Haptic Visuality and Neuroscience

In recent years several media theorists and philosophers have argued for a new understanding of visual technologies, as working critically outside European post-Enlightenment ocularcentrism with its abstract optical space. They argue that those practices are demanding to substituting the modern European understanding of vision as adapted to symbolic knowledge, with a new perspective where vision itself is addressed as embodied and material. In this paper I will further this claim by specifically addressing the issue of ‘haptic visuality’ (Riegl, Deleuze, Marks). My argument here is that new digital media and new media art’s haptic images brought to light an evidence that has always been present in our relationship to the images we see: the evidence that we relate to images firstly at a sensor-motor level. I will, then, claim that this concept of haptic visuality can be best understood in articulation to the most recent discoveries of neuroscience, primarily, those related to the mirror neurons issue which support the idea that our relationship with images is pre-cognitive and that it finds its meaning in gesture, in the sense of touch and in the physical spatial perceptions, more specifically, in the sensor-motor system.