"Touch Me" at the Victoria and Albert Museum

"Don't touch the art" is what one is usually told at museums. Not so at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London this summer. Opening on June 16 is the exhibition, "Touch Me: Design and Sensation." The show, which runs until August 29, encourages audiences to touch and interact with a wide range of objects made by contemporary designers, including Karim Rachid, Marcel Wanders, Matali Crasset and Gitta Gschwendtner.

An unusual show for any institution, it seems especially unique at the Victoria and Albert which, though it has a very active contemporary program, is known for its venerable selection of objects throughout the centuries. It is curated by Luren Parker, Curator of Contemproary Programs at the V&A, and Hugh Aldersey-Williams, a freelance writer and curator, and includes a special commission called "Their Lips Met," created by British conceptual artist Richard Wentworth, that puts special emphasis on the mouth. Wentworth will gather drinking vessels and cups borrowed from museums and combine them with more peculiar and quotidian objects. It will be, in Aldersey-Williams's words, "a parade of objects people are encouraged to bring to their lips."

Nowadays, when the sense of touch is brought up, it is usually in the context of how disembodied our experiences of the world are becoming, thanks to technology. Aldersey-Williams stresses that the museum's show is not an openly critical one, but says that if a critique is present it takes on the presumption that as technology increases, the sense of touch is left behind. "Our gripe is that the quality of interaction with electronic products has been brutalized. Quality of touch is missing," he says.

The show counters that notion with technological objects that promote touch. For instance, there is Noriyuki Fukimura's "remote furniture," two rocking chairs that are wired together, such that when one person sits in the first chair, it transmits a pressure pattern to the other, creating, in Aldersey-Williams's words, "a dialogue of physical movement."

For anyone who would cite cellular telephones as one of the primary ways in which we distance ourselves from the sense of touch, there are the Somos, or "Social Mobiles" by the US and UK-based design firm Ideo. The phone has a spring knob that allows its users to "ping" an electronic signal at another cell phone user, interfering with that user's signal and interrupting their call. "It's as if you have fired something at them," Aldersey-Williams says, "a kind of imaginary missile. It implies a sensation of physical contact."

And then there is the warm and fuzzy television set developed as a student project by Peter Strathis, who is based in the US. It is a little portable TV that sits comfortably on a tabletop. Its design is sleek, resembling a Modernist sculpture, but it is coated with fabric and, to turn it on, the user must stroke it like a cat. It is only then that its monitor becomes visible.

There is even one of the now ubiquitous Ipods in the show, though the curators included it for the rather quirky reason that it produces a clicking sound when one dials through its options. The machine doesn't have to make the sound, of course, but it affects underlying perceptions about the sense of touch.

The show promises to be great fun for visitors, but it also has a serious side. Supported by the Wellcome Trust, a medical foundation, its underlying concerns are scientific, an investigation into how touch works, and the ways in which it may be more complex than other senses. It addresses the connections between art and science in a way that arises organically from the material on view, and how the audience interacts with it.

"Many things can be inferred from touch," says Aldersey-Williams. "When you stroke a piece of paper on a table top, you also sense things like how firm that tabletop is. There is a complex series of reactions that take place in your muscles and joints." In assembling the show, the curators consulted with psychologists, neurologists, computer scientists, as well as with professionals in the humanities. And in terms of its contents, the show runs across design genres, including product design, fashion and jewelry.