Touch is both subject and method. Pain becomes text in real time.
If my PhD could be condensed into one word, it would be touch. This work operationalises that claim: two BioSignalsPlux EMG sensors are placed on the forearm flexor muscles to measure the electrical activity generated by muscle contractions during repetitive, endurance-based actions such as polishing barbed wire or sustained gripping. The electrical signal produced by the body under sustained effort is routed through an Arduino microcontroller, processed by a Python bridge script, and transmitted via OSC into TouchDesigner, where it is converted into real-time textual output.
The performance involves sustained physical contact with barbed wire — polishing, gripping, holding — until the material yields and the body records the duration in its own grammar of fatigue and tremor. The EMG signal does not simply measure this; it participates in it. Threshold levels in the signal determine which words and phrases from a poetic corpus are triggered. Low pressure produces sparse, tentative language; high intensity produces dense, urgent text. The body writes through its own endurance.
The poetic corpus itself is drawn from the 0wl dataset — grandmother's letters, RNN-generated fragments, the accumulated residues of practice. The language that the muscle activity triggers is not arbitrary: it is already saturated with grief, memory, and displacement. The body's pain enters an archive of inherited pain and together they produce something neither could generate alone.
This work is the technical and philosophical centre of the PhD. It enacts Karen Barad's concept of intra-action: the EMG sensor does not simply record what the body does but participates in producing what the performance is. Touch is never unidirectional — the barbed wire, the sensor, the corpus, and the body are mutually constituted through the encounter. The work demonstrates that sensation is not private data but a relational, processual, and poetic event.