Touch

What is touch?

"Many suffers of MS can feel an object in their pocket (a set off keys), but they can't identify by touch. The brain won't decode the shape correctly" Diane Ackerman

I have seen first-hand the struggles that MS can cause in a person’s life. The feeling of touch plays a large role in the life of someone with MS. My goal in making this piece was to show an effect of MS in a subtle way. I want to focus on the identity touch brings to an object. I took two pictures of the same hand in the same position but holding different objects that someone with MS could misidentify. The hands look like they are a proper set of hands holding objects, but really it is the same hand. This is done to show how easy it is to mistake objects when the sensation of touch is lost.  The hands where cut out from the body and replaced with no background to show the feeling of detachment of touch from the whole body. 

Pain

"Pain has played us through out the history of species we spend out lives trying to avoid it, and, from one point of view, what we call "happiness" may be just the absense of pain. Yet it is difficult to define pain, which may be sharp, dull, shooting, throbbing, imaginary or referred." Diane Ackerman

Diane Ackerman, in her book A Natural History of the senses, discusses the difficulty of defining physical pain. This made me want to explore personal definitions of pain. I chose to put the Webster definition first to show the difference between a vague definition and the personal definitions. I invite four people to define what pain was to them. Each recording was done in private to help each person to feel comfortable and speak freely without judgement from peers. The visual for the audio is a gray background that says, "close your eyes.". My intention is for the viewer to listen to each definition and realize the variety voices and inflictions used by each person.  

A transcription of the audio recordings appears below. 

“My definition of pain is something that can distress someone whether it be physical or emotional. People are willing to go so in depth about their physical pain but never their emotional pain. As a society we have grown so accustom to not disclosing that information because of what people might think of us. Physical pain is something that will most likely lesson over time, but emotional pain can linger longer than we like. So, we just think its simpler to not acknowledge the emotional pain. But as I know from experience that if you are able to talk about your experience with emotional pain in a real honest way, instead of resorting to joke format like we do now then the pain will lesson.”

“Pain is more than the physical, mental or emotional discomfort that is caused to a person. Pain is always there, and it lies dormant. Pain is something that is inevitable, you can’t escape it.”

“Pain is discomfort that can vary from person to person and situation to situation. There are different levels to pain but no matter what to some degree you feel this feeling of misplacement and isolation.” 

“Pain is suffering caused by some external event that is usually outside of your control whether that’s emotional or physical.”