Abstract

This lecture will explore Blockchain’s origins and its role as an artistic medium and distribution tool. Furthermore, how has blockchain catalyzed art markets and museological practices? How has it revitalized an interest in the broader history of digital art and what are its limitations?

Bio

cactoidlabs.io, is an experimental artist-driven blockchain consultancy specializing in bridging Web3, Digital Art and Museums lead by Lady Cactoid and Crypto Cactoid. _______An artist and co-founder of Cactoid Labs, Crypto Cactoid is a Full Stack developer specializing in blockchain, Solidity, Ordinals, Machine Learning and APIs, with 15 years experience working with metadata at scale, engineering SAAS systems that operate billions of API calls per month, as well as Merkle Trees, ERC721A, ERC1155, and L2s. He has built Contracts and Full Stack Web3 for leading artists and institutions including 0xDEAFBEEF and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art._______Lady Cactoid (a.k.a. Yael Lipschutz) is a curator, art historian and co-founder of Cactoid Labs. She holds a PhD in Art History and has organized large-scale exhibitions at institutions such as the Los Angeles Museum of Art, the and The Getty. She works as an independent curator and scholar, specializing in art and technology. She is the Artistic Director of the Digital Leaders Circle at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) and the author of numerous books and articles, including Noah Purifoy: Junk Dada (LACMA, Prestel), Cameron: Songs for the Witchwoman (The Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA), Los Angeles), and World Without End: The George Washington Carver Project (Hirmer, forthcoming 2026).

For more information about the MAT Seminar Series, go to:
seminar.mat.ucsb.edu.

Abstract

With haptic technologies increasingly embedded in commercially available devices, vibrotactile feedback is now appearing in streaming music platforms, gaming environments, VR/AR systems, and assistive devices. Haptic feedback has been shown to enhance the music listening experience [1], and recent musical haptics research has pursued greater tactile specificity and multi-feature extraction [2]. Despite these developments, relatively few musical works are composed specifically for audio–haptic realization.

The research undertaken in this Master’s project is a practice-based exploration of musical composition for coupled audio–haptic media through a multimodal gallery installation, Feel4UTM. The work renders music simultaneously as acoustic sound and distributed bodily vibration through three stereo haptic stations—two wearable systems and one handheld device. Haptics and sound were developed in tandem, with each modality mutually informing the content and structure of the composition. All synthesis, sequencing, and signal processing were custom designed for the installation. Filtering and transient detection are used to derive the haptic signal directly from the audio, allowing harmonic, rhythmic, and textural decisions to shape both sound and vibration. The composition unfolds across five large-scale sections, each oriented toward a distinct affective direction. The installation was presented in an open gallery setting where visitors engaged with the work independently over extended exhibition hours, introducing practical constraints distinct from a traditional seated concert performance.

As vibration becomes an increasingly common component of mediated listening, compositional methodologies must expand to account for how musical structures translate onto the body. This project presents observations from the process of creating an audio–haptic composition and installation. Musical, technical, and interaction design considerations are discussed, and several preliminary compositional guidelines for audio–haptic media are proposed.

Wearable Technologies for Shared Haptic Experiences

Abstract

Despite rapid advances in multimedia computing, targeting audio visual channels -- such as the quick sharing of photos or videos, watching a livestream from across the world, or experiencing an immersive virtual reality video game -- a "haptic digital divide" persists. Haptic technologies cannot yet capture or reproduce the rich, whole-hand touch experiences of daily life, such as shaping a piece of clay or hugging a friend. This limitation stems from the biological complexity of the human hand, which serves as a simultaneous sensory organ and a highly-dexterous manipulator.

Our sense of touch is an inherently active and exploratory modality: we must move our hands to contact objects in order to perceive or manipulate them. Perception is therefore a product of inherently coupled sensory streams, where information is simultaneously received from receptors in the skin, joints, and muscles, elicited via deliberately-coordinated hand movements and mediated via internal predictive models of the sensorimotor consequence. Thus, it has proven difficult to record, isolate, and reproduce touch outside of the context in which it was originally experienced. This dissertation builds upon prior research on haptic perception and action to investigate the above challenges preventing the sharing of haptic experiences between people.

The dissertation presents two haptic devices for sharing touch experiences. The first device is a smart-bracelet, worn at the wrist, to address a current gap in accessibility of digital transcription methods for language that is communicated in the tactile domain. People who are Deafblind and use tactile sign languages to communicate have no methods for the digital transcription of communication in the tactile domain; this is imperative for important matters such as court proceedings or occasions where in-person translators are unavailable. Chapter Three presents a wrist-worn smart bracelet that can capture skin oscillations, extract salient spatiotemporal features, and accurately classify (>90%) the 26 letters of a tactile sign language alphabet. Here, the hand remains free and unoccluded for natural signing. The results indicate that tactile communication can be sensed and accurately classified with current technologies, moving us towards a future where real-time digital transcription of tactile sign languages is possible.

The second device is an inter-manual exoskeleton that enables one person to guide the kinematic postures of a second, compliant person. The device partitions control over movements (i.e. kinesthetic agency) from incoming cutaneous sensation across two people through a shared, guided experience. The device enables research investigation into the necessity of self-directed movement and direct cutaneous feedback on haptic perception and functional manipulation. Chapter Four presents results from grasping and manipulation of objects in such guided conditions, indicating that functional manipulation of small objects is possible even when the motor-controlling hand is deprived of direct cutaneous sensation from the object. Findings from Chapter Five show that haptic perception of three-dimensional shapes remains significantly above chance under guided movement conditions, demonstrating that internal predictive models for motor planning are not strictly required when discriminating between object shapes.

Collectively, these findings contribute to a deeper scientific understanding of the sensorimotor system and provide a technical foundation for future haptic technologies capable of sharing and reproducing complex touch experiences.