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Photo by Hayley Pfitzer (2025).

Vibrating Waiting For You To Touch

How do we touch a digital body?
Julianna Johnston
November 1, 2025
MITU580
580 Sackett Street #Unit A – Ground Fl Brooklyn, NY 11217
MAXlive and the MAXmachina laboratory program are supported in part by the Simons Foundation, the Ettinger foundation, public funds from the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature, with additional support from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation/EST, and the generous support of our individual donors.

A mixed-reality performance that explores the sensorial and emotional experience of scrolling. It is a dance of scrolling thumbs—thumbs attached to hands performed by whole people. Through movement, sound, and absurdist costuming, props, and embodied exploration, the piece investigates how our bodies are disciplined by digital systems and how the intimate act of touch becomes flattened into functionality. This work asks: how do we touch a digital body? And can touch rehumanize the dehumanized scroll?

Featured Collaborators

"It challenges the question of how we are able to lose ourselves in mindless scrolling on our phones and the emotional and physical process of losing connection with our sense of touch for ourselves and towards others"

Mariah Davis of Digital Arts Blog

Production Photos by Hayley Pfitzer (2025).
Behind the Scene Photos by Jerome Allen-Smith (2025).