Shapereader and the Limits of Touch

Ilan Manouach’s Shapereader works from the premise of a tactile language: a series of plates forming an index is encountered through the fingertips and used to learn and understand the deployment of the symbols on those plates in larger sequences that comprise narratives such as Arctic Circle. The project is driven by a notion of community: ‘Shapereader is a community-specific tactile conlang (constructed language),’ writes Manouach, and it has been developed through a variety of workshops and community events in museum and educational settings. Yet while Shapereader presents compelling ideas around the ways in which touch can be used to communicate, it also serves to flag up several complex challenges that touch presents to the notion of communication. Touch is spatially situated within a physical context, and a physical body, and cannot easily be transmitted or shared. The tactile experience’s (non)-directionality is quite different to those produced by the distance senses that have tended to dominate communication technologies and cultures. And communities that develop through tactile means are uniquely fragile when touch becomes dangerous or taboo as has happened in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. This chapter takes Manouach’s Shapereader as a focal point to examine some of these challenges and difficulties. It does not seek to critique Shapereader, at least not on its own terms, but rather to employ it as a means of bringing into focus questions about the limits of touch and the boundaries of its possibilities.