch, like smell and taste, is a sense that the moving image apparatus is technically unable to represent (129). 1 In this context, a key question arises: how can touch be perceived within a medium that can only reproduce what is accessible to the eyes and ears? How is it able to overcome its technical limitations? Is it the medium itself that accomplishes this, or is the role of the artist crucial? The concept of illusion plays a crucial
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/189/image/coversmallDis-Sensing Video: The Illusion of Touch in Early Video Art2026-04-09text/htmlen-USDis-Sensing Video: The Illusion of Touch in Early Video Art2026-04-092026TWOProject MUSE®837212026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-04-09Contestable Chimeras: Excess, Indifference, and Obsolescence
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/987819
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I became interested in performance when I discovered I was a bad painter in art school. But I was always interested in the body as an evolutionary architecture, as a biological apparatus that perceives, interacts, and becomes aware of the world. Also, I have always been envious of gymnasts and dancers who use their own bodies as both a means of expression and a mode of experience. The body is a convenient site for experimentation and interrogation. Most of these performances and projects have been challenging physically and in technical complexity. To practice performance, you have to consider the physical consequences for your ideas.Having studied Western art and read Western philosophy, I wanted to experience an
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/189/image/coversmallContestable Chimeras: Excess, Indifference, and Obsolescence2026-04-09text/htmlen-USContestable Chimeras: Excess, Indifference, and Obsolescence2026-04-092026TWOProject MUSE®458222026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-04-09Symbiotic Consciousness: Experiments in Knowing and Acting at a Distance
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/987820
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Our cells are not our own, and they have many agencies. The mitochondrial family pierced our early cellular membranes billions of years ago. Now they exist inside each cell, with other critical organelles, in perfect symbiotic synchrony. Our microbiomes composed of trillions of bacterial cells live in synchrony with a healthy digestive system to power these same “human” cells.There was a time when all these microbes were parasites. Now they are us, and we are them. We are not individuals, though we imagine we are. We are a neural construction that supposes we are an individual in a kind of consensual hallucination. Behaviorally and actually, we are a mediation: a sum total of all these agencies and genetic drifts.
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/189/image/coversmallSymbiotic Consciousness: Experiments in Knowing and Acting at a Distance2026-04-09text/htmlen-USSymbiotic Consciousness: Experiments in Knowing and Acting at a Distance2026-04-092026TWOProject MUSE®366852026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-04-09From There to Here: Receiving Touch in a Telehaptic Space
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/987821
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E. M. Forster’s novella The Machine Stops, published in 1909, describes an experience of an end of a sensorium regulated with buttons. In this world, as in our post-pandemic world, a screen (a blue plate in the novella) is responsible for a person’s intellectual and emotional connection with other humans. These days, such a condition is not just science fiction. Remote presence became central to social activity during the 2019–2022 pandemic and is painfully familiar to those who experienced it during a period of dwelling, sometimes for months, within the walls of one room.In The Machine Stops, Vashti, one of the two main characters of the story, leads a partially disembodied life below the surface of the Earth in a
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/189/image/coversmallFrom There to Here: Receiving Touch in a Telehaptic Space2026-04-09text/htmlen-USFrom There to Here: Receiving Touch in a Telehaptic Space2026-04-092026TWOProject MUSE®689172026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-04-09Filters: Life as in a Film
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/987822
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As usual, the Zoom meeting started while I was finishing up my emails. I had muted my computer to block out the multi-layered noise of various homes. Although the meeting window was open in the corner of my screen, I failed to notice when the conversation began. Then I forgot to put up a proper background image. It is like I am only half there, wherever “there” is. In a sort on limbo, a foot on each side or, as we say in French (which even DeepL or ChatGPT do not translate properly), le cul entre deux chaises.Gwenola has been talking for several minutes, and I haven’t been paying attention to what she was saying. I’m trying to catch up.... Within the screen itself, our lives are now immersed in the realm of film.
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/189/image/coversmallFilters: Life as in a Film2026-04-09text/htmlen-USFilters: Life as in a Film2026-04-092026TWOProject MUSE®261532026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-04-09Telehaptic Sense-acts and Distancing Effects
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/987823
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Telematic media – be they visual, auditory, or haptic – all serve as means to shorten or overcome distance, making more apparent the fact of sharing time and not space. The sense of touch has been posing a particular challenge. The sense closest to the body and hence the most intimate one, it is quite complex not only physiologically but also psychologically and epistemologically. Throughout the history of human culture and thought, it has stood for forms of connectedness, relations to truth, evidence, and intimacy. Digital telematic technologies today provoke us to reconsider our conceptions of relatedness. I propose to address the problematic of telehaptics, locating it at the intersection of the phenomena of
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/189/image/coversmallTelehaptic Sense-acts and Distancing Effects2026-04-09text/htmlen-USTelehaptic Sense-acts and Distancing Effects2026-04-092026TWOProject MUSE®685422026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-04-09The Fold: From Your Body to the Cosmos by Laura U. Marks (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/987824
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In The Fold: From Your Body to the Cosmos, Laura U. Marks presents a compelling way of understanding how we experience the modern world. She calls this understanding a cosmology, a term as evocative of her project’s scope as it is purposefully anachronistic. Whereas the medieval cosmologies that Marks evokes have concentric circles separating the firmament from the celestial, Marks’s cosmology has squiggles representing folds separating the observer from the infinite (83). There is a playful aspect to all of this, which I believe is intentional. Marks sets an ambitious task for herself to create “a book of practical philosophy about living in a folded cosmos” (5), and that playfulness keeps her book much more
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/189/image/coversmallThe Fold: From Your Body to the Cosmos by Laura U. Marks (review)2026-04-09text/htmlen-USThe Fold: From Your Body to the Cosmos by Laura U. Marks (review)2026-04-092026TWOProject MUSE®121122026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-04-09The Charismatic Gymnasium: Breath, Media, and Religious Revivalism in Contemporary Brazil by Maria José de Abreu (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/987825
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Breathe in and then breathe out. Input, output. Reception and distribution. The text of Maria José de Abreu’s The Charismatic Gymnasium has a respiratory rhythm to its cadence, drawing readers deeply into the religious, political, haptic, and circulatory systems working in contemporary Charismatic Brazilian Catholicism before expanding out to consider the larger networked extremities of Brazil’s body politic and plexus of right-wing Christian ideology that has been of fueling social metamorphoses rapidly since the beginning of the twenty-first century. de Abreu’s richly textured ethnography centers on the voltaic connections among bodies, theological ideas, and right-wing political authority found in Brazil and
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/189/image/coversmallThe Charismatic Gymnasium: Breath, Media, and Religious Revivalism in Contemporary Brazil by Maria José de Abreu (review)2026-04-09text/htmlen-USThe Charismatic Gymnasium: Breath, Media, and Religious Revivalism in Contemporary Brazil by Maria José de Abreu (review)2026-04-092026TWOProject MUSE®177262026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-04-09Angry Planet: Decolonial Fiction and the American Third World by Anne Stewart (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/987826
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In her reading of Leslie Marmon Silko’s Almanac of the Dead (1991), Anne Stewart observes that, “The golf course is an ur-site of colonial excess and capitalist venality” (133). Beyond its narrative function in Silko’s novel, the golf course is indeed a signifier not only of colonial excess, but also of state violence against Indigenous peoples. In July 1990, a dispute over a proposed golf course to be built on Kanien’kéhaka (Mohawk) lands in Oka, Quebec, led to a 78-day standoff between the Canadian army and Mohawk Warriors protecting a sacred burial ground referred to as “The Pines.” The protest was famously documented by Abenaki filmmaker Alanis Obomsawin in Kanehsatake: 270 Years of Resistance (1993). As
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/189/image/coversmallAngry Planet: Decolonial Fiction and the American Third World by Anne Stewart (review)2026-04-09text/htmlen-USAngry Planet: Decolonial Fiction and the American Third World by Anne Stewart (review)2026-04-092026TWOProject MUSE®217802026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-04-09