Bodymoving 2021/09/25, 17*36

At the Time of Writing: Digital

Media, Gesture and Handwriting
October 10, 2013

From Dreamaphage, Jason Nelson, 2004

by Maria Angel and Anna Gibbs

[W]riting is indeed an act in league with the past and the future, but it
also requires that a body move through the space of the now. The
gestures of writing can make the body present as well as absent; they
do more than “commit” the word to space; they actually submit space
to […] the caress (Carrie Noland 209).

In this paper we explore textual forms that are emerging through a

reanimated interactivity with technology and environment. We draw on a
set of texts that conceptualize and enact an ethos of corporeal
performance that is increasingly coming to characterize acts of reading
and writing in digital contexts. What we do with our bodies when we read
and write with new media and new media interfaces is becoming
qualitatively different to our quiet and relatively still engagement in the
scenes and scenarios of bookish writing and reading. Gesture is elicited
from us when we play with or operate technologies and read texts, and

https://www.berfrois.com/2013/10/bodymoving/ Page 1 of 26
Bodymoving 2021/09/25, 17*36

writers seem to be actively programming texts that express behaviors

such as movement and sound, and we contend that these changes,
apparently minor in their everydayness, are more significant than might
first appear.

Historically, for Walter Ong, the animism in oral forms of storytelling, and
the reliance of such storytelling on context and the dynamic strategies of
performance, was ultimately replaced by a culture of silent reflective
reading engendered by the technology of the typographic book. Silent
reading as a model for the transmission of knowledge is still a dominant
one – the very idea of study is captured in the image of the (reading)
thinker in repose immersed in a book, or at the very least, in text. This
literate performance of the reproduction of cultural memory and
knowledge has become so naturalized (internalized in Ongʼs sense) that it
has suppressed what the body – the eyes, the restless changes of
position, the incline of the head – does in the performance of reading and
writing text: that is, its active, affective, and gestural engagement with its
environment and its artifacts. We argue that new media technologies
reintroduce an animism and dynamism that re-engage the movement and
gestures of the body in the scenes of writing and reading, rendering these
processes explicitly performative in a way that is intimately involved in the
generation of meaning.

For Carrie Noland, the movement and vitality of digital works “recall the
corporeal energies that drive inscription” so that “[w]hen letters move,
morph, or pulse, they expose digital writingʼs nostalgia for the hand, the
producerʼs creative will to reengage with and express the kinetic impulses
of the body” (“Digital Gestures” 218). Digital writing can then be
understood to call forth particular kinds of body memories associated
with behaviors suppressed or sublimated by typographic cultures of text.
First among these is movement (reading and writing require a certain
stillness), but strongly associated with it is touch, which may be linked to
the capacity to reach and grasp.

https://www.berfrois.com/2013/10/bodymoving/ Page 2 of 26
Bodymoving 2021/09/25, 17*36

What we would call an ethos of touch is evoked either through the

representational aspects of the user interface or else through the
movement of letters themselves. Camille Utterbackʼs Text Rain is
paradigmatic here of a whole series of more recent texts in its evocation
of words becoming sensory objects that can be played with – in the
original installation a reader-participant, standing and moving in front of a
video projector, could use her/his body to play with falling letters drawn
from a poem about bodies and language. Belén Gacheʼs Word Toys, on
the other hand, works with the representational design of the typographic
book which demands to be held and touched in order to be read. Here the
reader is able to turn the pages by clicking and dragging the mouse,
entering the book either through a portal or through an index, the pages
responding visually as well as audibly as they flip or flick over. Similarly,
Jason Nelsonʼs Dreamaphage (Version 2, 2004) uses the representational
qualities of the page (more specifically, the medical report), but in an
interactive context where the reader must discover, locate and read these
in mobile environments which move text and page in and out of focus
(and grasp), so that the textual environment is suggestive of dreamwork,
or the feverish, hallucinatory experience brought about by infection. Other
works invoke a more generalized vitalism. For example, Dan Waberʼs
Strings comprises little visual poems about a relationship between two
poles of attraction. The “text” is composed of a piece of animate string (a
live wire, if you like) which morphs and dances to produce the textual
elements of meaning, but in a way that address meaning in its affective
and gestural as well as its linguistic or typographic context. In the little
poem “argument,” the characters yes and no are written through the
movement which composes them (recalling the hand in handwriting
although you donʼt see it). In it, yes and no move and stretch between two
poles of attachment simulating the movement of a tug of war, but also
the movement of affect and force in an argument which shifts from
antagonist to antagonist engaged in “hot” exchange. In “argument 2”, the
narrative movement of yes and no is transformed through the introduction

https://www.berfrois.com/2013/10/bodymoving/ Page 3 of 26
Bodymoving 2021/09/25, 17*36

of the word or character maybe which hovers over the scene, fading in
and out of sight, but is nonetheless there as a potential resolution of the
conflict. “flirt” sees the disappearance of yes from the string of language
and the deformation of no. In “flirt (cntd)” yes remerges in a teasing
dance where the string visually flirts with the reader, showing itself off bit
by bit, revealing itself flirtatiously and then rather brazenly seeking
attention, before making offstage trailing its feather boa behind it. In this
way, Strings uses dynamic form to represent patterns of behaviour that
exceed the affordances of typographic writing – typography does its work
through the activity of silent reading calling forth incipient gesture and
sensory modalities through the internalisation or else abstraction of
writing as voice and speech.

Because of their appeal to the senses and sensory novelty, we propose

that digital environments have a strong relationship to gestural, sensory
and affective modes of communication. New media platforms proliferate
the potentials for combining writing with visible, aural, mobile, and tactile
modes. As we will argue below with reference to locative writing projects
and texts involving gestural “grasp,” this affectivity signals an implicit
understanding of cognitive process as integrally involving both affective
and sensory modalities strongly related to movement.

We would argue that fundamental to these changes is the manner in

which media mediate and alter physical activity, what we do with our
bodies in acts of mediation. If “reflective” and “silent” reading and writing
is characterized by incipient gesture then with new media we find a
different ecology of the body. New media technologies entail and promote
movement, action, and gesture: we push buttons, drag and click mice,
stroke track pads, tap screens, insert and detach USBs, external drives,
monitors, and so on, to say nothing of the manner in which wii consoles
and Xboxs are using whole body movement in their gaming interfaces.

We want to turn now to the way that new media produce and elicit forms

https://www.berfrois.com/2013/10/bodymoving/ Page 4 of 26
Bodymoving 2021/09/25, 17*36

of what we call “gestural mimicry.” As we have proposed, reciprocal

mimicry involves the interrelation and assemblage between the readerʼs
or userʼs body, technology and/or environment as the body moves
through space. On the other hand, we argue that gestural mimicry
involves a different form of relationship. Rather than the transformational
movement of the body through environmental space, it involves the
intensive gestural movements of the body as it interacts with a
technology. In gestural mimicry, it is the smaller, intensive movements
between body and technology which characterize its distinctiveness. We
would want to insist, for example, on the way that digital texts and
projects induce repetitive behaviors such as the hand or finger
movements associated with typing or mouse movements and track pads,
and on the intensive movement of handwriting. At first glance, these small
repetitive gestures may seem fairly innocuous, but we argue that with
gestural mimicry it is precisely exhaustive repetition and the attenuation of
expansive gesture, the smallness or intensiveness that escapes overt
attention, that gives it a certain power. Using the everyday example of the
pop-up toaster, Brian Rotman draws attention to the non-explicit and non-
intentional effects of technologies, to “their implicit restructuring of time
and space, their facilitations of new modalities of self, the work they do
behind or beneath or despite the explicitly instrumental or signifying
functions they are known by and are introduced to discharge” (437). Just
as for Rotman the pop-up toaster “prosthetically extends” the human
body and contributes to the formation of new temporal economies
associated with capitalism (438), we would add an increasing array of
technologies and techniques which reshape habits and restructure modes
of awareness. These would include, the “pings” associated with the arrival
of email and text messages or missed calls on computers and mobile
phones which instill behaviors and modes of attention in the user; the
resizing of laptop computers so that they resemble the shape and weight
of the paperback book or magazine (the workstation or desk becoming
yet another mobile prosthetic attachment, hence the importance of the

https://www.berfrois.com/2013/10/bodymoving/ Page 5 of 26
Bodymoving 2021/09/25, 17*36

“fashion accessory” to designers of digital hardware); and, significantly,

the varieties of button pushing and device manipulation associated with
the use of the control pad in digital gaming (the affects of this
conditioning of the human body are yet to be fully realized).

In thinking about new textual behaviors emerging in digital contexts and

what their relevance might be, we draw on the work of French twentieth
century anthropologist Marcel Jousse, in whose unacknowledged wake
Ong, Abram, Donald and others, all theorize orality and its relationship
with writing. Jousse understands writing as one of the technologies of an
algebraic form of abstraction that occludes more direct “concrete” or
mimetic form he terms “mimage” – that is, the corporeal or gestural re-
enactment and transmission of the worldʼs energies. Marcel Jousse
theorizes gesture or “geste”, as the bodyʼs “direct resonance” with the
energies of the world, or its “objective registration” of them through
engagement with it (15). Jousse calls this process “intussuception.” For
him, gesture comprehends all corporeal activity, including that associated
with affect (laughter, tears), and even states of mind, while what we
ordinarily call “intellectual” is simply an abstraction from gesture (15). For
Jousse, then, memory is less a purely cognitive capacity than the result of
the bodyʼs organization of expression in relation to its action in and active
proprioceptive apprehension of its relation to the world: the up/down,
left/right, forwards/backwards, which forms the basis of parallelism in oral
style, or the correspondence between the rhythm of breathing and certain
traditions of verse, including additive patterns like the one in a particular
1609 version of Genesis cited by Ong, for example. Because gestural re-
enactment can be delayed or deferred as the performance of memory, it
can also be made conscious and either become formulaic or opened to
play – and hence, to art. As Merleau-Ponty long ago realized, writers
donʼt just deliver messages: they produce gestures (60), for even forms of
sedentary writing involve incipient gesture. Gilles Deleuze and Claire
Parnet contend that writing is made less of ideas than of “motor agitation
and inertia” (75). From this perspective, the writing body rehearses and
https://www.berfrois.com/2013/10/bodymoving/ Page 6 of 26
Bodymoving 2021/09/25, 17*36

recalls or re-enacts, in abstract attenuated form, active relations with the

world. As we have argued, this experience of incipience is also at the
heart of silent reading, and we now propose that the interactivity and new
affordances and vitality of digital texts and contexts is externalizing
gesture and making visible the conditions of gestural mimicry in both
reading and writing practices.

Writing of the evolution of human cognition, Merlin Donald, like Jousse,

has theorized this mimetic capacity as one that involves using human
bodies as a complex storage and retrieval devices for the performance of
memory. Arguing that “a mimetic act is a manifestation of a highly
abstract modeling process,” Donald writes that:

Mimesis is based in a memory system that can rehearse and refine

movement voluntarily and systematically, guided by a perceptual
model of the body in its surrounding environment, and store and
retrieve products of that rehearsal […] Purposive rehearsal reveals the
presence of a unified self-modelling process, and most importantly,
the whole body becomes a potential source of conscious
representation. Retrievable body-memories were thus the first true
representations, and also the most basic form of reflection, since the
mimetic motor act itself represents something: systematic rehearsal
refers to the rehearsed act itself, comparing each exemplar with a sort
of idealized version of itself. (6)

For Donald, this mimetic system is “supramodal” in that the human body
can employ various senses or perceptual systems for modeling input and
output (a visual event can be translated into speech, or a tactile sensation
rendered by an image). The link between “grasping” a model for
performance and purposive rehearsal can be found in the experience of
typing. As Steven Connor suggests, typing is like playing the piano, where
you donʼt just play sequential notes, but chords and runs in which the
fingers are faster than the brain, and the ambidextrous mode this requires

https://www.berfrois.com/2013/10/bodymoving/ Page 7 of 26
Bodymoving 2021/09/25, 17*36

means that rhythm plays a crucial role in co-ordinating the activities of

each hand in relation to the other, creating an automaticity that doubtless
produces it own affect (for example, pleasure in fluency and agency) but
which also allows concentration on the feeling of the music itself precisely
because it is automatic. When it comes to typing, however, the movement
of the fingers on their respective hands gives rise not to notes but to
particular words with particular meanings, which might then be affectively
and imaginatively linked to the gestures that produce them. For Connor,
then,

“I” is located firmly on my right hand, and I strike it always with my

second finger. “Me” is a snappy and satisfying cooperation between
left and right; but “we” belongs to the left. A special atmosphere
attaches to words the letters of which are concentrated on the left; the
atmosphere of words learned in a foreign language. The word “dream”
is almost entirely a left-handed word, as is the word “left” and the
word “word.” (np)

The activity of typing conjoins gesture with signification and meaning

through the medium of affect in a process that relies on the human
“mimetic faculty” described by Walter Benjamin. For Benjamin, this means
the capacity to translate between, or abstract immediately, from different
forms of sensory experience (so that we can speak of synaesthesia, the
intermingling of the senses, or of sensory experience as always taking
place in the mode of “mixture” as Michel does – so too Massumi, who
places more emphasis on the shifting ratios between sensory modalities).

While the human speciesʼ capacity for gestural mimicry and cross
modalisation is rich and varied, we propose that a new ontology is
developing around the figure of the hand, particularly in its relation with
visibility and forms of knowledge, or what Nigel Thrift calls “perceptual
labour” (2008: 98). We see this in the attention that designers are giving
not only to the look, but to the “feel” or haptic” quality of technological

https://www.berfrois.com/2013/10/bodymoving/ Page 8 of 26
Bodymoving 2021/09/25, 17*36

objects. As both Serge Bouchardon and Barbara Bolt have noted (in
different contexts), to “grasp” a concept, an object or a text, is to
introduce a human dimension to knowledge through the figure of the
hand and its capacity for manipulation and gesture. Nigel Thrift, too, in his
work on the computational aspects of contemporary culture, points
towards a new relevance for the hand as an age old epistemological
figure. For Thrift the hand not only manipulates the world, it touches it,
and in emergent contexts he speculates that “touch will increasingly be
thought of as a sense which can stretch over large spaces.” He writes that

all manner of entities will be produced within an expanded sensory

range. […] [P]aramount amongst these newly touchable entities will be
data of various kinds which, through haptic engineering, will take on
new kinds of presence in the world […] the hand will extend, be able to
touch more entities and will encounter entities which are more
“touchable,” The set of experiences gathered under “touch” will
therefore become a more important sense, taking in and naming
experiences which heretofore have not been considered as tactile and
generating haptic experiences which have hitherto been unknown.
Equally, we might expect that descriptions of tactile sensations like
“soft,” “hard,” “rub,” “stroke” and “caress,” “hold,” “shove,” “push,”
grasp,” “hit” “strike,” and “seize” will change their meaning. (103-4)

As we argue below, the expanded sensory dimension of the hand is

already producing a new epistemology in digital contexts, although
perhaps because of its complexity and its acknowledged relationship with
the development of the human brain, it has always held a distinctively
human place of significance. [1] The hand has often been used as a
figure of creation, as when Michelangelo famously images the hands of
God and “man” almost connecting, the gap between their outstretched
fingers suggesting a synaptic transfer, so that the hand, thought (or the
idea) and the “spark” of creation are immediately and inescapably
conjoined. The figure of the hand is inseparable from the idea of gesture

https://www.berfrois.com/2013/10/bodymoving/ Page 9 of 26
Bodymoving 2021/09/25, 17*36

(which clearly involves movement), and instantiates a conception of

thought as thinking (i.e. a movement) as a process which is active and
creative, rather than passive and contemplative. In gesture the body is not
an isolated instigator of movement: rather, movement is always attuned to
a milieu to which it responds in different ways. Handwriting retains the
indexical trace of gesture (hence the importance we accord to the
signature, for example to an artistʼs signature on a painting, or on a
document where the gesture stands as a sign of legal and ethical assent).
Typography and the production of graphical logos each represent
attempts in different ways to reproduce the gesture inherent in writing and
the making of visual signs. While digital writing must dispense with the
indexicality privileged by both the legal and art historical discourses of the
western world, it nevertheless returns us to the importance of gesture as
a way of thinking.

The immediacy and fluidity of handwriting is an acute site of such desire.

Handwriting, after all, as Hensher notes “is what registers our
individuality, and the mark which our culture has made on us. It has been
seen as the unknowing key to our souls and our innermost nature. It has
been regarded as a sign of our health as a society, of our intelligence, and
as an object of simplicity, grace, fantasy and beauty in its own right” (np).
As Noland comments, the “ductus of the letter is the conduit for corporeal
energy; it embodies – in an inscription – the gestures required to form it”
(“Digital Gestures” 232), and “the software programs digital poets use
provide many opportunities for creating a bond between the writerʼs
visceral experience of tracing letters and the graphic instantiation of this
tracing” (“Digital Gestures” 234).

Writing of poet and painter Henri Michauxʼs attempts to supersede

alphabetic writing by creating a set of signs that registered the bodyʼs
production of “gestes,” Noland points out that Michaux himself, as well as
many of his contemporaries, considered the apparently spontaneous
realm of the gestural to be more “authentic” than alphabetic script, the

https://www.berfrois.com/2013/10/bodymoving/ Page 10 of 26
Bodymoving 2021/09/25, 17*36

handwriting requiring hours of laborious bodily discipline to learn.

According to Noland, Michaux practiced sets of movements associated
with the production of signs in scripts other than the western alphabet in
order to unlearn the routines of movement inculcated in his own body and
to open new kinetic possibilities in this same body. What she makes clear
is that crucial to Michauxʼs project is “examining meaningʼs contours […]
discovering what meaning looks like, and, more to the point, how meaning
feels when being made and unmade” (Agency and Embodiment 135,
emphasis in original), and this feeling might not be directly related to the
particular meaning being made: rather, the point is the way in which the
body is drawn into the process and signals its success so that the process
can be learned and iterated. It is not so much that the experience of the
authorʼs body is simply transmitted to the body of the reader through the
intermediary of text, as that the reader has to retrace and recapture some
of this feeling through the work of reading which re-performs some
aspects of writing. Here we might recall Benjaminʼs comment: “perhaps
Stone Age man produced such incomparable drawings of the elk only
because the hand guiding the implement still remembered the bow with
which it had felled the beast” (253). The same preoccupation with the
bodyʼs learned routines as repositories of “sleeping” memory which must
be awakened through performance is manifested in much digital work, as
letters traced out on screen as if by an invisible hand stimulate – perhaps
via the mirror neuron system – mimetic impulses in the nerve endings of
those watching, especially if they have been subject to the disciplines of
these gestural routines themselves. Variations in the scale of the letters
and the speed of writing evoke different kinds of experience beyond the
rhetorical dimension of emphasis – the slowness and scale of childlike
writing, or perhaps sensations of an unaccustomed fluency
accompanying a speeded up process of inscription: at any rate, a
contagious “micro-kinetic melody” of movement (Dagognet 528). As
Alphonso Lingis observes: “a hand is not only an instrument, for seizing
and taking. Hands are also organs for exploration” (69).

https://www.berfrois.com/2013/10/bodymoving/ Page 11 of 26
Bodymoving 2021/09/25, 17*36

Here the readerʼs attunement to the feeling of meaning-making (the

meaning being made is precisely about the conditions under which
meaning is made) is key. We are used to thinking of gesture as something
continuous with speech, where it works to fill in gaps. Gesture in this optic
always gestures to the point where speech fails, and something arises
which canʼt be articulated – or even thought – in words (Agamben, 78).
The gesture as an event in speech then creates a figure for the
inexpressible (Bennett). But in digital works, as we will argue, where the
independence of text from speech is most apparent, gesture gestures
towards communicability: it is constantly foregrounded as a way of
thinking by ‘doing things with wordsʼ under suggestion from the work
itself, as we read. Here gesture entrains thought, but reading also takes
place by doing, by active engagement in the manipulation of text, as in
Paul Carterʼs idea of “material thinking” (2004), where interaction with
materials is the process by which art (sculpture, painting, performance) is
made.

At the intersection of performance art, installation and writing, Fiona

Templetonʼs 1995 text installation Cells of Release at the disused Eastern
Penitentiary in Philadelphia, imbricates the architectural space of the
building (a series of cells lining both sides of a corridor) with movement
through that space and the work of handwriting a single long line of text
on a reel of paper made to unwind as she went, working day after day for
six weeks to move down the corridor, in and out of each the cells,
composing the text, writing without revision, so that the unreeling paper
strip followed along her trajectory. The text itself, documented by means
of photos of the installation and a transcription of the line in a book of the
same name and followed by Templetonʼs afterword reflecting on the
process of production of the work and her rational for it, is at once
referential and reflexive. It references the fact that the project was carried
out as a collaboration with Amnesty International whose members write
letters to authorities in order to obtain the release of political prisoners, it
reflects on the site itself and what happened there, it insists on the here
https://www.berfrois.com/2013/10/bodymoving/ Page 12 of 26
Bodymoving 2021/09/25, 17*36

and now of the performance of the writing process and it instantiates the
duration of the work of thinking about the unspeakable violence done to
particular prisoners or the effects of incarceration on them, the work of
composition and sheer physical and mental endurance involved in it, as
well as the changes in the writer herself which are inevitably induced by
all these things.

Using first person narration that fluctuates between Templeton herself

and the prisoners on whose behalf Amnesty advocates (it draws on court
records for the latter), the text addresses a “you” who sometimes seems
to be actually present at the time of writing (Templeton allowed visitors to
witness and read the work in progress) but who is also the reader who
comes after at any time to retrace the journey of that continuous
unpunctuated line, whether through the space of the prison or through
the pages of the book that follows. “Handwriting,” comments Caroline
Bergvall, in her essay on Templetonʼs work, “commits writing to the
circumstances of writing as much as to language” (228). Writing that
“gestural and calligraphic skills, long devalued by most western poetry,
have found their way back to art through performance and body-related
visual arts: blood writing and white ink writing, writing done using body
emissions and organic materials; writings that are seen to register bodily
movements and highlight taboo manifestations of the human bodyʼs
interior/s,” Bergvall links Templetonʼs work to a line of often avowedly
feminist political performance work by Nancy Spero, Gina Pane, Ana
Mendieta, André Serrano, Shirin Neshat and others (228-9). But where,
especially in work dating from the 1970s and 80s, it was specifically
womenʼs experience of inhabiting a body marked as female in a world in
which the male body was taken as representative of the human, this
particular work of Templetonʼs foregrounds not gender, but rather the
articulation of a relationship between what is culturally inexpressible – the
excruciating effects of all the different forms of pain suffered by the
prisoners who were once incarcerated in the particular physical site of
Templetonʼs work (the Eastern Penitentiary) – and the silencing, first by
https://www.berfrois.com/2013/10/bodymoving/ Page 13 of 26
Bodymoving 2021/09/25, 17*36

the removal from society effected by internment then by the worldʼs

ignorance or forgetfulness, of the prisoners in other places whose cases
have been taken up by Amnesty. In so doing, Templetonʼs work connects
both past to present, and “here” with a “there” which it brings into an
urgent now. It is a performance of memory which it both evokes and
transforms through the physical activity of a locative practice uniting
walking with writing and the use of this movement to map thinking to
space, or more particularly, to place, to the architecture of a (purpose)
built environment with its very particular history. Once again, however, the
body and its movements mark the site and sign of the intimate
relationship, rather than the absolute divide, between digital and print
media. Both imbricate bodies, movement and gesture with writing, but
where – as in Templetonʼs work – movement is by necessity extensive, in
written works, digital or otherwise, gesture is more often than not
intensive, where textual movement is contained within the incipience of
the page, or in digital contexts in the parameters of an a screen or
performance space, manipulated either by the play of generative code
and/or else by the manipulation of the reader/user. Digital writing, it
seems, functions at the confluence of thinking and moving.

Serge Bouchardon writes of electronic work as “moveable, actable or

explorable text”: many electronic texts are “read” by the reader having to
click buttons or work with a mouse or track- pad to reveal text. Some
notable literary examples would include Judd Morrisseyʼs The Jewʼs
Daughter where text is revealed by brushing the cursor over highlighted
text, and Alison Cliffordʼs The Sweet Old Etcetera which produces the
poetry of E.E. Cummings as a visual score which can be played by the
reader. Hence, as Bouchardon argues, the materiality of electronic text

cannot be dissociated from the action of the reader. The text on the
screen is not only another materialisation of a meaningful form. It is the
gesture of the reader which reveals the materiality of the text. One can
wonder if the nature of a digital text is not to be manipulable more than

https://www.berfrois.com/2013/10/bodymoving/ Page 14 of 26
Bodymoving 2021/09/25, 17*36

to be readable. (5).

The significance of this lies less in outdated debates about interactivity

and its limits in artworks, or in discourses of the power, control or freedom
of the reader, than in the way electronic works solicit the bodyʼs
involvement with reading via gesture, and in the nature of the experience
this generates. Bouchardonʼs work suggests that this involves not only the
readerʼs active capacities, but also their failure: for him, the experience of
manipulation is characterized not only by grasp, but also, and crucially, by
its loss. Here he draws on the way in which Bessy and Chateauraynaud
use the concept of “grasp” to describe the embedding, in both persons
grasping and things grasped, of moments when the body is engaged in
noncognitive experience.

Mari Velonakiʼs Circle D: Fragile Balances plays with the idea of grasp and
its loss in the way Bouchardon suggests. At first glance, Velonakiʼs work
might be understood deliberately eliciting nostalgia both for the kind of
grasp implied in handwriting via the handling of a pen, and for what we
take for the immediacy and intimacy in other forms of (hand)craft that
have become so familiar as to constitute a second nature. Her small,
carefully crafted and finished wooden boxes atop their matching wooden
stand each frame four screens on which handwritten texts (fragments of
love letters) are made manifest as the boxes are handled and turned by
the viewer. They must be held and handled carefully, however, since the
messages tend to disintegrate and become illegible if the movement of
the holder is jerky and abrupt. The viewer holding a box must attune
herself to a certain rhythm to enable the continuation of the flow of text
around and between the boxes and to be able to read it herself, so that
interaction involves experimentation with and a play between grasp and
loss of grasp. Here, then, the central role of gestural attunement takes
the work beyond the nostalgia of the trace, as the viewerʼs movements
become an active conduit for communication between the boxes. This
work forms one of the iterations in Velonakiʼs Fish-Bird Series which deals

https://www.berfrois.com/2013/10/bodymoving/ Page 15 of 26
Bodymoving 2021/09/25, 17*36

with incommensurability: the fish and bird are in love with each other but
canʼt unite, “due to technical difficulties.”

Other works which raise the oscillation of grasp, its achievement and loss
in new writing environments, are Jason Nelsonʼs between treacherous
objects and Philippe Bootzʼs petite brosse à dépoussiérer la fiction ( small
brush to dust off fiction). Both these works in different ways problematize
a transparent relationship between perception and gesture through the
sensory novelty of control. Nelsonʼs work is heavily influenced by his
interest in games and gaming interfaces. In between treacherous objects
the reader/user has to navigate different spatial and mobile environments
littered with commodity objects which recede into the horizon, or else
move towards the reader, depending on the controlled motion of the
mouse, which is only partially successful in avoiding obstacles as the
reader searches for various text clues hidden in the work. Gestural
precision does not work, in fact it is smaller more diffuse gesture that
seems to control the movement through the textʼs environment. Philippe
Bootzʼs petite brosse à dépoussiérer la fiction plays on the very carefully
and minutely executed archaeological act of brushing away earth layer by
layer to excavate an object, and especially on the forensic work of dusting
surfaces for fingerprints or traces of DNA as the reader must continually
brush away an image in order to be able to decipher clues to what might
have happened in the different scenarios offered by the text which seems
to lie below it. The fact that images must be brushed aside to read text is
an aspect of the work that we take up in a later chapter, but important for
our point here is the way the work reveals the process of dusting as a
fantasy of control in the digital world, and not as a as part of the process
of never-ending housework.

On one level, Nelsonʼs and Bootzʼs texts subvert the usual idea of
precision in interactive skill, and on another they demonstrate the
experience of the complexities of grasp involved in “writing on complex
surfaces” (Cayley “Writing on complex surfaces” np), although we would

https://www.berfrois.com/2013/10/bodymoving/ Page 16 of 26
Bodymoving 2021/09/25, 17*36

share Johanna Druckerʼs view that the surface of the page is already
complex, given the ways it imbricates space with temporality. Digital
media does, however, introduce a new dimension to the idea of “surface.”
John Cayley, an eminent poet and theoretician working with
programmable media, argues for the distinctly new experience of “writing
on complex surfaces” made possible by digital media. For Cayley,
programmable media introduce a complexity of surface and temporal
structures that enable the performance of writing in ways only imagined,
or abstracted from the space of the written paper page. Drawing on and
critiquing Joan Retallackʼs concept of the “flatland” of (paper page)
writing, Cayley asks us to think about the ways in which new media writing
is reorganizing our perceptions of both time and space. Referring to his
experimental writing in the CAVE environment at Brown University, where
the experience of language is phenomenologically “real” (in the world of
CAVE it is possible to perceive letters in a mobile three dimensional
context, and more recently to “play” with them), he writes that:

[l]iteral graphic materiality is able to entirely and suddenly transform

spatial perception, and at the same time, it creates an entirely new
space for itself, for inscription and for reading. It creates the potential
for a new experience of language. […] Specifically, I believe [it]
provides an important vehicle for the investigation of the
phenomenology of surfaces, surfaces in general, but also, of course,
surfaces of inscription and reading. (Lens 13)

Here Cayley points to the emergence of a new phenomenology of new

media writing, which we argue is co-emergent with a different ontology
brought into being through the combination of the affordances of new
technologies and the way in which they are embodied. Cayleyʼs CAVE
texts involve a new grasp of language and its literalisation in contexts that
transform – as he argues – the spaces of language but also, we think, our
sense of space and our place within it.

https://www.berfrois.com/2013/10/bodymoving/ Page 17 of 26
Bodymoving 2021/09/25, 17*36

It appears to us, through our analyses of the new surfaces upon which we
are inscribing our selves and our cultures, that the importance of grasp
and its loss is played out through a dynamic of technical innovation
involving transparency and rupture. Gestural movement either sutures
together hitherto disparate surfaces so that everything seems transparent
and within oneʼs grasp, or else things evade capture and break apart into
irreconcilable differences. JODIʼs work geogeo is a good example of a text
which explicitly engages with the slipperiness of grasp in what we might
call the particular surface tensions of digital writing, while simultaneously
exposing the political nature of the organization of space into the surfaces
we are beginning to take for granted. The work opens with a pointed
anecdote (Kare np) about how Steve Jobsʼ casual intervention in the
search for a series of linked names for new fonts resulted in them being
mapped onto the world rather than onto a local train line. The developers
initially named the fonts after stops on a local train line. Apparently, for
Jobs size mattered, and the story collected on folklore.org is tagged
“personality” as well as “software design.” Alongside this excerpt appears
a list of the cities that subsequently had fonts named for them (Athens,
Monacco, Geneva, Cairo, etc.) – or perhaps it is a list of the fonts that
came to be named after cities. The ambiguity is doubtlessly deliberate, as
the work reconfigures writing in relation to territory rather than to speech.
Selecting one of these proper names will deploy sample text in the
relevant font over the Google Map of the terrain for which the font was
named, so that the imagination of a particular city is mapped back onto it
along with a short text (a word or phrase), scrawled on the surface of the
earth. From a particular focal resolution, one might now touch or write the
surface of the earth as one would a page or screen. The font sample
(phrase) corresponds to handwritten manuscript in its lack of character
uniformity and precision because the sample font isnʼt bit-mapped in the
usual way. Instead, it appeals to, and yet corrupts, the idea of vector
mapping, all the more since the letters often follow features of the imaged
terrain, such as roads, so as to highlight the way in which the world is

https://www.berfrois.com/2013/10/bodymoving/ Page 18 of 26
Bodymoving 2021/09/25, 17*36

already written by human systems, if non-alphabetically. In some ways

this is the obverse of the writing of the world on its own surfaces by rivers,
canyons, or the trajectories of birds.

But geogeoʼs writing is also constrained, as roads follow – at least to some

extent – terrain. This work inhabits and works the spaces between
different forms or systems of imaging and mapping, and denaturalizes
these views (reminding us, as Peter Gendolla writes, of the book of nature
(371)) by relativising them in relation to each other, or by creating friction
between them. The writing on the imaged terrain in geogeo is both
electronic and “handwriting” (or, more properly, it resembles a type of
graffiti etched or scratched awkwardly on the surface of the earth). It
represents a move to personalize and render proximate the abstraction
performed by writing, as well as the abstraction performed by imaging
and mapping. The work plays with telepresence and the smooth traversal
of time-space enjoyed by the user of Google Maps where the experience
is one of increasing proximity to things as one navigates through the
visual field of satellite resolution. From outer space, one can visually reach
down and touch the earth at the level of the individual street and follow
the pathway set by the line of writing. However, here the coherence and
readability of the writing breaks down so that movement in the territory
(as opposed to movement over it at a distance) comes at the expense of
legibility. We see the move from the striated, optical space of distance
and mastery (the commanding view), into the haptic visuality theorized by
Laura Marks in which vision is often blurry so that we have to feel our way
through space. One might argue that the tendency of web platforms to
glitch and freeze might work to elicit the sense of contingency and
especially of transience that accompanies mortality, or the alternating
seizing and loss of control that characterizes the erotic, though in one
way at least the rapid technological development we are currently
witnessing might augur the opposite. While in the films Marks discusses,
haptic visuality tends to be instantiated in images of sensual experience
(like hair-washing, smelling spices or perfumes, and so on) and ultimately
https://www.berfrois.com/2013/10/bodymoving/ Page 19 of 26
Bodymoving 2021/09/25, 17*36

bound by narrative, geogeo operates differently calling into account the

proprioceptive and haptic economies of a globalizing telepresence.

In geogeo, writing becomes a kind of walking with the fingers, an activity

of proximity with a keyboard and prosthetic vision: an abstract mapping of
space enabled by Google Maps (trademark registered), and a virtual
graffiti or tagging of terrain by JODI. Michel de Certeau describes the way
pedestrians who traverse the city create a kind of unconscious script
readable only to others from the distance allowed by height, so geogeo
can be read as a humorous play on this micro-political idea, a kind of
making real of the place-making work of (locative) writing involved in
passage through space. In this kind of work one can traverse space with a
speed that far surpasses walking, so that the relationship pertaining
between time and space is altered, “de-realized” in Stieglerʼs sense (110),
in contradistinction to the immediacy of access to the particularity of
place promised by Google Maps. Here proprioception (the bodyʼs felt
awareness of its place and extensive volume in space) as we know it in the
everyday experience of walking (Massumiʼs “movement vision”) is
replaced by a haptic visuality used not to communicate sensory
experience by mimesis (as it often is in the quasi-ethnographic films Laura
Marks and others discuss, as well as in Velonakiʼs work discussed above),
but to show us the limitations of our own “mirror vision” in the space of
statistical calculation. The speed of interoception is exceeded – and
superceded – by the speed of the fingers, and yet, crucially, we discover
that anticipation is not enhanced by virtue of this. While geogeo ironically
purports to instantiate the universalizing white masculinist vision of
smooth transparent access to the world assumed by Steve Jobsʼ
cosmopolitan and cosmological inscriptive staking of claim. It performs
the political work of exposing the fantasy of access to worlds by
telepresence, making clear that a certain kind of awareness of detail at
street level comes at the expense of another kind of knowledge and
purchase gained by overview.

https://www.berfrois.com/2013/10/bodymoving/ Page 20 of 26
Bodymoving 2021/09/25, 17*36

What seems to be emerging, then, in this and other digital media works, is
an emphasis on memory as performance, intimately bound up with the
gestural and habitual capacities of the human body. Complex surfaces are
frequently glossed over by the small habitual consistencies (forms of
gestural mimicry) which render temporal and spatial differences
homogenous, as in the YouTube-spread contagion of images of deranged
cats and laughing babies analysed by Anna Munster as haeccities, or
“moments of thisness.” The popularity of these kinds of phenomena
contour the affective energy of the present forming a “shared singularity
of everydayness”, instances of which are nevertheless generalisable, and
can thus comprise what she calls “singular generality.” While Munster
sees these as a form of “networked aesthesia,” we would argue that they
rather represent a form of networked anaesthesia whose insistence on the
moment militates against critical reflection. Against this, the ironies and
ambiguities of works that position themselves as part of an aesthetic
practice (like geogeo) tend instead to provoke thoughtfulness as they are
actively engaged with through the performative work of experiment and
play on the part of the reader. Performance is always live, of the present
moment, and it therefore demands constant renewal, re-enactment and
repetition. Repetition inevitably gives rise to difference, and when this
difference is remarked upon, and reproduced, it marks a point of cultural
transformation.

Piece originally published at Electronic Book Review |

Works cited:

Abrams, David. (1996) The Spell of the Sensuous, New York: Vintage.

Agamben, Giorgio. (1999). “Kommerell, or on gesture.” In Potentialities:

Collected essays in philosophy. Trans: Daniel Heller-Roazen. Stanford, CA:
Stanford University.

https://www.berfrois.com/2013/10/bodymoving/ Page 21 of 26
Bodymoving 2021/09/25, 17*36

Benjamin, Walter (2002). “The Knowledge That the First Material on which
the Mimetic Faculty Tested Itself” [1936]. Selected Writings vol. 3, 1935-
1938, eds Howard Eiland and Michael W Jennings. Cambridge, Mass and
London: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.

Bennett, Jill, (2008). “A Feeling of Insincerity: Politics, Ventriloquoy, and

the Dialectics of Gesture.” In Ernst van Alphen, Mieke Bal and Carel Smith
(ed.). The Rhetoric of Sincerity. Stanford University Press, Stanford,
California, pp. 195 – 213.

Bergvall, Caroline (2008). “Handwriting as a Form of Protest: Fiona

Templetonʼs Cells of Release.” In Craig Dworkin, ed, The Consequence of
Innovation: 21st Century Poetics. Roof Books, New York. pp. 215-230.

Bessy, Christian, and François Chateauraynaud (1995). Experts et

faussaires: Pour une sociologie de la perception. Paris: Editions Métailié.

Bolt, Barbara (2006). “A Non Standard Deviation: Handlability, Praxical

Knowledge and Practice Led Research.” Speculation and Innovation:
Applying Practice Led Research in the Creative Industries. Brisbane:
Queensland U of Technology,
http://artsresearch.brighton.ac.uk/links/practiceled/Bolt2005.pdf

Bootz, Philippe, nd. Retrieved March 2012 Petite brosse à dépoussiérer la

fiction. http://www.bootz.fr/brosse/brosse.html.

Bouchardon, Serge (2008). “The Aesthetics of Materiality in Electronic

Literature.” Conference paper. Electronic Literature in Europe. Bergen:
September 11-13, 27 Oct. Retrieved October 2012.
http://elmcip.net/critical-writing/aesthetics-materiality-electronic-lit….

Bronowski, Jacob (1973). The Ascent of Man. Boston: Little, Brown and
Co.

Carter, Paul (2004). Material Thinking: The Theory and Practice of

https://www.berfrois.com/2013/10/bodymoving/ Page 22 of 26
Bodymoving 2021/09/25, 17*36

Creative Research. Melbourne University Publishing.

Cayley, John (2006). “Lens: The Practice and Poetics of Writing in

Immersive VR.” Leonardo Electronic Almanac, “New Media Poetry and
Poetics” Special Issue, Vol 14, No. 5-6.
http://leoalmanac.org/journal/vol_14/lea_v14_n05-06/jcayley.asp.

–, (2005) “Writing on Complex Surfaces.” dichtung-digital 35 (2/2005)

<http://www.dichtung-digital.org/2005/2-Cayley.htm>. Originally given as
a paper at the 6th DAC (Digital Arts & Culture) Conference, IT University,
Copenhagen, 1-3 December.

de Certeau, Michel (1984). The Practice of Everyday Life. Trans. Steven

Rendall. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Clifford, Alison (2011) [2006], The Sweet Old

Etcetera. http://collection.eliterature.org/2/works/clifford_the_sweet_old_e
tceter…

Connor, Steven (1999). Paper given at the Modernism and the Technology
of Writing conference. The Institute of English Studies, March 26.
Retrieved October 2012. http://www.stevenconnor.com/modhand.htm

Dagognet, François (1992). Etienne-Jules Marey: A Passion for the

Trace. Translated by Robert Galeta and Jeanine Herman. New York: Zone
Books.

Deleuze, Gilles, and Parnet, Claire (1987). Dialogues. Eds. Hugh Tomlinson
and Barbara Habberjam. New York: Columbia UP.

Donald, Merlin (1997). Precis of Origins of the Modern Mind: Three Stages
in theEvolution of Culture and Cognition.
http://www.bbsonline.org/Preprints/OldArchive/bbs.donald.html

Drucker, Johanna, (2008). “Graphic Devices: Narration and Navigation.”

https://www.berfrois.com/2013/10/bodymoving/ Page 23 of 26
Bodymoving 2021/09/25, 17*36

Narrative. Vol. 16, No. 2.

Gache, Belén (2006) Word Toys. Anthology of electronic poetry for the
internet. Retrieved March 2012. www.findelmundo.com.ar/wordtoys/

Gendolla, Peter (2009). “‘No Preexistent World”: On ‘Naturalʼ and

‘Artificialʼ Forms of Poetry.” In Beyond the Screen: Transfromations of
Literary Structures, Genres and Interfaces. Eds Jörgen Schäfer and Peter
Gendolla. Bielefeld: Transcript. 365-390.

Hayles, N. Katherine (199). How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in

Cybernetics,Literature and Informatics. Chicago: U Chicago P.

Hensher, Philip (2012). “Why handwriting matters.”

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/oct/07/missing-ink-handwriting-
art-…

JODI. geogeo (2006). http://geogeo.jodi.org

Jousse, Marcel (1925). Études de psychologie linguistique: Le Style oral

rythmique et mnémotech- nique chez les Verbo-moteurs. Paris: Gabriel
Beauchesne.

Kare, Susan (1983). “World Class Cities.” Folklore.org.

http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?
project=Macintosh&story=World_Class…

Lingis, Alphonso (1996). Sensation: Intelligibility in Sensibility. Atlantic

Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press,

Marks, Laura (2004). “Haptic Visuality: Touching with the Eyes.” The
Finnish Art Review, No. 2, 2004

Massumi, Brian (2002). Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect,

Sensation. Durham and London: Duke University Press.

https://www.berfrois.com/2013/10/bodymoving/ Page 24 of 26
Bodymoving 2021/09/25, 17*36

Merleau-Ponty, Maurice (1974). Phenomenology: Language and

Sociology. Ed J O”Neil. London: Heinemann.

Morrissey, Judd (with contributions from Laura Talley) (2000), The Jewʼs
Daughter. Interactive narrative. Retrieved March 2012.
http://www.thejewsdaughter.com/

Munster, Anna (2010). “‘Hahahaʼ – 186,775,728 views. Emerging

collectivities of publics, emerging experiences of affect across viral
media,” paper presented to the NIEA Experimental Arts Conference,
UNSW, 19th August 2010.

Nelson, Jason. (2006). “Between Treacherous Objects.” Retrieved March

2012. http://www.secrettechnology.com/between/between.html.

Nelson, Jason (2004). “Dreamaphage” version 2. Retrieved March 2012.

http://www.secrettechnology.com.

Noland, Carrie (2009). Agency and Embodiment: performing

gestures/producing culture. Harvard U Press.

–, (2009). “Digital Gestures.” In New Media Poetics: Contexts Technotexts

and Theories. eds. Thomas Swiss and Adalaide Morris. Cambridge: MIT
Press.

Ong, Walter. J. (1982). Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the

Word. London: Methuen.

Rotman, Brian, (2002). “Corporeal or Gesturo-haptic Writing.”

Configurations 10, 2002: 423-438.

Serres, Michel (2009). The Five Senses: A Philosophy of Mingled

Bodies. Trans. Margaret Sankey and Peter Cowley. London: Continuum.

Stiegler, Bernard (2009). Technics and Time, 2: Disorientation. Trans.

https://www.berfrois.com/2013/10/bodymoving/ Page 25 of 26
Bodymoving 2021/09/25, 17*36

Stephen Barker. Stanford, Calif. :Stanford U Press.

Templeton, Fiona (1997). Cells of Release. New York: Roof Books.

Thrift, Nigel (2008). Non-Representational Theory: Space, Politics, Affect.

London: Routledge.

Utterback, Camille, and Romy Achituv (1999). Text Rain.

http://camilleutterback.com/projects/text-rain/

Velonaki, Mari (2008). Circle D: Fragile Balances.

http://mvstudio.org/work/fragile-balances/

-,- (2004-2009). Fish-Bird

Series. http://www.csr.acfr.usyd.edu.au/projects/Fish-
Bird/Background.htm

Waber, Dan (1999). Strings.

http://collection.eliterature.org/1/works/waber__strings.html

Notes:

[1] As Thrift notes, quoting Tallis (2003), a strong case exists for the
evolution of human intelligence driven by the hand as the first “ur-tool”
(103).

https://www.berfrois.com/2013/10/bodymoving/ Page 26 of 26