Book part:

Sinnliche Immersion und haptische Medien: Utopien und Möglichkeiten

If one understands media immersion as the inclusion of all the senses in media, it can be seen that commercial media are mainly directed at the eye and the ear. In response to this, this article addresses some of the utopias of haptic media in order to discuss the possibilities and limits – of physiological, technical and narrative nature – to include the haptic sense and its subqualities in media interactions. To this end, the text first concentrates on the different meanings of multimodality in the field of psychology, sociosemantics, and human-computer interaction, to be able to outline an apparent contradiction of transmedia phenomena: While, on the one hand, haptic metaphors are frequently used in transmediality literature, the designed media products are, on the other hand, often limited to the audio-visual channel. In the following, four utopias of haptic media are set out against the background of media history and discourse: Salomo Friedländer’s «Idee vom Ferntaster» (1913), in which he postulates the telehaptor as a multimodal universal device; Aldous Huxley’s dystopian «Feelies» (1931/32) as the pacifying mass medium of the Brave New World; Salvador Dalí’s sketch of a tactile cinema (approx. 1928), with which he hoped to achieve «surreal effects» among the audience, as well as Oswald Wiener’s «Bio-Adapter» (1969), a suit that encloses the body, with cybernetic consciousness as its final product. Based on these utopias, the article discusses the challenges in the current development of haptic media and the role that can potentially be played by the interlocking of physical and narrative stimulation.