🎉   Please check out our new website over at books-etc.com.

Seller
Your price
£74.00
Dispatched within 2-3 working days.

Mirror-Touch Synaesthesia

Thresholds of Empathy with Art

Edited by Daria Martin
Format: Hardback
Publisher: Oxford University Press, Oxford, United Kingdom
Published: 28th Sep 2017
Dimensions: w 184mm h 259mm d 24mm
Weight: 956g
ISBN-10: 0198769288
ISBN-13: 9780198769286
Barcode No: 9780198769286
Trade or Institutional customer? Contact us about large order quotes.
Synopsis
The neurological condition synaesthesia (the mixing of the senses) has for over a century provoked thought about new ways of artistic seeing. In 'Mirror-Touch Synaesthesia: Thresholds of Empathy with Art', a recently discovered manifestation provides a lens through which to re-examine contemporary art experience. People with mirror-touch synaesthesia feel a physical sense of touch on their own bodies when they witness touch to other people and often to objects. The condition is a rare yet recognizable form of heightened physical empathy: present in just 1 in 75 people, it is associated with an overactivation of the near-universal mirror (neuron) system. Mirror-Touch Synaesthesia places mirror-touch, a social synaesthesia, at the center of dialogue between neuroscience, the humanities, and contemporary art theory and practice in order to explore, for the first time, its powerful potential as a model for the embodied and relational spectatorship of art. Mirror-Touch Synaesthesia brings together essays and conversations by prominent neuroscientists, anthropologists, artists, art theorists, curators, film theorists, and philosophers, as well as mirror-touch synaesthetes, and through proximity, and cross-disciplinary dialogue, dissolves barriers not only between disciplines but between theory and experience. Essays and conversations find common ground not only in quantitative but also qualitative accounts of mirror-touch; the editor has conducted the first set of in-depth, semi-structured interviews with mirror-touch synaesthetes, which is available in excerpted form in the volume's appendix. This collection of thirteen conversations constitutes a performative project at the boundary between art and science that invites contributors to reconceptualize the ways that artworks invite us into relational, co-constitutional forms of spectatorship. Critically refiguring arguments about the 'social turn' in contemporary art that reject the traditional viewer as passive, Mirror-Touch Synaesthesia expands the possibilities of what art we might call 'participatory', and enriches debates around the social agency of perception. In these essays, the blurred thresholds in mirror-touch between sight and touch, and between self and other, are redrawn for an interdisciplinary readership as newly sensitized boundaries between image and action, art and life.

New & Used

Seller Information Condition Price
-New£74.00
+ FREE UK P & P

What Reviewers Are Saying

Submit your review
Newspapers & Magazines
Mirror-Touch Synaesthesia, in bringing together leading neuroscientists, artists, philosophers and experiencing synaesthetes, is of equal importance to the fields of science and the humanities, shedding new light on in-feeling (empathy) and its vital relevance to contemporary life and culture. The book reminds us of how, even in our period, which is characterised by accelerated scientific discoveries, cross-disciplinary exchange and the contribution of artworking and
philosophy to science and its methods, in this case to neuroaesthetics, is increasingly crucial and far-reaching, leading to implications for future research in terms of social, cultural, and ethical critique. * Bracha L. Ettinger, artist, psychoanalyst, philosopher, author of The Matrixial Borderspace and And My Heart Wound-space *