Touching the City: Tactility and Affect of Public Art

Abstract

Touching objects of public art is one of the most frequently recorded and at the same time superficially described practices of interaction with the urban environment. I propose to look at this practice through the lens of the “affective atmospheres” approach, which allows us to problematize tactile contact as a means and result of affective attunement with space. Analyzing the affective-discursive canon, emerging around the interaction with a new art object (the sculpture “Big Clay No. 4” in Moscow), I demonstrate how, on the one hand, the transition from digital to visual and tactile interaction with the materiality of space creates collective affect online; on the other hand, how this affect is transmitted to social media, making the public art object the center of a phygital hybrid space.