Sourcing Gesture Pt. 2
Aby Warburg, Mnemosyne Picture Atlas. 1929.
Find part one of ‘Sourcing Gesture’ here.
Isabelle Bucklow March 6, 2025
Through the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the German polymath Aby Warburg devoted his intellectual life to uncovering a ‘psychology of human expression’. His final and unfinished project, a visual Mnemosyne Atlas (1927-29), showcases certain gestures that persist from Western antiquity to modern advertisements. Warburg forged formal connections across media to trace the migration of a certain pose from a tomb carving, to a Roman statue, to a 1920s fashion campaign. But it would be remiss to assume this was a historical retracing back to an original source, imitated and gradually adapted until it reaches its current form. Instead, this project uncovered not an original but recurrences: ‘Original worlds exist only as survivals, that is to say, impure, masked, contaminated, transformed, antithetically reversed’.¹ Specifically, Warburg was interested in recurring expressions of heightened emotion/motion, leading him to develop the term pathosformel (pathos formula). Pathos, an individual emotive ephemeral event, is transformed into a generic and permanent symbolic expression (enacted corporeally).
Warburg was concerned with the emotional undercurrents of social memory that informed how past gestures are read in the present. Although gestures might once have claimed stable meanings through time, Warburg noted pathosformel can also be ‘aesthetically reversed’, that is, they both contain and can be flipped into their opposite; joyous laughter becoming sinister mania. The same gesture is capable of communicating different things and Warburg termed this oscillation between opposing forces an ‘energetic inversion’. Thus, for Warburg, gestures are primarily signs of ‘affective intensity and energy’. An affective (and affecting)energy is stored in, released, received and re-enacted through gestures; in short, gestures move (corporeally, temporally) and we are moved by them (but to what psychological ‘affect’ we cannot always be sure for that same gesture, as we have seen, can tip into its opposite meaning).
“Gesture's fragile, fluctuating energy is displaced; a process akin to pinning a butterfly to a mount, which tells you nothing of what a butterfly actually is.”
Returning to Atkins and Zultanski’s Sorcerer, the set was delineated by three cast-iron radiators. The script’s Appendix A states the radiators must be ‘plumbed into the central heating of the theatre […] on and quite warm’.² It is also acknowledged the audience might never notice the radiators are on. There is however a moment in the play when Peter leans in to adjust one of the radiators, ‘his microphone picks up the sound of water moving in it’. For a play propelled by gesture – through ticks and gestural skits (outlined in the stage directions) – and where the use of these gestures conjures a sense of psychological unease, it feels apt to note the explicit circulation of energy in the space as carrying something of a Warburgian charge; Where else does gesture emerge from but the heady concoction of affective intensity and energy.
If gestures have long been defined by a simultaneous charge between kinetic energy and stored energy, today gestures are also stored in energy intensive data centres. The online database Imagenet contains a wealth of gesticulations categorised under the branch: natural object> body> human body>; and there are datasets based on a collection of European early modern paintings, from which hand gestures are ‘extracted using human pose estimation (HPE) methods’. Some datasets are open source while others are bought and sold or generated in-house to train all sorts of AI tools. The first that comes to mind is the gesture recognition feature in Google Meet video calls. Give a thumbs up and an emoji will appear on screen, raise your hand and the host will be notified you have something to say, of course this function is rife with misrecognition, outbursts of emojis and unintended affects. In such datasets the cataloguing may evoke Warburg’s atlas by bringing together disparate sources that share a formal similitude, but the binary order imposed by these datasets flattens and de-contextualises gestures, fixing them to a preordained affect. Stored here, gesture's fragile, fluctuating energy is displaced; a process akin to pinning a butterfly to a mount, which tells you nothing of what a butterfly actually is.
¹ Georges Didi Huberman, The Surviving Image (Penn State University Press, 2016) p. 161
² Ed Atkins, Steven Zultanski, Sorcerer (Prototype, 2023) p. 106
Isabelle Bucklow is a London-based writer, researcher and editor. She is the co-founding editor of motor dance journal.
