Feb 02 2010
The Secret Gestural Prehistory of Mobile Devices
Lisa Gye & Darren Tofts
The Secret Gestural Prehistory of Mobile Devices is cultural anthropology. It seeks to recover those moments of intuitive prehensile dexterity, when the famous and the ordinary alike felt the unconscious desire to occupy their hands for an as yet unknown purpose. Like Roy Neary’s obsession with the image of Devil’s Tower in Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), this gesture was vague, uncanny and compelling. It is the intimation in images of a gestural second nature to come.
Perhaps this time has arrived, now, when mobile telephonic and teletextual communications are unavoidably associated with the spectacle of intimate bodily gestures. But this intimacy has a prehistory, a psychopathology of unconscious gesture in search of a purpose.
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