As digital culture shifts from passive viewing to interactive immersion, touch gains new significance. Artists like Sondra Perry, Melanie Bonajo, and Tabita Rezaire explore skin as an interface, challenging digital detachment and reclaiming intimacy through haptic aesthetics.
As digital culture shifts our modes of engagement with images – from passive viewing to interactive immersion – the sense of touch, even in its absence, gains new significance. Screens become proxies for skin, and gestures like swiping and tapping create a new language of intimacy. Artists working in digital media exploit this shift, crafting works that foreground tactility, embodiment, and the sensation of touch even in virtual space. In this article, I explore how female digital artists interrogate the skin as an interface, not just as a physical surface but as a site of negotiation between self and world, intimacy and mediation, presence and virtuality.
SONDRA PERRY AND THE DIGITAL FLESH
Sondra Perry’s work interrogates the instability of digital representations of the body, particularly Black bodies, within virtual environments. In her video installations and digital interventions, skin is rendered as a flickering, mutable surface—distorted by algorithmic manipulation and glitch aesthetics. Her 2016 piece Graft and Ash for a Three-Monitor Workstation presents a blue-screened avatar, its digital epidermis slipping between the artificial and the organic. The smooth, non-textured skin of the digital self is both an erasure and an excess, a site where race, identity, and technology intersect. Perry’s practice embodies haptic visuality by emphasizing the affective power of digital textures, compelling the viewer to “feel” the instability of the digital flesh rather than simply observing it.
WHEN THE BODY SAYS YES: TOUCH IN THE ERA OF DIGITAL MEDIATION
Presented at the Venice Biennale in 2022, Melanie Bonajo’s When the Body Says Yes explores the politics of touch in an era increasingly shaped by digital mediation. Through a blend of video installation and participatory performance, Bonajo investigates how communal intimacy and non-sexual touch can serve as acts of resistance against alienation and technological detachment. The work foregrounds the sensory experience of the skin, presenting touch as a means of reclaiming bodily agency in an age of virtual interactions. By documenting moments of collective care, tenderness, and embodied presence, When the Body Says Yes challenges the hyper-individualized nature of contemporary digital culture. Bonajo’s practice suggests that even in a world dominated by screens and virtuality, the human longing for tactile connection persists—revealing the skin not just as a physical boundary, but as a site of radical intimacy and social transformation.
TABITA REZAIRE AND THE SKIN AS A SPIRITUAL INTERFACE
Last but not least, Tabita Rezaire merges digital aesthetics with decolonial and spiritual practices, treating the skin as both a historical archive and an interface of healing. Her video installations, such as Sorry for Real (2015), engage with digital textures that resemble wounds, scars, and membranes, evoking both trauma and repair in a post-colonial frame. By layering glitch aesthetics with organic forms, Rezaire suggests that digital skin can act as a conduit for ancestral knowledge, techno-spirituality, and embodied memory. Her practice challenges the notion of technology as disembodied, asserting instead that digital interfaces are always deeply entangled with the textures of flesh, history, and sensation.
TOWARD A HAPTIC AESTHETIC OF DIGITAL SKIN
These works reveal that the skin, both digital and organic, is not a passive surface but an active interface – a site of inscription, transformation, and sensory exchange. In embracing haptic visuality, these artists move beyond the optical paradigm of detached spectatorship, instead creating an aesthetic that is felt as much as it is seen. Through digital distortions, sensory overloads, and textural disruptions, they remind us that in the virtual realm, touch is never truly absent – it is merely reconfigured, dispersed, and reimagined.
LINK
- Between dust and algorithms. A day with Damiano Tata in his studio - October 24, 2025
- Giuliana Cunéaz: art as an exploration between science and wonder - September 12, 2025
- Beyond the screen: immersion, embodiment, and empathy at Venice Immersive - August 29, 2025
