The aim with Dress is to explore the fundamental human need for touch by creating a shop which sells the possibility to touch human skin. The resulting store allows us to challenge the customers relationship to touch by having them confront their personal and cultural inhibitions to touching another person in public. Exposing naked flesh to the touch of a paying customer also brings attention to the conflation of erotic and consumerist values so prevalent in our culture.
As usual, the film is shown in the dark. But the cinema has shrunk somewhat only two hands fit inside it. To see (i.e. feel, touch) the film, the viewer (user) has to stretch his hands through the entrance to the cinema. At last, the curtain which formerly rose only for the eyes now rises for both hands.
The tactile reception is the opposite of the deceit of voyeurism. For as long as the citizen is satisfied with the reproduced copy of sexual freedom, the state is spared the sexual revolution. Tap and Touch Cinema is an example of how re-interpretation can activate the public.' Valie Export
