Haptic media

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This article is orphaned as few or no other articles link to it. Please help introduce links in articles on related topics. (June 2008)

This article does not cite any references or sources. (June 2008) Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unverifiable material may be challenged and removed.

This article or section needs to be wikified to meet Wikipedia's quality standards. Please help improve this article with relevant internal links. (June 2008)

Haptic Media include any form of medium that communicates with the senses before the intellect. It is non-verbal communication. The human brain processes many types of information that are not translated into thoughts before experienced and embodied. Haptic information is something sensed and felt. The cinematic arts are haptic in form because moving pictures accompanied with sound communicates with our memories of feelings that we have once embodied. The cinema can bring us back to such memories through haptic signals in image and sound. Haptic media communicates in ways that written text cannot.

Haptic media is closely related to kinesthesis and the fact that the human body processes haptic information as it moves through space. Some of the information becomes cemented as conscious memory that can be constructed in language and some of it is stored in the senses.

Another example of a haptic medium is architecture, which among other things is the art of creating inhabitable places for the activities of every day life. Architectural spaces are experienced and embodied through a sense of place. Such a sense of place is comprised of haptic signals that might include light, smells, sounds, temperature. Architecture may also have a haptic impact on the senses when a given space is symbolic, such as a religious temple or a prison. The sense of place comes down on the body in haptic ways.