Measures of Closeness: The Contactless Condition

The intangible power of algorithmic capitalism vibrates in our bodies. How can we get in touch with the shifting conditions created by large-scale computation through what our bodies know, and can we situate new modes of digital and data governance as a problem of and in the body? The increasing complexity of the body as a data-subject, as shaped by the capitalist sensorium and as defined by the power to scale space, constantly asks for reconsideration of the critical terminologies of somatic knowledge that pay attention to the impulse of capital as it intimately circulates the body.

In a collaborative work on the notion of Contactless, researcher Sarah Vowden[1] and I sought the term's affordances beyond its technological applications, as the terminology of contactless lent itself to magnify some of the relations between skin and surface, between touch, exchange, and technological mediation, as well as between bodies navigating urban terrains. We looked at the condition of partial touch of contactless technologies as a new site of choreo-spatial epistemology. We read this through the micro distances we calculate with our bodies, a set of sensorial attunements of the almost-touches in everyday life. Thinking through the partiality of the almost-touch, we thought contactless as a condition proposes a thread that navigates along with the somatic and spatial knowledges, toward a conceptual model of knowledge production that operates from a state of theoretical partiality.

The following passages are taken from a text we created collaboratively. The language traced our research work that included bodily exploration, scoring, mapping, and strolling. It is a language used while being locked in our rooms and creating together while never physically meeting. The text offers some hybrid writing forms that always come close but never really become one.

The distance between my eyes is four fingers.

The distance between my shoulders to my screen is two straight arms.

The distance between my lips and the camera is a tongue, three fists, and a middle finger.

The distance between my chair and the wall is one arm length and two dancer-poses.

The distance between my keyboard and Sarah's chin is 9,855,000 handshakes but only

6,570,000 air hugs.

Contactless Technologies have increasingly entered the financial terrain of small payments, reducing the transaction to the waving of a card over the payment terminal, or at the touch of a thumb with biometrics integrated into mobile phones, forming a new material encounter of the everyday transaction. The use of contactless finds ease at the end of our fingertips and on our tongue as we perform the practice daily through monetary transactions.

Using Near-field-Communication technology, contactless cards produce an electromagnetic induction via its internal antenna and data is transmitted via radio waves between the card and the payment terminal at a maximum distance of 4 cm.

It is this critical space in which multiple scales of contact take place; the prosthetic tendency of contactless as an extension of the body, the reduced social encounter and a lexicon of gestures determined by its different technological mutations (the card, the watch, the mobile phone…).

The 4 cm is the distance at which our two research practices converge. Our interest in the 4 cm concerns how in a contactless transaction touch is not wholly removed. A non-touch, the almost touch, the tap, these produce an ambivalent physical encounter that destabilises classical notions of touch and the sensory engagement of monetary exchange.

Yet Contactless is not merely defined by the transaction. It is a condition, an embodied disciplining of the body and an indication of the wider applications of contactless as a technological mediation into the absence of touch and the logics of frictionless movement through the cityscape. Its technological application has now proliferated beyond the monetary exchange, but we must not forget its ideological roots in the centres of banking and commerce.

We read this through the micro distances we calculate with our bodies, the almost touches in everyday life

The distance between you and me when we walk to the shop is your left arm and my right arm if we didn't trim our fingernails.

The distance between my shopping bag to your back when we stand in the queue is four sets of elbow bumps and a ring finger.

The distance between my mouth's breath and your lips is two masks thin. I can smell you.

The distance between my next word and your ear is 17 air kisses.

The distance between my blanket and your basket is a full body stretched and a bunny hop.

Contactless grapples with the absent language of the non-touch. Michel Serres repositions touch as a sense that extends beyond the epidermal limits of the skin; there is always an excess in touch, yet 'there is no word corresponding to touch to designate the untouchable or intangible, as there is for the invisible which is present in, or absent from what is seen, complementary to it, although abstracted from it, and incarnated in its flesh.'[2] For Serres, there is an absent language of untouchability, and in this sense, we may think of Contact/less as a temporary placeholder for such a term.

This space of untouchability is reframed by Karen Barad through the fundamentals of quantum physics, questioning what it means to touch beyond close proximity. Barad proposes that no material can ever really be 'touched'.[3] Touch is the electromagnetic interaction of particles devoid of physical contact, and thus the sensation felt of the surface of any material can be read as the electron repulsion between the atoms of your fingers and the object. Touch, for Barad, therefore relies on the calculation of this space of an almost-touch, whether that is at the quantum or the social scale. Barad's radical reading of the measure of closeness invites us to look at new conditions of intimacy and proximity as they are being shaped by technologies of the 'near field.' The space of Barad's 'almost-touch' is a political space; we can observe how embodied knowledge is constantly being produced by shifting spatial, social, and political conditions. In a recent article written during the Covid-19 pandemic, Paul B. Preciado, adopting the Foucauldian notion of the body fabricated as a political project, discusses how recent technological and spatial models of sovereignty are now manifested much closer to the skin. The narrow space between the skin and the apparatus becomes a new political territory by transmitting xenophobic policy managed by technology: a 'new territory where the violent border politics that we have been designing and testing for years on "others" are now expressed taking the form of containment measures and of a war against the virus.'[4] Preciado inspires a notion of sovereignty modelled after big data which mobilises the physical, social, and political qualities of the almost-touch space as a management tool. With Preciado's framing, we can see how the borders of touch for the citizen-user are always troublesome and negotiable. When the state of contactless is framed not only as a technological development but as a condition that fabricates the body as a political project, we begin to notice how contactless a techno-political extension of the skin is. As Benjamin Bratton proclaims, 'the city also wears us'[5] as new skins emerge through the weaving of technological infrastructures in the urban milieu, and contactless is an extension of this socio-sensorial management of bodies.

The distance between my dog and my hand is as far as I can see, and a chip.

The distance between my key and the lock is the length of my big toe.

The distance between my belly and the seatbelt goes through my digital credentials. The distance might change by the colour of your skin.

The distance between my forehead and the duty-free goes through heat measures.

The distance between my credit card and your coffee is 4 centimetres wide, which is exactly two thumbs touching.

Dismantling the classical hierarchy of the senses, Tavi Meraud's consideration of intimacy and touch is viewed through the optical phenomenon of iridescence, where surface isn't a concretion, but an accretion. Such an approach to the surface suggests a collapse between appearance and reality and defines contact as 'really apparent, or apparently real'.[6] Meraud reframes intimacy as a form of spatiality that 'organises our experience of space and of surface' by the logic of proximity and questions the instinctive association of intimacy through proximity, adding that the 'metrics of how much of my private sphere comes into contact with that of another, is rather a foil for an even deeper sense of spatiality, that of interiority.' Instead, they propose a transformation toward accentuating the inner aspects of intimacy, focusing on the drive toward locating the real implied by this interiority. In contactless, intimacy collapses into the micro-space of the 4 centimetres. Like iridescence, contactless is touch beyond the real and of the flesh, a newly defined space of interaction that moulds our bodies into new spatial configurations.

At a time of social distancing, the world obsesses over a new politics of touch as we move through the city with recalibrated choreographies of distance. The 4 centimetres swell to the 2 meters – the distance between bodies suggested to suppress transmission as articulated by the UK government and demarcated on signs erected all over the city. In the supermarket, we oscillate between these scales of acceptable touch as we move with avoidance down aisles, and at the till wave our contactless cards or devices at the safe distance of 4 centimetres.

Even before the 4-centimetre or 2-metre contactless spaces, the body was always used for measuring distances, like the ancient common cubit measurement from the bottom of the elbow to the tip of the middle finger. During the pandemic, borders become much closer to our bodies: they land on our doorway, divide our beds, go through our screen. These new borders also extend beyond the limits of the skin. In a contactless urbanism, the space between skin and screen becomes thicker, a hybrid space, a patchwork of technologies from optical scanning to temperature sensing and barcodes that blur the phenomenological, cultural, emotional, and financial realms of contactless technologies.

As a new lexicon of closeness emerges in the era of social distancing and isolation, our bodies have recalibrated to confine ourselves to the home and make measured calculations of distance to other bodies in the street. A new contactless futurity will inevitably emerge as the markings of feared contact during lockdown remain etched in our movements. The desire to touch without touching will see contactless technologies mediate these new urban choreographies, reflected in the infrastructures of the smart city, which will become ever more synonymous with the accumulation of big data. As researchers in the fields of spatial and performance studies, our interests in contactless converge at the intersection of the body in a contactless urbanism; how the 2-metre distancing strategy that we perform in our neighbourhoods is also the precondition for an increasingly embedded and panoptic strategy of contactless in our cities. The smart city also produces a new data-subject, and it is this entanglement of the embodied disciplines of social distancing and the technological mediation of contactless that promotes new ways of thinking of the urban during the pandemic.

The distance between my yawn and your clapping goes through Zoom's voice recognition.

The distance between your touchscreen and my fingers is 30 megabits per second if I sit in this room.

The distance between Evann's words in Vancouver extends along the submarine cable, from English Bay to the Panama Canal, the Gulf of Mexico, before it crosses the Atlantic Ocean.

The distance between my typing fingers and the Vodafone servers is 5,689 tears and two swallows.

The distance between sleep pattern and your watch goes through your Amazon shopping cart.

The distance between my lips and my next text message goes through Apple face recognition algorithm and a smile.

As we are told that we must avoid any unnecessary contact with other bodies, objects, and surfaces, contactless provides us with a technological mediation to control and manage touch. Embedded infrastructures of contactless technologies are also increasingly compatible with enhanced surveillance measures, from the mobilisation of biometric methods of identification in financial-payment systems to government-tracked identification cards. Contactless infrastructures have been mobilised during the pandemic both as a management system of contact and movement and as a platform to extend surveillance strategies of the state. The pandemic thus reveals the collaborative potential of contactless devices and apps with state intervention and mass tracking. These infrastructures are unlikely to be backtracked after the pandemic; they will imprint themselves in the digital makeup of the city and take new forms as our bodies and our movements grow accustomed to new measured forms of contact. This is not merely the replacement of languages of touch, but a calculation of what and which kind of touch is necessary and desired in urban environments. Do we need keys to enter homes or is the wave of a hand preferable? Should high-value payments be made contactless? Should our smartphones become an extension of the surveillance state? Should my health data be used by a payment system app?

Through our framework of embodied partialities, we explore this hybrid space of the non-touch that is now at the tip of our every movement as we calculate our bodies' proximity to other bodies and objects in the urban milieu. We ponder how we will differentiate contact from technologically mediated forms of touch. What is an act that involves touch and what is a touchless act? Which gestures will never involve touch again? What are the future implications of a new contactless urbanism and opportunities for surveillance capitalism? And will the technological apparatus that substitutes fleshy notions of touch still be considered contact?