At last night's sculpture conversation, the question of touch came up frequently. Sculptures don't occupy illusionistic spaces separate from the world, they sit in the same three-dimensional world as the rest of us, and because of that, they tempt us to relate to them physically: to touch them.

But increasingly, touch has become the province of another realm—the two-dimensional screen. You delve into the marvels of the iPhone—really, out into the marvels of the virtual world—by moving your fingertips across its screen. The rapid circling roll of the iPod has become the embodiment of infinite musical choice: when I think about a song I want to hear, my finger starts circling. Touchable screens promise a more direct connection between your body and what it wants. Super-limbs. All you have to do is learn the new choreography.

Not all screens are equally amenable, of course. My laptop screen makes threatening, displeased little waves when I touch it. My TV still radiates a charged sort of weird fuzz. Movie screens are—well, are they even there? Are movies even still shown on screens? Then there are those friendly fingertip-beckoners that grab you right when you get to the airport: the instant check-in machines, little fast friends.

The reason I bring all this up is because of Tivon Rice's installation at 911 Media Arts Center, Between Here and a Kind of Fleshlessness. Rice is a young Seattle artist who is working on his PhD in the DXArts program at UW; he shows at Lawrimore Project. There are three works of art in this show, all new. Two have LCD monitors, each one displaying an image of a finger or a palm. Mounted on the wall under each monitor is a rubber pad shaped more or less like the finger (long and narrow, pointed horizontally, see above) or the palm (made rectangular by the closeup view on the rectangular screen).

The pinkish rubber pad is a finger magnet. You know instinctively, because of its texture and echoing shape, to run your finger along it. When you do, a(nother) finger appears onscreen, running over the original finger or palm. This, at first, is reassuring—a recognition. It quickly turns frustrating, though. The projected finger you trigger with your own real finger has its own pre-set patterns. By touching the pad in a certain area, you make the projected finger appear on a certain area of the original finger or palm. But once it's on there it traces a little arc and then stops. This projected finger is not a good representative for your finger. It seems to stand in for your finger, but then it doesn't do what your finger wants to do. This is irritating.

Is this a function of the technology? If technology were more advanced, would the virtual finger make a genuine connection with the real one? Or is the artist making the point that even tarted-up technology—sexy, opaque-white bubbly pillows lit pink from within like design bits from a Mac store surround the pads and screens—is inadequate in imitating the human body? Okay, but that isn't something we need an elaborately engineered touch-screen experience to be reminded of: Yet another rule-following German will follow his touch-screen GPS right off another cliff any day now, killing his body because he trusted a screen more. The two, clearly, are not in sync.

The work that affected me more intimately, even insidiously, was the three-channel video installation Between Here and a Kind of Fleshlessness (2009). Words taken from T.S. Eliot mix and remix on the three screens. The words appear with two sets of images, one brightly colored and the other more or less black and white: first, footage of a sleeping dog's fanged, pink-gummy mouth, and second, a patch of water under a pier in the dark of night.

The dog makes sudden, loud snoring noises—it is a sleeping monster, a sleeping god—and the water laps. There is a pattern to these sounds, images, and words. You begin to recognize the rhythm, and then to long for it, just the way you would a great pop song. This composition has that same crowd-shaping power. It seems addressed not to a single person but to an entire congregation of seekers: "But the faith, and the love, and the hope, are all in the waiting" is repeated, and the dog exhales and the teeth come slowly back together on "waiting." I can still feel and see it all now.

This work may be more conventional than the rubber-screen sculptures, but it's also more effective.