A pair of forms generated from the accumulated afterimages of a constrained body. In the former officers' quarters of the former Air Force Command Headquarters, one hand is handcuffed to the wall while the other reaches as far as possible into the surrounding space. The work records reach as a measure of captivity: a spatial inscription of distance, force, and denied movement.

Media: Motion capture, custom software, 3D-printed nylon
Award: Prix Ars Electronica 2026, Digital Humanity — Honorary Mention

Initiated in 2015, The Sculptures of Touch is an ongoing research-based practice that repositions the human body not as an image to be captured, but as a medium through which historical pressure is sensed, translated, and given form. Its central proposition is that when the body becomes the recording instrument, the archive itself changes: it ceases to be merely a repository of objects and becomes a field of embodied decisions.

The work proposes somatic archiving as a post-visual heritage practice: an archive in which the body does not merely document historical sites, but is acted upon by them. Touch becomes a way of receiving pressure, hesitation, refusal, and care. Digital tools are reoriented away from extraction and toward contact, translation, and return.

In an era when cultural heritage is often measured by resolution, fidelity, and forensic completeness, the project follows another path. Rather than reconstructing contested political sites as stable objects of knowledge, it asks how historical spaces might be remembered through embodied encounter: through touch, pressure, hesitation, reach, and restraint.

The body is never neutral. It selects. It pauses. It withdraws. The direction, duration, and intensity of each contact become affective inscriptions—marks of what the body is willing, or unable, to approach.

Here, motion capture does not function as a tool for reproducing architecture. It records a body's negotiation with architecture. Data is not treated as objective evidence, but as the residue of bodily decisions. The resulting 3D-printed forms are not replicas of monuments, walls, bunkers, or rooms. They are condensed volumes of contact: spatial records of fear, curiosity, confinement, desire, and memory.

• The human becomes the medium.
• Touch becomes the archive.
• Movement becomes testimony.

The project therefore does not preserve ruins as objects. It preserves the choices a body makes in the presence of history.

Across successive exhibitions and research phases, each iteration extends the question of how technological recording can move beyond representation and become an embodied practice of remembrance.

Future phases may extend this method to contested political sites across different geographies, forming a transnational tactile archive composed not of measurements, but of encounters.

In a data-driven era, The Sculptures of Touch proposes a different model of memory: history need not be reproduced in perfect detail in order to endure. It can be carried through the body, translated through touch, and returned as sculpture.