Reflections
- Looking for ideas that might be useful for my project on touch and intimacy
- In this work they talk about the term extimacy (from Lacan) about the desire to show oneself as a route to intimacy
- It is the path of showing parts of ourselves to others in order to be validated
- “While intimacy (concealing) creates the foundations of self-esteem, extimacy (exposing) enables its complete construction”
- The author proposes another definition of intimacy:
- “Extimacy is a phenomenon of public disclosure of own intimacy to achieve self-confirmation and acceptance of the inner self and to form a social bond.”
- The data that people are sharing is private and has to have some element of risk to the persons self-esteem e.g. brain cancer as private only and anal cancer as intimate both having a relationship to the emotion of shame
- In my project I will be asking people to touch something which (hopefully) will reveal something personal them, a dimension of how they are feeling as demonstrated by a change in the music that is being heard
- The potential risk here is that this could be experienced as something surprising and exposing
- Also touch is a behaviour that is part of how we are intimate with each other, and touching something unfamiliar which responds with a response that might be interpreted as intimacy might feel risky
- The experience may be heightened by the public nature of the work – people will be engaging with it with other people or works around them
- The article ends with thoughts about the potential effects of digital extimacy and how this might change with the blurring of experiences between the internet and mixed reality. It suggests further research on the theory of extimacy as a concept in digital social environments.
References
Skok, K. (2025) Intimacy in social media: A theoretical analysis of extimacy. Culture & Psychology. Vol 31. Issue 1.
