* A full list of abstracts can be downloaded at the bottom of the page. (Updated: 10/30/09)

Marc Ainger
Animating Electronic and Computer Music
The word "animate" is used here in the sense of "bringing to life." As an artist working with electronic and computer music, I have always been concerned with  animating music that is conceived without a direct relationship to traditional (human) performative gesture. In fact, this is one of the unique characteristics of the medium, and it may serve as one of its strengths or its weaknesses, depending on how the artist works with it.  I will consider varying approaches to animating electronic and computer music, and I will consider some of the questions that are posed by these approaches.

Vita Berezina-Blackburn
Translating Gesture with Motion Capture Technology
Motion capture technology allows to examine gesture independently from the visual appearance of its source. Presented in animated format this is an approach for artistic interpretation of gesture as embodiment, form and space with varying degree of abstraction. Embracing the view of gesture as vehicle for externalizing a thought this is a process of both translating and sharing an act of gesture by channeling its meaning.

Andrea Bachner
Inscription - Gesture - Script:
Some Thoughts on a Sinographic Model
In this paper, I will reflect on the medial politics of the theoretical models of inscription and script in conjunction with gesture. I will read these theoretical concepts with and against contemporary Chinese experiments with script, calligraphy, and gesture, namely Zhang Yimou's movie Hero and the opening ceremony of the 2008 Olympic Games (also staged by Zhang). I will focus more particularly on questions of transculturality (Western dreams of Chinese writing versus the "reinvention" of Chinese writing in a national and global context) and medial politics (i.e. what is involved in the ways in which we conceptualize inscription, script, and gesture, and how we describe different writing systems in medial terms).

Paul Bouissac
Gestures for the senses:
an evolutionary perspective on the multimodality of gesture
This paper will examine the multimodality of gestures (haptic [touch], optic [production of visual patterns in distal space], acoustic [production of sounds], and olfactory [pheromones dispersion], and to propose an evolutionary interpretation of the way in which these dimensions are integrated in human interactions.        

Gestures have been studied almost exclusively from the point of view of the visual medium and researchers have been mostly concerned with their morphological description, and their regularity and systematicity within particular cultural contexts. They have usually been construed either as micro-temporal events in social dynamics or as habitus in historical perspectives to the extent in which they have been documented in texts and iconography. This paper’s aim is to contribute to expanding the scope of these studies – with respect to both perceptual modalities and time frame -- in order to deepen our understanding of this important aspect of human behavior.

The first part of the paper will focus on the inherent multimodality of gestures. Obvious examples are handshakes and clapping, which are culture-dependent social behaviors and involve touch and sounds. But all gestures can be assessed with respect to a progressive haptic and acoustic scale in addition to their visual dimension, as well as non negligible olfactory functions with respect to the dispersion of pheromones. These phenomenological variations are relevant to the semantic of gestures and should be fully conceptualized. They are also important for understanding the relations between the different modalities and the reasons for which the visual medium has been foregrounded so far in gesture studies.

The second part will endeavor to show that the time frame of gesture research must include an evolutionary perspective if all aspects of the object of study – including its inherent multimodality – are to be accounted for. The paper will then discuss the evolutionary pressures that may account for the poly-functionality of the upper limbs (including of course the hands) in primates and particularly in Homo sapiens.  

In conclusion, the paper will develop some theoretical and methodological proposals toward a research agenda that would integrate the intrinsic multimodal dimensions of gestures in view of their evolutionary significance.

J. Briggs Cormier
Viewpoints:
A Movement Vocabulary
Anne Bogart's Viewpoints are a practical vocabulary that encourages collaboration within the theatre rehearsal room. The Viewpoints allow company members to share critical, yet nonjudgmental, feedback during the creative moment. This allows the creative moment to be extended rather than cut short by outside direction.

Brenda Brueggermann
The Open Hand, the Closed Fist:
A Rhetoric of Gesture in American Sign Language
The literal and physical figure of "the open hand and the closed fist" as a symbol for rhetorical (persuasive) theory and practice has been documented on several accounts.   This paradoxical gestural figure serves as the anchor for a rhetorical analysis  of the 3 kinds of persuasive appeals--ethical, logical, and emotional--that are made in contemporary American Sign Language (ASL) discourse as it occurs across 3 different sites: ASL literature (poetry, performance art, storytelling); social network vlogs; and some popular sign-language based youtube videos.

Ricky Crano
From Gesture to Image and Back Again:
Agamben and the Cinematization of Thought
Every image simultaneously obliterates (insofar as it posits a referential reality and passive subject) and preserves (insofar as its stillness secretes a pure potentiality) the gestural movement that it captures. Because the advent of cinema, through its illusion of movement, marks an attempt to revitalize the power of gesture, Agamben can argue that gesture, and not image, constitutes this mediological, memorial technology. On the threshold of writing movement and moving writing, the cinematograph, in its most literal sense, is both paralyzing and liberatory with regard to the gesture that it seeks to reanimate. This paper will reassess and then expand on this ontology of cinema with an account of the interruptive force of the cut, the transversal relation of disparates in montage, and finally Agamben’s own cinematic style and the implicit challenge it poses to future philosophical thought.

John Davidson
Brecht’s Cinematic Gestus
Bertolt Brecht most famously sketched out his ideas on the notion of gestus in his work on theater in the period immediately following WWII.  “Actors’ Training” describes the category of “gesture” as arising from daily life and being formed in the theater in two ways.  There are individual “gestures” that function as either a tradition-determined replacement for language (the nod of the head to signify assent), an illustration of something external (the curve of a racecar), or an expression of something internal (a grimace).  The gestus, on the other hand, is a complex of individual gestures and expressions that show an overall attitude (Gesamthaltung), which can manifest itself at the level of an individual scene or an entire work.  Both in “Actors’ Training” and the “Little Organon for the Theater,” Brecht stresses the complex and contradictory nature of the social gestus (gesellschaftliches Gestus), and it is the admittance of this complexity that he insists upon as he warns actors and directors against moving toward representations that can reduced to a single term.  For a director, a play’s overall gestus is to be sought in the attitude of the author and the attitude of the epoch from which it comes.  The individual production provides one more turn of the screw for the audience member or critic, as the gestus then also becomes grounded in the moment and choices of the performance, its presentation of the contradictions of the day.While much of his theory of gestus seems specifically generated in regard to the theater, Brecht uses the term with some frequency already in his writing on film from the 1920s and early 1930s.  In that context it lacks the clearer delineation that it will later receive, but this may not be such a bad thing, as that later clarity comes as he prepares for his return to (East) Germany and then responds to the official reaction to his material there.  The task of the work to be presented at “Gesture at Large” will be to examine the implications of gestus within the context of film, i.e. prior to its post-WWII casting.  We will consider first Brecht’s initial understanding of film as a medium that could resist certain habituated gestures of interpretation (such as, art is the expression of individual personality) and could more adequately address the productive needs of culture, seeking an overall gestus toward the cinema in his attitude and that of his epoch.  The second task will be to carry this notion of gestus into a reckoning with contemporary cinema and cinematic theory, to see what it still has to offer in this regard.

Mark Harris
The Undead Gesture–contemporary art’s malignancy                                 
The continuing investment by visual artists in gestural strategies seems unaffected by a legacy of critical commentary on subjectivity and mark-making in art. In spite of examples like Friedrich Nietzsche’s suspicion of the reverence for artistic spontaneity, Walter Benjamin’s association of pictorial facture with atavistic art practices, Joseph Kosuth’s dismissive classification of painting as a fiction of signature marks, and Mary Kelly’s association of traumatic performance rituals with the myths of subjectivity enacted by abstract expressionism, artists have neither been able, nor willing, to forgo gesture. Do the possibilities for contemporary artists consist in annotating preexisting roles, playing before a backdrop of gestural codes as if enacting the script for an artistic ontology in a one-theater town? Or does the persistence of these practices reveal a field of operations with the unlimited potential of new roles for art? Is this an accommodation to a field of restricted actions entailing surrender to what is acceptable as art, or does it constitute a critical engagement that pushes at art’s limitations? Are there temporal or geographic reasons for the relevance of such work, where at one time, in one milieu, the gestures of an artist might possess an agency that would dissipate elsewhere? Or is gesture always already undead?

David Horn
Chevreul's Pendulum:
Automatism, Attention, and the Unconscious
This paper follows mid-19th century experiments with divining rods, "exploratory pendulums," and "talking tables" and explores their implications for later theories of writing and consciousness.

Tom Kasulis
Kūkai and the Cosmos as Gesture
Kūkai (774–835), the founder of Japanese Shingon (“Truth-Word” or “Mantra”) Buddhism, was one of Japan’s most profound and influential thinkers. Affiliated with the so-called “esoteric” traditions of Buddhism, Kūkai believed that reality was not to be observed or analyzed, but rather engaged; language was not to refer to its object but to confer with it; and wisdom was not to be gained but performed. Each of these beliefs was enacted in a form of ritual praxis: the structure of reality contemplated through mandalas, the resonance of energy-matter sounded as “truth words” (mantras); and wisdom manifested through sacred gestures called in (mudras or seals). In his system, the three practices—the three “intimacies”—are so interfused as to be inseparable, but one can get the point of the whole system by focusing on any one of the three. In this paper I will focus on the gesture aspect. For Kūkai, the cosmos is itself a Buddha, which itself is practicing the mandalas, mantras, and mudras. While the mandala gives structure to reality and the mantra gives matter-energy its force or vitality, the mudra gives the universe its pattern of change. The Buddha’s gestures lend the universe its style and our gestures can participate in that style, bringing us into harmony with the way of things. Without our performing gesture, we cannot be intimate with the universe and cannot achieve wisdom.

Matt Lewis
Evolving Gesture Technology
As technologies emerge which allow computers to observe human motion, the space of possibilities for integrating gesture into computer interfaces is rapidly expanding. The landscape of gesture recognition technology from the near future will be surveyed, as well as approaches for exploring possible application domains.

Timothy McNiven
The Pitfalls and Potentials of Using Visual Evidence in Studying the History of Gestures
In studying the history of gestures, scholars must rely on two sources: texts and pictures.  Though each of these has its difficulties, I want to address the problems and benefits of pictorial imagery.  My own work examines gestures on Athenian pottery from roughly 750 to 300 BCE, a body of some 40,000 images on which gestures are often used to develop the narrative by adding emotional responses and portraying some kinds of communication.  With this extensive body of well-dated images, it is possible to trace a gesture’s appearance, change over time, and disappearance, and perhaps interpret the meaning.  But this is not as simple as it sounds.  Images on pots are not objective documentation, they are subject to their own conventions, and only limited contexts are depicted on them.  Other periods present other problems.  The gestures depicted on icons were codified by the clergy, leaving Byzantine artists little space for documenting the use of gestures in their society.  Late Renaissance artists created oddly stylized gestures that may have little relationship to reality.  The scholar of gesture needs to be aware of pitfalls such as these to avoid using pictorial evidence uncritically.

Michael Mercil
Gesture and the Animal
Michael Mercil discusses his current “agri/cultural” project called The Virtual Pasture—an artwork making relation between a flock of sheep; a grazing meadow; an outdoor video monitor; a public land-grant university; the Wexner Center for the Arts; 4-H youth programs; a livestock auction; an art auction and a documentary video.  Of special interest  are types of knowledge gained and communicated by means other than words. With The Virtual Pasture he explores human and domestic animal relations—in particular, how people and farm animals learn to know and trust one another through touching, or handling, rather than through speech. Among the questions this project asks are, Where, when and how do we encounter farm animals now? And, How might we re-establish contact with those living creatures with which we share deep mutual dependence, but which we have made invisible to our daily life?

Carrie Noland
Captured Body Movements: The Digital Choreography of Merce Cunningham
Brian Rotman writes suggestively in Becoming Beside Ourselves that “Once the body’s movements, gestures, and hapticities are captured and digitally manipulable they become de-territorialized.”  He maintains that methods of digital manipulation are capable of producing a “bio-technic subject,” a new co-constructed body that stretches the limits of what a body can (or was thought to be able to) do.  In this paper I examine the effort of the experimental choreographer, Merce Cunningham, to apply the LifeForms software computer program to the creation of “movement phrases,” gestural sequences that are the building blocks of a dance.  Cunningham began as an avant-garde innovator in the vein of John Cage, employing low-tech chance operations to construct sequences of movement.  From 1990 on, he shifted the responsibility of sequence-production from the tossed coin to the “Sequence Editor” of LifeForms.  I explore how the manipulation of the gesturing body in both cases affects the type of body—understood as a delicate sensorimotor network—that emerges from this “distributed” form of choreographic procedure.   I also ask whether we can really claim that gestural “operating chains” (Leroi-Gourhan) developed within cultural, artifact-laden environments are any less “captured,” “manipulated,” and “de-territorialized” than the dance movements Cunningham dissects and recombines for his works.

Dorry Noyes
Making a Gesture: French Outsider Politicians Between Classicism and Transgression

Drawing on a musical conception of gesture as a salient, shaped break in a pattern, I will consider gesture as a mode of political action--a rich topic particularly in relation to social movements, diplomacy, and electoral politics. Focusing on the last, I'll talk about the matrix of power, solidarity, and authenticity through which politicians' bodily comportment is assessed in representative democracies, conditioned by culture-specific norms of performance. In France, the classical tradition imposes particularly self-conscious, indeed reified, disciplines of decorum upon political actors, which are felt by many to undermine democratic practice. I will compare two incidents in which leaders from outside the traditional political elite committed gestures that reawakened public commitment to the classical norms, with very different outcomes for the legitimacy of the actors in question: the suicide of socialist Prime Minister Pierre Bérégovoy on May Day, 1993 and the 2008 episode in which President Nicolas Sarkozy told a French farmer to f--- off.

Josh Penrose
Mapping Anything to Anything:
Gestural Mapping in Digital Media Performance
This presentation will discuss control of electronic sound in performance situations by considering real-time digital controllers designed, built and performed by the presenter.  Among these instruments are the “Recycler 2.0”, a feedback tube responding to spatial position, orientation and acceleration, and “Plane 1.0” a Theremin-like instrument that uses infra-red light to detect the hands of the performer.  The presentation will explore these instruments through the lens of historical instrument design considerations, as well as the gestural relationship between the body and instrument offered by new digital technologies.

Aron Vinegar
Wittgenstein, Architecture, Gesture
In three brief but important passages, Wittgenstein writes about the close, one might say ‘perspicuous’, relationship between architecture and gesture:
“Architecture is a gesture. Not every purposive movement of the human body is a gesture. And no more is every building designed for a purpose architecture.” 
“Architecture:--draw a door—‘Slightly too large’.  You might say: ‘He has an excellent eye for measurement.’ No.—he sees it hasn’t the right expression—it doesn’t make the right gesture.”
“Remember the impression one gets from good architecture, that it expresses a thought. It makes one want to respond with a gesture.”The purpose of this talk is to make some sense of these passages in relationship to Wittgenstein’s writings on and practices in architecture, and to his other comments about gesture in regards to the sacred, music, language, and following signs. I will open this out to some contemporary examples of art and architectural theory and practice that elucidate the fecundity of thinking about gesture and architecture with regards to the issues of comportment, experience, expression, and language that they raise. If architecture is a form of life, a way of acting, how does it construct its expressive gestures, and how might we respond to them? What does it mean to make an architectural gesture as opposed to a gesticulation? Are there any strict criteria to differentiate the two?