Date: 2022-2023 Materials: tissue paper, clay, printed paper, book Thanks to: Maud Lalouis-Gret, Roberto Barbanti, Yves Citton, Gwenola Wagon, participants of seminars of EUR ArTeC, Paris 8 and Parsons Paris team.
In his book Gesture and Speech, the anthropologist André Leroi-Gourhan tells us that throughout their history, humans have always externalized certain organic functions in the form of tools. As a result, our vocabulary of gestures has gradually diminished as manual operations have been transformed into tooling. The researcher highlights the dangers of a society whose gestural imagination would be reduced to nothing. Would such a society still have the resources needed to invent the future in which it wishes to live?
Working from the images in the user manual of our Epson Stylus Pro 4900 printer, we produced a kind of three-dimensional gestural archive of technical diagrams. We observed that the roughly seventeen gestures described in this manual (to load, pull, scrape, clean) were, in the end, very familiar to us. They are among the last remaining gestures that make up our gestural repertoire. Moreover, these gestures leave very little room for interpretation for users who choose to perform them. In other words, not only is our repertoire of gestures shrinking, but the last gestures we are still invited to carry out cannot easily be reinvented.
