Gesticulate Wildly
Isabelle Bucklow April 11, 2024
For time immemorial we’ve been gesturing: toward something over there, to each other, that something tastes good, that we are in pain, in love and sometimes for no (conscious) reason at all. We might gesture alongside language, but gesture is not necessarily a substitute for language. Gestures articulate states of mind or sensations that cannot be encased by language. Gestures can fill gaps left by language or create a gap which they then fill, or overfill. Gestures represent and relay information aesthetically, symbolically; others see them and recognise them as meaningful. Those meanings, however, are not fixed. They are hinged on cultural, economic, environmental and psychological variables. But before going further, hell, how do we even distinguish a gesture from other movements we make with our bodies? This question leads to others regarding voluntary and involuntary actions, inculcation, the very notion of freedom itself!
Le Centre de l’Amour (ca. 1687), Peter Rollos
Because we’ve always been gesturing, we’ve also always been thinking about gesture. Aristotle disparaged gestures as crude tools used by orators to manipulate their audience. Cicero’s De Oratore asserted that ‘every emotion of the mind has from nature its own peculiar look, tone, and gesture’.¹ Around 95 AD Quintilian set out a foundational system for gesture, called Institutes of Oratory, suggesting that shrugs, nods, pointing, furrows, pursing and flares (expressed by shoulders, head, hand, eyebrows, lips and nostrils respectively) might ‘be a language common to all’.²
By the 18th century, everything had been thrown into great doubt; we weren’t simply recording what gestures the great orators were making, but asking more fundamentally what is gesture, and why do we gesture? With the dawn of industrialisation, the metaphysical why turned into a technical how. How do new environments create new gestures? The production line was a shining example of how gesture can be broken down into goal-oriented parts, then standardised and forced to repeat indefinitely. Gestures can be mistaken for machines. Machines can also malfunction.
In one of the most frequently quoted essays on gesture – titled Notes on Gesture (1992) no less – Giorgio Agamben claimed: ‘By the end of the nineteenth century, the Western bourgeoisie had definitely lost its gestures.’³
In Agamben’s account, gesture isn’t lost definitely and entirely into the ether, it remains embodied, we just lost control of it. He begins with an example of measure and mastery, introducing Gilles de la Tourette’s 1886 treatise on ‘gait’, the first ‘strictly scientific analysis’ of human movement.⁴ With a forensic eye, prophetic of unflinching machine vision, Tourette detailed the weight distributions, stride lengths and joint rotations involved in walking. The year before, Tourette had published Study on a Nervous Condition characterised by lack of Motor Coordination accompanied by Echolalia and Coprolalia (what we now call ‘Tourette’s syndrome’). Unlike the dependable pedestrian gait, these gestures were arrhythmic and proliferating.
In his patients, Tourette observed muscle spasms and tics without recognisable intent or interpretable justification. For Agamben, these incomplete and partial gestures evidenced ‘a generalised catastrophe [of the sphere of gesture].’⁵ Then, in the second half of the 20th century, reports of gestural glitches ceased. Perhaps, Agamben suggested, they had become the norm. This hypothesis could well be supported by Charlie Chaplin’s jittery skits and the modern hops and convulsions of dancer Isadora Duncan. And so, to Agamben’s next pronouncement: ‘In the cinema, a society that has lost its gestures tries at once to reclaim what it has lost and to record its loss.’⁶
Contemporary artist Martine Syms’ video piece, Notes on Gesture (2015), took its title from Agamben's 1992 essay. It was first shown in ‘Vertical Elevated Oblique’, an exhibition whose title referenced earlier texts on gesture, like John Bulwer’s Chirologia: Or the Natural Language of the Hand and Chironomia: Or the Art of Manual Rhetoric (1644). Bulwer’s illustrated compendium set out a ‘universal’ vocabulary of gestures (the ‘universal’ was, for Bulmer, the Anglo-Saxon white male). Syms’ work creates an alternate inventory, interrogating black identity, media representation and the hand’s ‘natural’ language. Syms says that through ‘modernity, migration to cities and away from our kin, family, familiar networks, we lost our movement or embodiment and we put it into cinema.’⁷ Body, gesture and video are innately linked, and innately political.
In the film, Syms’ collaborator Diamond Stingily reacts to title cards (WHEN DEY GOT YOU FUCKED) and makes hand gestures accompanied by phrases (‘Real talk,’ ‘Check yourself,’ ‘Point blank, period’). Through stutters and loops (reminiscent of Vines) these sounds and gestures glitch between authentic and dramatic. Syms has said the work was inspired by a riff on the joke “Everybody wanna be a black woman but nobody wanna be a black woman,” referencing the media appropriation of black culture (of which gestures are integral) that drains politics and ethics from the aesthetics of blackness. Further, Syms has written, ‘mass media allows for narratives – and subsequently, ideologies and typologies – to be industrialised.’⁸ Syms’ looping bitesize gestures anticipated the structure and style of TikTok and Instagram reels. If, in the 19th century, we lost our gestures and put them into cinema, then TikTok seems to cannibalise gestures at the same rate it produces and transmits them – an algorithmic factory of gestures consumed by users and fed back into the loop.
In 2021, during the pandemic, a medical report was published about an overwhelming global increase in tics in children and young people. Many of the patients had watched TikTok videos of young people with Tourette’s syndrome and adopted their gestures and utterances. A New York Times article published last year reported TikTok videos labelled #Tourettes have been viewed 7.7 billion times. These TikTok tics not only demonstrate that gesture is innately quotable, but also how that quotability can be hosted, networked and monetised.
Liz Magic Laser is a performance and video artist whose 2023 work, Convulsive States – an investigative report-cum-hallucination – explores the history of spasmodic gestural expressions of mental distress. Laser considers these gestures as both a symptom of trauma and its possible antidote. The artist visited Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital, where Tourette's mentor Dr Jean-Martin Charcot studied the phenomena of hysteria (now called ‘psychogenic nonepileptic seizure’) by unconventional means: performance lectures and photography. His methods have been criticised for being exploitative and theatrical, something Laser finds dismissive. Laser notes, ‘at a time when underclass women were incarcerated and ignored, Charcot offered patients an opportunity to express their trauma, vocally and physically, which was probably healing for some and damaging for others…Charcot put them on stage and facilitated their erotic display of rage. Was it good or bad? Yes, both.’⁹
In her film, Laser also highlights the TikTok tic phenomenon. TikTok is a much bigger, more visible stage to display and work through existential changes. It is also a stage where performer and audience aren't separate and distinct, but merged (into what art historian Isobel Harbsion calls ‘the prosumer’).¹⁰ Gestures are not so much lost and reclaimed/recorded here, but trapped in an infinite, insatiable economy of exchange. Multimodal AI tools (like Open AI’s new text-to-video model, Sora, released in February), will alter and amplify this exchange by contributing ever more ‘realistic’ AI generated bodies into the short-form video landscape; their morphing synthetic gestures ripe for virality, but trained on what ‘universal’?
TikTok and Sora are experiments that ‘innovate first, regulate later’. Over two decades since the launch of social media, concrete causal patterns between a teen mental health crisis and social media use are becoming increasingly apparent (leading to a federal lawsuit against meta raised in late 2023).¹¹ We do not yet know all the virtualities inherent in TikTok and short-form social media, let alone spatial computing; TikTok is now available on the Apple Vision Pro (a virtual and augmented reality headset), and according to one tech news platform, ‘ready to eat up your gestures.’¹²
Since the release of Apple Vision Pro, there have been numerous videos shared online of wearers on the subway, crossing roads, making bizarre pinches and swipes through the air. Currently only a select few can afford the hardware, and when spotted in the wild their gesticulations appear absurd and anti-social. It seems we are in another crisis of gesture. As media theorist Vilém Flusser wrote, in my favourite collection of essays on gesture, ‘whenever gestures appear that have never been seen before, we have a key to decoding a new form of existence.’¹³ And so, in attending to the gestures of today, as well as those of the past, these signs – or symptoms – might inch us closer to decoding the strange phenomena of living and all that entails.
¹ Cicero, De Oratore [Book III], ed. A.S.Wilkins (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1902), 215
² Quintilian, “Institutio Oratoria” in The Loeb Classical Library [Edition Vol. IV] (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1920)
³ Giorgio Agamben, “Notes on Gesture” in Means Without End: Notes on Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press: 2000) 50
⁴ Ibid.
⁵ Ibid.
⁶ Ibid., 52
⁷ Martine Syms quoted in Hannah Ongley “Martine Syms illuminates a space between secular and sacred at Prada Mode Los Angeles”, Document Journal, February 22, 2022
⁸ Martine Syms quoted in Colby Chamberlain “Review: Martine Syms, Bridget Donahue” Artforum
⁹ Liz Magic Laser quoted in Wendy Vogel “Liz Magic Laser on hysterical crisis and alternative healing” Artforum, October 5, 2023
¹⁰ See Isobel Harbison, Performing Image (Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2019)
¹¹ Kari Paul “Meta sued by 33 states over claims youth mental health endangered by Instagram” The Guardian, October 24, 2023
¹² Rowan Davies, “TikTok is now on Apple Vision Pro, ready to take over your view and eat up your gestures” techradar, February 16, 2024
¹³ Vilém Flusser, Gestures, trans. by Nancy Ann Roth (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014)
Isabelle Bucklow is a London-based writer, researcher and editor. She is the co-founding editor of motor dance journal.
