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).

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“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.” 

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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. 

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¹  Georges Didi Huberman, The Surviving Image (Penn State University Press, 2016) p. 161
² Ed Atkins, Steven Zultanski, Sorcerer (Prototype, 2023) p. 106

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Isabelle Bucklow is a London-based writer, researcher and editor. She is the co-founding editor of motor dance journal. 

Film

Francis Ford Coppola

Film

Film

Sourcing Gesture Pt. 1

Antonin Artaud, 1948. Le Cuziat.

Isabelle Bucklow March 4, 2025

Some months have passed since we last spoke about gesture, and we are no closer to conclusivity. I'll begin with simple observations:: we all gesture everyday, and those gestures are, more often than not, seen and understood by others. Gestures signify and transmit information and so serve a communicative function. This communicative status has led many to neatly package gesture as a language of sorts, that is, decodable, meaningful, shareable and universal. We’ve explored in earlier writings that gestures accompany and provide emphasis to language, as in persuasive speeches of antiquity to present day. But this understanding can  impose hierarchy, establishing language as the source-code that deciphers the gestures. Here, however, I am interested in those gestures that disrupt semantic meaning, that do not rely on a specific word or stable concept, but instead subtly shift according to their affective intensity, revealing the invisible according to their own symbolic logic. 

The French dramatist Antoin Artaud’s impassioned 1938 manifestos for the stage, The Theatre and its Double, speaks of the actor’s need ‘to break through language in order to touch life’, clarifying ‘it must be understood that we are not referring to life as we know it from the surface of fact, but to that fragile, fluctuating center which forms never reach.’¹ Gesture exists  in this precarious point between fragile fluctuating life-force and corporealized form. Writing some years later, British theatre director Peter Brook referenced Artaud, adding the actor’s need to find a ‘form which would be a container and reflector of his impulses [...] We encouraged the actors to see themselves not only as improvisers, lending themselves blindly to their inner impulses, but as artists responsible for searching and selecting amongst form, so that a gesture or a cry becomes like an object that he discovers and even remoulds.’²

If we are to loosen language’s hold on gesture, then we can  more wholly consider the forms or gestures an actor selects, and where they came from. For it seems that when you are really into something or someone and your interest is piqued, you’ll quickly get an itch to know the fabled ‘origin story’ and isolate the determining factor that set it all in motion. In anticipation, we are not going to find it.

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“Just as a child imitates the actions successfully executed by those with authority over them, the gesture is borrowed from without and performed from within.”

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One approach would be to turn to evolution. We have previously considered Andre Leroi-Gourhan’s Gesture and Speech where he traces ‘The essential traits of human technical gesticulation’ back to the action of grasping. Leroi-Gourhan, like us, was interested in the gestures of human hands, even more so in the ‘mesh of techniques’ that humans inhabit and from which a grasping hand emerges. But dwelling on the prehistoric conditions that produced a certain gesture feels a lot like asking someone their personal history only for them to begin at early bipedal apes roaming the Miocene epoch. So, by way of narrative license, let’s jump from Leroi-Gourhan’s paleoanthropology to a contemporary avant-garde theatre-script: Ed Atkins and Steven Zultanski’s Sorcerer, 2023, in which three protagonists, drinking beer in their friend's apartment, are discussing how they go about putting on and taking off a jumper:

‘I put my arms through like this–
(makes motion, puts her hands through the air like a long glove or like putting hands in a cow, one after the other.)
And then I do–
(swooping motion, ducks head in, almost like going under a short doorway) 
[...]
I do an awkward mixture of both. I put my head and one arm though at the same time–
(makes moton, half-lifts one arm and tilts head, like putting head through and checking on the other side of a portal)’³ 

Described are idiosyncratic combinations of gestures that achieve the same thing, as well as stage directions for gestures that employ metaphor to describe one gesture by way of a different gesture. 

One protagonist observes:

‘There’s a way people do it in the movies, which I copied as a kid: you put your arms in first– 
(puts arms in.) 
And you go–
(pulls over head in a movie way)’

In a seminal, anthropological text on gesture from 1934, Techniques of the Body, Marcel Mauss noted how movies influenced gestures. When lying in a hospital in New York he wondered, ‘where previously I had seen girls walking as my nurses walked…At last I realised that it was at the cinema…Returning to France, I noticed how common this gait was […] American walking fashions had begun to arrive over here, thanks to the cinema… ’.⁴

The walking fashions described by Mauss are not motivated by biological necessity but adopted on the basis of aesthetics, taste and an imitative desire to be like stars in the movies. It is through this  opening that we can pursue symbolic gestures that arise from what Mauss terms ‘prestigious imitation’: Just as a child imitates the actions successfully executed by those with authority over them, the gesture is in this sense borrowed from without and performed from within. And so, at the turn of the century you could say many common gestures borrowed their iconography from what was performed in the cinema. But, where then did the cinema source its gestures if not from gestures common to life? 

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¹  Antoin Artuad, The Theatre and Its Double, (Grove Press, 1958 [1938]) Preface, p. 13
² Peter Brook, The Empty Space (Penguin, 1968), p. 58
³ Ed Atkins, Steven Zultanski, Sorcerer (Prototype, 2023) p. 17-18 
⁴ Marcel Mauss, Techniques of the Body ([1934] 1973), Economy and Society, 2(2), p. 72

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Isabelle Bucklow is a London-based writer, researcher and editor. She is the co-founding editor of motor dance journal. 

Film

Film

Hannah Peel Playlist

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Mercury Prize, Ivor Novello and Emmy-nominated, RTS and Music Producers Guild winning composer, with a flow of solo albums and collaborative releases, Hannah Peel joins the dots between science, nature and the creative arts, through her explorative approach to electronic, classical and traditional music.

The King and Prince of Cups (Tarot Triptych)

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Name:  King of Cups, Prince of Cups
Number: 1 or 3
Astrology: Water or Scorpio
Qabalah: Yod of He or Vau of He

Chris Gabriel March 1, 2025

The King of Cups is the ruler of the suit. He sits imperiously on a throne, cup in hand. He is the powerful sea, and the paradoxical strength of water. As chapter 78 of the Tao Te Ching says: 

Nothing in all beneath heaven is so soft and weak as water.
And yet, for conquering the hard and strong, nothing succeeds like water.
And nothing can change it:
weak overcoming strong,
soft overcoming hard.

This is the way of the King of Cups.

In Rider, we find a fair faced King wearing an ornate crown with golden filigree, a greenish gold cape with red scallops, and a blue robe. A fish pendant hangs around his neck and his shoes are scaly. One hand holds the Cup and the other, a scepter. Behind him the sea churns, a ship sails, and a fish swims.

In Thoth, we have the equivalent Prince. He is nude but for his helmet, which bears an Eagle. He stares into his cup which holds a serpent. In his hand is a downward lotus. His fluid chariot is drawn by a great eagle. Waves splash behind him.

In Marseille, we have the simplest image. An old grey bearded king with a large crown under which the flaps of his hat rise up. He is dressed as the other kings, but his cup is the largest.

We can interpret, in this card, the classic 1950’s image of the father, home from a long day of work and having a drink, and all of the negative connotations that may come with this.

In the phrase “Drink like a fish”, you will see the ill dignified form of the King. The solution is the serpent in the cup: St. John’s Chalice.

St. John is given a cup of poison wine. He blesses it, a serpent rises out, and he drinks it just fine. This is the highest form of the Scorpionic Water: a medicinal poison. Harmful substance distilled into a curative form. The King of Cups understands well the maxim of Paracelsus: dosis sola facit venenum. The dose makes the poison.

While the King of Wands will act on aggression and make war with the world, the King of Cups will, like water, slowly erode the foundations of his enemies. He must beware, however, lest his waters dissolve himself. This is shown perfectly in the Fisher King of Arthurian legend who, wounded again and again by the bleeding, poisonous Lance of Longinus (the Lance that wounded Christ on the Cross) and by his own poisoning, poisons his land to become a waste. The only cure is in the Holy Grail.

When pulling this card we may be met with an older, wiser man who has mastered his emotions, and is filled with love. Alternatively, they may be troubled, with a heavy heart. We may also be called on to use our love and power. Emotion is extremely powerful, be sure it sweetens and heals rather than spoil and poison those around us.

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Chris Gabriel is a twenty four year old wizard and poet who runs the YouTube channel MemeAnalysis.

CHANNEL, SOCIAL, READINGS

Film

Karmic Escape Velocity

George Sturdy and Solomon Young, 1869.

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Molly Hankins February 27, 2025

The Law of One is based on a series of channeled conversations between physics professor Don Elkins and Ra, the Egyptian sun god. It posits that forgiveness is the path required to exit the wheel of karma. Forgiveness of self and others corrects the imbalance of ‘energetic momentum’ between giver and receiver, described as karma in The Law of One. The momentum is said to take on a circular pattern of repetition that can only be disrupted by complete forgiveness. 

Ra is a 2.6 billion year old, sixth-dimensional social-memory complex. They chose a physicist as the preferred channel for The Law of One’s teaching because of Elkin’s advanced understanding of certain physics-based concepts, namely inertia. In physics, inertia is a property that allows matter to exist in a single state unless changed by an external force. Humans caught in the cycle of karma, unable to understand the true purpose of forgiveness, risk never being able to achieve the escape velocity necessary to get out.

Ra, and many other higher dimensional beings who’ve taken an interest in human life, acts as that external force by giving us the information necessary to overcome karmic inertia. From our limited perspective, we can’t understand the utility of forgiveness, particularly radical forgiveness for acts of violence and destruction that are deemed unforgivable. Without being able to understand why it’s useful to forgive, and how forgiveness of self is inherent in true forgiveness of another, we’re unmotivated to do so. 

Rather than repeating the lessons created by imbalance, forgiveness allows us to integrate sustainable balance in how we give and receive energy. We benefit from understanding how the physical and emotional experience of balanced energy exchange feels and the gain intellectual experience of the lesson learned. Not only does conscious forgiveness prevent us from making the same mistakes and repeating lessons, it releases us from negativity by allowing us to see others as part of ourselves.

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“Achieving peace of heart and mind stronger than rational thinking is what life feels like off the karmic wheel.”

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As suggested by the name, the premise of The Law of One is that we are all one.  Specifically that all of life is part of the original thought of The Creator, and as we all contain the initial  creative spark from one thought, we are all reflections of The Creator. By recognizing ourselves in the reflection of another, we can more easily forgive. Forgiveness is not about condoning a transgression or trying to make it right, it’s about releasing any negative emotions to free ourselves. 

Once forgiven, the transgression no longer has power over us, even if the pain caused by it still remains. This frees us to begin healing, and the Bible refers to that healed state of being as “a peace that passes all understanding” (Phillippians 4:7). Achieving peace of heart and mind stronger than rational thinking is what life feels like off the karmic wheel. While the inevitability of human drama will pull us back on,we can always forgive and hit karmic escape velocity once more. 

A passage from The Law of One uses the metaphor of a poker game to describe the role of forgiveness as a tool to ‘win’ the game of life: “I am Ra. Let us re-examine this metaphor and multiply it into the longest poker game you can imagine, a lifetime. The cards are love, dislike, limitation, unhappiness, pleasure, etc. They are dealt and re-dealt and re-dealt continuously. You may, during this incarnation begin — and we stress begin — to know your own cards. You may begin to find the love within you. You may begin to balance your pleasure, your limitations, etc. However, your only indication of other-selves’ cards is to look into the eyes.

“You cannot remember your hand, their hands, perhaps even the rules of this game. This game can only be won by those who lose their cards in the melting influence of love; can only be won by those who lay their pleasures, their limitations, their all upon the table face up and say inwardly: ‘All, all of you players, each other-self, whatever your hand, I love you.’ This is the game: to know, to accept, to forgive, to balance, and to open the self in love.”

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Molly Hankins is an Initiate + Reality Hacker serving the Ministry of Quantum Existentialism and Builders of the Adytum.

Rick Beato

Film

Iggy Pop Playlist

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Iggy Pop is an American singer, songwriter, musician, record producer, and actor. Since forming The Stooges in 1967, Iggy’s career has spanned decades and genres. Having paved the way for ‘70’s punk and ‘90’s grunge, he is often considered “The Godfather of Punk.”

Wheel of Fortune (Tarot Triptych)

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Name:  Wheel of Fortune
Number: X
Astrology: Jupiter
Qabalah: Kaph, the Palm

Chris Gabriel February 22, 2025

In the Wheel of Fortune, we find one of the greatest mysteries in the deck. It is the endless flux of our lives and the universe encapsulated in a single image. Understanding this card will allow us to grasp the cosmology of tarot and divination.

In Rider, we find a wheel in the middle of a blue sky. The Cross is its center, and around it are the symbols of Salt, Sulphur, Mercury, and Aquarius. On the rim is the Tetragrammaton and TARO, serving duall

purpose as an anagram of ROTA, or Wheel. Atop the Wheel we have a Sphinx bearing a sword. A snake falls down its left side, and Hermanubis flies up from below. At the corners are the four Cherubs, winged and reading in their clouds.

In Thoth, there are vibrant purples and golds - the colors of the divine. In the center is a ten spoked wheel. Riding the wheel are the Sphinx who sits above, Apophis or Typhon falling down, and a monkey climbing up. The background is a violet spiral marred by the lightning bolts, which descend from the stars above.

In Marseille, we are shown a more material wheel sat upon a base. It has six spokes. Along the wheel are three monkeys: the one atop is crowned, winged and bearing a sword, to the left one falls and the other rises on the right.

What is the Wheel of Fortune? What is the meaning of this trinity?

Let us look to Jupiter, the God of this card. Jupiter, like the other Gods of the ancient pantheon, is very human. As the king of the Gods he rewards those who please him and punishes those who upset him, and his whims are very fickle. This is the nature of life and luck, where our conditions change extremely easily and with no warning. We find ourselves on top of the world, and then we are plummeted down again, and must fight our way back up. This is an eternal struggle.

This card argues there is a logic to this cycle of change. It can be put concisely into a magic word: IAO.

Isis
Apophis
Osiris

In these three characters, we are given the narrative cycle for life. Isis and Osiris are married, Apophis/Seth kills Osiris and chops him up, then Isis restores and mummifies him.

Isis is the mother and healer, Apophis the son and destroyer, and Osiris, the father and the destroyed. 

This is the essential magickal trinity of life, death, and rebirth, and the alchemical trinity of Salt, Sulphur, and Mercury. 

I see this pattern very clearly in children’s games: Rock, Paper, Scissor and Kiss, Marry, Kill.

Isis: Salt: Rock: Kiss
Apophis: Sulphur: Scissor: Kill
Osiris: Mercury: Paper: Marry

The trinity is even mirrored in language with the Ablaut Reduplication. Consider: Tic-Tac-Toe, hip-hop, splish splash. If we reverse these, Toe-Tac-Tic, hop-hip, splash splish, we end up with a very awkward phrase, we naturally speak in the IAO pattern.

This may seem silly, but it is through this exact pattern that we can grasp our ever changing conditions in life.

The Wheel of Fortune itself is still used extensively in games: from game shows, various wheel based auctions to, of course, roulette. In all of these, we see a very immediate form of luck and changing fortunes.

When we pull this card, we are seeing a coming change to our situation.  Luck and fate will come into play. Whether or not this will bring us higher or drop us farther can only be indicated by the other cards. For example, if a card like “Failure” precedes Fortune things may be ready to improve. 

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Chris Gabriel is a twenty four year old wizard and poet who runs the YouTube channel MemeAnalysis.

CHANNEL, SOCIAL, READINGS

Film

A Start

Knot, 1947. Anni Albers.

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Anni Albers was one of the key figures of 20th Century Art. Joining Walter Gropius’ Bauhaus School as an untrained, but deeply passionate, novice, she came to create a new language of textiles, a radical theory of color, and an understanding of pattern and form that would change the course of art history. Her career extended long beyond the Bauhaus, blurring the lines between craft and fine art, teaching at Black Mountain College and becoming the first textile artist to have a solo show at the MOMA. In this essay, written in 1947 but not published until Gropius’ death in 1969, she succinctly captures the feeling of a radical place that offered new promises and the development that this philosophy encouraged in all of its practitioners.

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Anni Albers, February 20, 2025

I came to the Bauhaus at its “period of the saints.” Many around me, a lost and bewildered newcomer, were, oddly enough, in white—not a professional white or the white of summer—here it was the vestal white. But far from being awesome, the baggy white dresses and saggy white suits had rather a familiar homemade touch. Clearly this was a place of groping and fumbling, of experimenting and taking chances. 

Outside was the world I came from, a tangle of hopelessness, of undirected energy, of cross-purposes. Inside, here, at the Bauhaus after some two years of its existence, was confusion, too, I thought, but certainly no hopelessness or aimlessness, rather exuberance with its own land of confusion. But there seemed to be a gathering of efforts for some dim and distant purpose, a purpose I could not yet see and which, I feared might remain perhaps forever hidden from me. 

Then Gropius spoke. It was a welcome to us, the new students. He spoke, I believe, of the ideas that brought the Bauhaus into being and of the work ahead. I do not recall anything of the actual phrasing or even of the thoughts expressed. What is still present in my mind is the experience of a gradual condensation, during that hour he spoke, of our hoping and musing into a focal point, into a meaning, into some distant, stable objective. It was an experience that meant purpose and direction from there on. 

This was about twenty-six years ago. 

Last year some young friends of mine told me of the opening speech Gropius gave at Harvard at the beginning of the new term. What made it significant to them was the experience of realizing sense and meaning in a confused world, now as then—the same experience of finding one’s bearing.

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Anni Albers (1899 –1994) was a German born, Jewish artist, writer, teacher, and printmaker. Alongside her husband Josef Albers, she helped redefine color theory in the 20th century, and was the leading voice textile art, ushering in craft practices into fine art.

Richard Prince

Film