Tapp- und Tastkino

The 1968 action »Tapp- und Tastkino« [Tap and Touch Cinema] by Peter Weibel and Valie Export is one of the early Expanded Cinema experiments that extended the perception of film and cinema, and it is also an important work of feminist activism. In the street performance, Valie Export strapped a box open at the front and back – the down-scaled movie theater – in front of her naked breasts. With a megaphone, Peter Weibel called on passers-by to visit the cinema – in other words, to put their hands through the curtain attached to the front of the box and feel her breasts. Thus, in the performance film was not perceived as an optical-visual sequence of images reproduced on celluloid, but as a tactile, direct experience. The performance undermines the distance between spectator and screen, and at the same time demonstrates the representation of women as objects in the mass medium of cinema. In an ironic and provocative way, it literally renders »touchable« what the voyeuristic gaze seeks to »feel« in the visual medium of film.