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.
While leafing through the thick user manual for our Epson Stylus Pro 4900 printer, we precisely noted the different diagrams which describe the maintenance operations to be carried out to maintain and repair your machine. While doing this work, we noticed that some of these technical operations involve simple and clearly identifiable manual gestures: incising a membrane, curetting an orifice, moving a ruler, or even fanning a ream of paper.
In total, we identified in the user manual of our Epson Stylus Pro 4900 printer, 17 diagrams describing gestures involving the use of our hands. We decided to redo these gestures and record their configuration through a paper cast.
The anthropologist André Leroi-Gourhan, in his book "Le geste et la parole" tells us that humans have always, throughout their history, externalized in the form of tools some of their organic functions. As a result, our vocabulary of gestures has gradually become poorer as manual operations have been transformed into tools. Still in this book, the researcher underlines the dangers of a society whose gestural imagination would be reduced to nothing. Would such a society have the necessary resources to invent the future in which it wishes to live?
