iz paehr

Feeling Virtual: An Archive of Touch

A collage brings together different images that feature hands and textures. In the front, a cut-out photo shows Iz’ perspective when looking downwards while using a VR headset. They are wearing a strap over their shoulders that two VR controllers are attached to, which allows them to use their right hand to lean onto their cane while their left hand is holding the controller intended for their right hand. The VR interface does not understand this bodily figuration and simulates outlines of virtual hands in unusual angles. Underneath, a hand-drawn wavy grid connects the scene to the background, where more hands touch costumes. The colors are tweaked in a way that object outlines disappear while surfaces and textures are enhanced, which creates an unfamiliar visuality. Above, a white text reads in braille: Feeling Virtual, and in plain text below the same with the subtitle: an archive of touch.

S+T+ARTS EC(H)O Residency with Salzburg Festival Archive and Ars Electronica, 2025

Feeling Virtual: An Archive of Touch is an arts-design-research project that experiments with access to cultural heritage by developing tactile virtual worlds.

The project prompts Virtual Reality to bend beyond its ableist status quo in which entering virtuality relies on standing, seeing, hearing and other hallmarks of nondisabledness. It starts from disabled community knowledges of how to navigate inaccessible surroundings, and asks: Which ways of moving, stimming, making noise, slowing down, using sign language, understanding things through touching them etc. can make for portals and navigational devices into haptic virtual worlds? How can digital access to archival materials become a multisensorial experience for all?

This project feels backwards into the Salzburg Festival Archive to crip its reception through novel VR experiences that foreground touch. The Salzburg Festival Archive holds props, costumes, visuals and texts from more than a hundred years of operas, concerts and theatre plays in Austria, and many of the artifacts have intriguing tactile dimensions. The project wants to bring archival digitisation processes, which often remove modalities of touch from interactions with materials, in touch with touch. The goal and tactile imaginary is the development of haptic sculptures that function as custom controllers. With these controllers, selected archival materials can be experienced in the form of tactile virtual worlds that make use of vibration, temperature, resistance, sound, and movements in space instead of relying on the primacy of the visual sense.

The project proposes that Virtual Reality can emerge through multisensorial – and nonvisual – arrangements. Instead of VR glasses simulating and/or interfacing visual virtual worlds, the plan is to bring together disabled knowledges and archival artifacts to develop novel tactile interfaces. In line with criptastic hacking, this process might open narrow definitions of VR by experimenting with how virtuality meets other senses; how starting from access transforms technology design processes; and how playing as a ‘fragile, tense activity, prone to breakdowns’ (Sicard 2014) might lead to more plural and sustainable experiences of cultural heritage.