The emergence of haptic aesthetics from a resurgent engagement with touch in academe offers new tools for critical discourse in print culture. This holds specific relevance for artists who employ the autographic print within their art practices. Ruth Pelzer-Montada gives texture to this potential when drawing attention to the insoluble dialectic indexically placed within prints through touch, eg absence and presence . Framed within haptic aesthetics this primal touch, varyingly evident in all prints, resists the dismantling of its aura, and finds an ally in the “object” of Peircean semiotics. At its foundation the indexical print keeps us in touch with the real, i.e Peirce’s object, activating our haptic perception. Rather than a solely optic reception (projecting interpretations onto the print) we can sustain an investigatory movement over, across or around a print from its production to its end. Such an autographic touch provides considerable scope for artists to radically decenter us.

This paper is integral to a body of work created through studio research into print culture and the haptic. The research employed papermaking and pulp printing to critically investigate the relationship between touch and sight, the outcomes of which inform the production, reception and evaluation of prints. A folio of these outcomes is presented at an Open Portfolio session of IMAPCT 10.