Facing Touch

Lia Cook has long been interested in how the human brain reacts to the desire for touch. In the early 2000s, she began to work with neuroscientists to compare the brain’s response to viewing a woven image of a face versus a photograph of the same face. They discovered that seeing the woven image triggered greater activity in the part of the brain most affected by touch. Facing Touch illustrates this experiment: in it, a girl wearing a cap with sensors attached reaches out to a woven portrait also by Cook, Binary Traces: Young Girl, from 2004.