Touch as techne: rethinking digitality

This article introduces <i>Pulse Project</i> (2011–), a doctoral performance research project that engages in critical discourse between art and science through the creation of digital soundscapes that weave together artistic, medical, technological, ancient and modern methodologies. Pulse ‘reading’, case histories, notations of pulses and programming soundscape compositions are all used together as methods for exploring the cultural encounter between artist, participants and diverse medical practices. <i>Pulse Project</i> seeks to provide an examination of the means with which the temporal materiality of touch can be used together with audio programming to form a translation and synthesis of different ecologies and disciplines, e.g. medicine and art, Eastern and Western practices, touch and digitality, etc. Drawing upon my experience as a clinical acupuncturist (with training in biomedicine), I use Chinese pulse diagnostics together with SuperCollider (an audio synthesis programming language) to inform the composition process of each soundscape. In this way, <i>Pulse Project</i> interrogates the aesthetic and philosophical axioms underpinning contemporary medicine, technology and cognitive embodiment through the exploration of their corollary ‘others’—traditional Chinese medicine and music theory—in order to generate a fresh approach to embodiment and soundscape composition.本文介绍了《脉冲项目》（Pulse Project，2011年至今）——一项博士阶段的表演研究项目，该项目通过构建融合艺术、医学、科技、古今多元方法论的数字音景，展开艺术与科学间的批判性对话。脉象诊察、病例档案、脉象记录与音景创作编程等方法被综合运用，以此探究艺术家、参与群体与多元医疗实践之间的文化互动。《脉冲项目》旨在探究如何将触感的时序物质属性与音频编程相结合，实现不同生态域与学科门类——如医学与艺术、东西方实践、触感与数字化等——的转译与融合。笔者凭借兼具生物医学培训背景的临床针灸师从业经验，将中医脉诊与SuperCollider（音频合成编程语言）结合，以此指导每一件音景作品的创作过程。通过这一方式，《脉冲项目》以当代医学、科技与认知具身所对应的"他者"——传统中医与音乐理论——为探究对象，质询支撑上述领域的美学与哲学公理，以期为具身研究与音景创作提供全新路径。