Book Launch: Daria Martin, Mirror-Touch Synaesthesia

On the occasion of Frieze Art Week, Daria Martin is presenting the volume “Mirror-Touch Synaesthesia: Thresholds of Empathy with Art”.

The neurological condition synaesthesia has provoked thought about new ways of artistic seeing for over a century. In this book, the phenomenon of mirror-touch synaesthesia provides a prism through which to re-examine contemporary art experience. This book brings together newly commissioned and never-before published essays and conversations from prominent neuroscientists through to contemporary artists and mirror-touch synaesthetes.

Critically refiguring arguments about the ‘social turn’ in contemporary art that reject the traditional viewer as passive, “Mirror-Touch Synaesthesia” expands the possibilities of what art we might call ‘participatory’, and enriches debates around the social agency of perception. Edited by Daria Martin with contributors including Giuliana Bruno, Trisha Donnelly, Vittorio Gallese, Judith Hopf, Mark Leckey, Brian Massumi and Catherine Wood.