on the "cinema of attractions": "Every change in film history **79** implies a change in its address to the spectator, and each period constructs its spectator in a new way" (2006, 387). Through the topos of the rube, I have been dismantling the construction of the "disciplined" spectator. Each period has its own rube figure(s) and each rube figure its own function(s): from silencing the distracted audience to unsettling the bourgeoisie, from destroying our imaginations to stimulating them (erotically), from reminding us of past screen practices to warning us about the future.

#### **Today's Children as Rubes**

In the following chapter we will encounter children acting like rubes in a museum context or public exhibition space, ignoring the (unspoken) "look, but don't touch" rule, like the two girls who pricked their fingers on the cactus artwork on display in Bologna (see Introduction). In their capacity as film viewers, at home or in the movie theater, young children often reenact, without knowing, the double founding myth of early cinema: running away from the screen when frightened and running toward the screen when curious, intrigued, eager to know, or anxious to interact. I recall that my own daughter at the age of two jumped up to touch the wall when her favorite movie *Finding Nemo* (2003) was projected in a home cinema setting. Having watched the film over and over again on a computer screen, she was marveled by its bigger-than-life projection on the wall and started to play with the characters she was so familiar with, chasing and being chased by the fish in the ocean. Quite different is the anecdote told by film scholar Malte Hagener about a child touching the screen in a movie theater, at an afternoon screening of Martin Scorsese's *Hugo* (2011) in 3D. This anecdotal instance happened at the end of the film, when the end credits were scrolling across the huge screen-wall and the audience was leaving the auditorium. The child, a little girl, ran to the front. At first a bit hesitant, she reached up and touched the screen. Then she ran to her father who was waiting for her back at the entrance. Hagener wondered

**80** when he posted the anecdote on Facebook, is this the "return of the rube in the digital age"?12

Why did this little girl want to touch the screen? For sure, she did not want to play with Hugo Cabret and the other characters, like my daughter did during the full-wall projection of *Finding Nemo*, since the images of the movie were already gone. But how did these girls even think about touching the screen? One might question whether their propensity is somehow grounded in (or enhanced by) today's early familiarization with touch-based media devices. Without wanting to suggest that before the advent of the iPhone and the iPad children would not have touched screens, I am nevertheless wondering whether today's children touch projection surfaces for the same reasons as children did, or would have done, before the age of the touchscreen. Are they touching the screen because they expect something to happen? And when it becomes clear that nothing is happening, why do they continue to touch the screen? At the *Hugo* screening the urge to touch the film screen was without doubt prompted by the 3D quality of the images. The girl's familiarity and hands-on experience with touchscreens, if not a direct cause of her attitude as a rube, might have made her more conscious of the materiality of the images, about their tangibility. In any case, it seems she was reflecting on cinema's "work" (or *travail*), trying to find out where the images came from, as Hagener also suggested.13

More generally, I like to think that for children movies make much more sense as "feelies," as three-dimensional stories that you can enter (as Buster Keaton does in *Sherlock Jr.*) and where you can touch the skin of the beautiful heroes or heroines (as Michel-Ange does in *Les Carabiniers*), not for the sake of sexual arousal, as envisioned by Aldous Huxley, but just to check out how it feels. In

*Brave New World* (1932), the Feelies are specially equipped movie **81** theaters with knobs on the arms of the chairs that spectators should hold to experience "tactual effects" and "titillations." In the mind (or imagination) of both children and rubes, no special equipment is necessary: for them movies are not only talkies but also always "feelies," and therefore they use their sense of touch without embarrassment. This is precisely why I argued in this chapter against the current consensus that the rube (like the child) serves to discipline the audience and to caution against indulging in a tactile film experience; instead, I defend the rube (like the child) as a positive model, a figure that serves to induce the spectators to enrich their film experience by getting back in touch with the hands-on layer of the "feelies."

# **[2] Early Museum's Hands-On Ethos**

*Do not touch! How many times do children hear this order? No one would ever say: do not look, do not listen. Bruno Munari*

## **Please Do Not | Touch It**

In the spring of 2011, I was staying with my family in the Keio Plaza Hotel in Shinjuku, Tokyo's major commercial and administrative district. In the hotel lobby was an exposition of traditional Japanese decoration consisting of all kinds of little colorful objects hung on long red strings. Very tempting to my then threeyear-old, it was strictly forbidden to touch this decorative installation. However, the "Please do not touch it" sign was folded into two parts across the angle of a wooden beam, inviting Englishspeaking tourists actually to "touch it" (fig. 7a–b). This effect was obviously unintentional, as is the case with many of the typical lost-in-translation signs in this city, but it allowed me to turn a blind eye to my daughter's transgressive act.

**84**

[Figure 7a–b] Keio Plaza Hotel, Tokyo. From author's personal archive, March 2011.

The pendulous decorations looked like a refined form of crib **85** mobiles, or an oriental version of Bruno Munari's "useless machines" or Alexander Calder's "mobiles." Both the Italian Futurist designer and the American sculptor made their first kinetic sculptures in the early 1930s, adding motion to the art of sculpture, which, according to W. J. T. Mitchell, is already "so clearly an art of the tactile that it seems superfluous to argue about it" (2007, 398). Whereas Munari is famous for the initiative of organizing "tactile workshops" in the Italian museum context, it is also well known that Calder's hanging wire sculptures, however fragile they may seem, were meant to be put in motion, either by (breathing of) air or by a touch of the hand, in a gentle tactile interaction. Yet parents will often feel compelled to restrain their children from touching these artworks when on display in a traditional museum or exhibition setting. In May 2012 the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam posted on Facebook a picture of a mother with son at their Calder Exhibition in 1969. The mother is clearly trying to prevent her child from touching one of the mobiles, as confirmed by the caption: "Niet aanraken!" (Don't touch!).

"Touch with your eyes, not with your hands" is another saying that parents with young children might find themselves repeating aloud, when taking them to an exhibition. It is a typical response of a typical responsible parent, who observes the rules of our (Western) hands-off culture. As Alexandra Schneider notes, "A visit to an art exhibition in a traditional museum space in the company of small kids will teach you not only about art but also about culture more generally. The most striking, and probably also most obvious lesson, concerns the issue of looking as opposed to touching" (2012, 55). Furthermore, she writes:

In some contemporary art exhibitions you are either explicitly invited to touch the exhibited art work or reminded not to touch it. The basic ethos is still the same: hands off! The invitation to touch the artwork has to be made explicit

#### **86** because it is commonly understood that we are not supposed to do that. (56)

This might also explain my perplexity in the lobby of the Keio Plaza Hotel, when, standing at a particular angle, I first read only the second part of the "Please do not | touch it" caption. For it countered my intuition, or rather my knowledge of the tacit (and still dominant) hands-off rule.

Even in exhibition rooms without disciplining parents (or when disciplining parents are maybe not needed), the same unspoken rule is made evident by the behavioral difference between adults and children: the former usually refrain from touching exhibited works (or they do it secretively), while the latter engage very openly, shamelessly, in a tactile interaction with touchable art objects, screen projections, and installations. I remember experiencing this discrepancy at the retrospective of Bill Viola in the Grand Palais, in Paris, in March 2014. The setup of this exhibition impressed me for the way it was organized as a fluid, almost visceral, path in the semi-darkness, from one installation to another. With all of his major works on display, Bill Viola emerged as a monumental artist of intimacy, or better of intimate encounters. Two works in particular attracted me because of the screen's materiality and potential interaction, each revealing the behavioral difference between adults and children in a traditional museum context.

The first, *The Veiling* (1995), was installed in a large room that one entered from the side, almost bumping into a row of nine translucent screens hung as parallel layers between two opposing video projectors (projecting images of a man and a woman respectively). In front of me, an elderly couple literally hit the screens, probably disoriented by the semi-darkness of the room. Furtively, I also touched one of the screens, curious to feel the texture of this stiffened gauze-like cloth. The second installation, *Going Forth by Day* (2002), occupied a vast room allowing for an impressive display of Viola's famous tribute to Giotto's Scrovegni

Chapel with its five "panels" of HD video projected directly onto **87** the wall (that is, the naked, screen-less wall). In the middle of the room, many adult viewers were sitting on the ground. My attention was drawn to a girl of about ten years old, who was casting shadow figures with her hands on the main entrance panel, "Fire Birth," through which visitors enter Viola's "chapel." Then she walked over to "The Voyage" panel, approaching it very closely, and physically touched the slowly moving image, as if to play with its characters. I was spellbound by this moment of screen touching, by its magic and its naturalness. Nobody reacted, nobody intervened. The Bill Viola exhibition did not bear signs saying "Please do not touch." Yet the disciplined (adult) museumgoer knows that this hands-off rule is implicit: in the Grand Palais as in any other major Parisian museum, you do not touch the artworks, even if they are "mere" projections. Yet the girl did so, unabashed and on purpose.

One might wonder if there is any correspondence with the child running up to the movie screen after the projection of Scorsese's *Hugo* as narrated at the end of Chapter 1. Are the two girls driven by the same force of attraction? To what extent are the situations comparable? First of all, we are clearly dealing with two different settings (museum space vs. cinema multiplex), each with a very specific type of "cinematic" experience (fresco-like video panel vs. 3D adventure motion-picture). But also the motivation behind the actions of the two girls may have to be found elsewhere: Whereas the girl at the Grand Palais might have been bored due to the long museum visit (yet creative enough to entertain herself with shadow plays and screen touching), at the *Hugo* show the touching of the screen was most likely motivated by curiosity. And the latter happened at the very end of the screening, when the images had already disappeared. The girl at the Grand Palais

**88** instead was engaging with the artwork itself, with the characters of "The Voyage."1

In this panel, like in many of Viola's installations, the characters' movements develop very slowly. The tension between motion and stillness, so characteristic for Viola's video art, might trigger even in the adult visitor an impulse to touch the screen. For instance, when facing for the first time the "video painting" *The Quintet of the Astonished* (2000), which shows the unfolding expressions of five actors in extreme slow motion, one might be tempted to touch the group portrait to check out whether its motion can be speed up (or slowed down to a complete standstill), whether any type of interaction is possible or not. Yet our knowledge of the hands-off ethos in the museum context will keep us at a safe distance, causing another type of tension, between our own motion and stillness. As Eivind Røssaak observes in relation to *The Quintet*,

In a strange way, the barely moving figures in the video lead the spectator to be aware of her own motions in front of the screen. To see the image adequately, the spectator must work with her own body's orientation. The spectator's work with the piece becomes a work with her body and its shifting positions, including, significantly, immobility. (2009, 340)

Later in this chapter I will come back to this notion of shifting viewing positions in front of contemporary media art, pointing out how children in particular are able to interact with noninteractive installations following a hands-on approach, that is, performing actions of concrete screen touching. But first I will delve into the history of museum culture to trace the possible origins of the hands-off ethos. In fact, as the research of cultural historians, such as Tony Bennett and Constance Classen, among others, has indicated, the prohibition against touching artworks arises

1 "The Voyage" displays the cross-section of a house, sitting on a hill overlooking a lake. In the house an old man in dying in bed, whereas at the shore of the lake a boat is being prepared to depart.

as an effect of the gradual institutionalization of the museum **89** that occurred during the long nineteenth century. Before this institutionalization process, touching artworks on display was a rather common practice. When using the notion of "early museum," I am aware of suggesting a possible link with "early cinema" and the figure of the rube discussed in Chapter 1. This is not accidental but deliberate.

#### **The Early Museum**

The first museum in the world was reputedly the Museum of Alexandria, with its annex Library of Alexandria. For the origins of the "modern" museum, however, one generally considers as a benchmark the foundation of the Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archaeology in 1677. Upon receiving Elias Ashmole's private collection, the University of Oxford erected a building to house it and make it publicly available. The doors of the Ashmolean Museum opened in 1683. Searching for origins, one can also go back to the early sixteenth century, when Pope Julius II founded the Vatican Museums. After the discovery of the famous Laocoön Group in a Roman vineyard in 1506, the pope decided to purchase the marble statue and put it on public display. His precursor, Pope Sixtus IV, already in 1471, donated a collection of important Roman sculptures to exhibit to the people, which marked the foundation of the Capitoline Museums. If one considers that other significant public museums, such as the British Museum and the Louvre, opened their doors only during the course of the eighteenth century, Italy is the leading example in the sixteenth century.

Precisely in this period, in sixteenth-century Italy, there is an important discussion among artists about the hierarchy of the senses. The so-called *paragone* debate basically turned into a contest between painting and sculpture—a contest about the noblest art form. The central argument in this debate concerned sculptural tactility, which for the defenders of painting (including, **90** above all, Leonardo Da Vinci) was a proof of sculpture's obscenity, while for the defenders of sculpture the tactile dimension was precisely praised as sculpture's most positive and powerful characteristic.2

The artistic rivalry between the senses of sight and touch is rooted in the famous painting contest between Zeuxis and Parrhasius, as described by Pliny the Elder in *Naturalis Historia* (AD 77–79). According to this anecdote of Greek antiquity, Zeuxis painted grapes in a manner so realistic that birds came to peck. The victory of the painting contest seemed to be his, so he said to Parrhasius to push aside the curtain that covered his picture, but it turned out to be a painted curtain. The outcome: Zeuxis deceived the birds, but Parrhasius deceived Zeuxis. Seventeenth-century Dutch painters, such as Gerard Dou and Gerrit Houckgeest, played with Parrhasius's trick. In those times it was customary to protect oil paintings from bright light by means of a drape that had to be pushed aside manually. Dou's *Painter with Pipe and Book* (ca. 1645) and Houckgeest's *Interior of the Old Church in Delft* (ca. 1645) are two examples that fool the viewer by adding at the right side of the frame a little curtain painted so realistically that you can almost reach out and touch it.3

In the late seventeenth century, the art theoretical discussions on the senses became philosophical questions with the debate around the Molyneux problem (1688). Irish philosopher and scientist William Molyneux, troubled by the blindness that afflicted his wife, proposed to John Locke a disturbing scientific

question: If one day a blind man finds his sight, would he be able **91** to recognize with his eyes two solid objects, such as a cube and a sphere, which until then had been perceived by touch only? (Crary 1992, 58). Locke's answer, formulated in *Essay Concerning Human Understanding* (1690), was basically no, because he considered sight and touch to be two completely different (and separate) senses. For more than three centuries the Molyneux problem has continued to resurface in the writings of many authors, from Berkeley to Leibniz, from Merleau-Ponty to today's cognitive sciences and discussions on the phenomenon of synesthesia.

Both the *paragone* debate and the Molyneux problem are crucial in understanding and contextualizing the pre-institutionalized museum, which lasted for a rather long period from the midseventeenth century to the end of the eighteenth century. Key for constructing my history of tactile media is the recent rediscovery, or revaluation, by scholars such as Constance Classen and Barbara Stafford, of how this period of early museum culture was indeed characterized by a hands-on ethos.

Classen's research has demonstrated that the first public museums inherited the practice of touching artworks on display from private art collections. As Classen puts it, it was an almost mandatory aspect of the guided tour with the curator (or the owner of the museum) acting as "gracious host" and the museum visitors as "polite guests." According to this hospitality logic, the museum visitors were supposed to "show their interest and goodwill by asking questions and by touching the proffered objects" (Classen 2005, 275). And Classen adds: "To be invited to peruse a collection of exotic artefacts or *objets d'art* and *not* touch anything would be like being invited to someone's home for dinner and not touching the food" (275). Important to note here is that this hands-on practice was not limited to three-dimensional objects, but also applied, although in a lesser degree, to paintings. People would like to touch paintings to feel the texture of the canvas and paint, or "simply to exercise their right to touch" **92** (297). Because after all that was the reason to go to a museum: to be in direct contact with the art objects.

For almost a century and a half this hands-on ethos characterized early museum culture. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the practice of touching artworks on display started to elicit disapproval and became absolutely taboo by the mid-1840s. This was a direct result of the institutionalization of the museum, which consisted largely in the disciplining of the museum visitor. Other rules were imposed during the institutionalization process: for instance, to lower one's voice, walk slowly with measured pace, dispense with food and drink, and last but not least abide by a dress code. These were all rules to exclude a certain type of public, even if the general idea of the institutionalization of the museum was democratization (see below).

According to Classen, the new hands-off etiquette that was imposed in the course of the nineteenth century also reflected a "change in attitude towards the museum contents," which became more and more regarded as sacred, "inviolable" masterpieces (2005, 282). Yet, it should be stressed that, whereas by the 1840s touching artworks had become taboo in the museum context, in the mid-1820s it was apparently still accepted: "As late as 1827 the Ashmolean regulations allowed visitors to handle artefacts with the curator's permission" (Classen 2007, 899). It is precisely in the 1820s that the first "pre-cinematic" toys appeared on the markets, those optical devices that needed to be operated manually to produce the illusion of a moving image, as I will analyze further in Chapter 5.

## **The User of the Cabinet of Curiosities**

To better understand the logic of hands-on practice, I propose to look briefly into the tradition of private collections known as cabinets of curiosities or "wonder rooms," from which the first public museums inherited this participative, "proto-interactive" culture. Originating in the Middle Ages, the *Wunderkabinett* (cabinet of

wonder), or *Wunderkammer* (chamber of wonder), became a typ- **93** ical phenomenon of the sixteenth century, expanding throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth century, that is, from the Renaissance and Baroque to the Enlightenment. The history of the *Wunderkammer*, and its miniature version, the *Wunderschrank* (closet or cupboard of wonder), is thus largely parallel to the history of the pre-institutionalized museum.

In these private collections the logic of hospitality was in force: the rich collector would invite friends or famous people to visit the cabinet. To visit meant to look at—and importantly, to touch—the objects on display. The collector, too, would touch the artifacts, regularly, to study them, displace them, or rearrange them, as Barbara Stafford has shown.4 Stafford characterizes the *Wunderkammer* and *Wunderschrank* collector as a "user." Cabinets of curiosities, as she writes, were "awaiting the incorporation of far-fetched contents and relying on the user for activation" (Stafford 2001, 7). Objects on display were not merely to be contemplated but explored, manipulated, and put into relation with one another. They stimulated all the senses:

The cosmos as displayed in the *Kunstkammer* was not so much a static tableau to be contemplated as it was a drama of possible relationships to be explored. These diverse artifacts made the active process of relating visible as they reached out to one another to create new pairings. The universal collection thus stimulated its users to become performers handling the props to better understand the world. Putting distant things in contact with one another in order to make connections obliges the collector's five senses to converge in a kind of synesthesia. (Stafford 2001, 6)

4 See Stafford's lengthy and rich introduction to the catalogue *Devices of Wonder: From the World in a Box to Images on a Screen* (2001), which is complemented by thirty-one short, object-related essays by Frances Terpak. NB: The "screen" in the catalogue's subtitle refers not so much to the film screen but rather to the new media screen, on which we visually and manually organize the cosmos, as the collectors of the *Wunderkammer* did.

**94** The *Wunderkammer* contained all types of *mirabilia*, objects that generated or inspired wonder, divisible into two main categories: the *naturalia*, or strange objects from the natural world, and the *artificialia*, or strange objects created by the human hand. To mention some typical items: fossils, shells, animals with two heads, rare fish or birds, rare prints and books, collections of dried leaves, diamonds, cameos, filigrees, coral and pearl necklaces, vases, antique coins, etc. In other words, these were curiosities of every imaginable kind, in particular *scientific* curiosities (so cherished in the Age of Enlightenment), not necessarily works of art. What mattered was the rareness, or uniqueness, of an object.

The gradual institutionalization of the museum entailed not only a new selection of objects, according to their representability instead of their exceptionality, but also a new organization of knowledge, a new "order of things" (Foucault 1970), grounded in the modern episteme of the human sciences. As Tony Bennett argues in *The Birth of the Museum* (1995), the three epistemes of Foucault's "archaeology of human sciences" apply also to the history of the museum. The Renaissance episteme is the knowledge of curiosities as displayed in the *Wunderkammer*, that is, according to the logic of analogy, of hidden and distant relations between exotic objects, relations that the "user" needs to explore or to create. I would add that this is the most tactile episteme, since hands-on practice is an integral part of this specific "order of things," which is in continuous reorganization and reactivation. This is the episteme of the early semi-private, semi-public museums. Then follows the classical episteme that founds the knowledge of the scientific taxonomy, according to which trivial, common objects are "arranged as parts of series rather than as unique items" (Bennett 1995, 96). And, finally, the modern episteme constitutes the model (or rather the historical a priori) on which the institutionalized museum is based. It forms the conditions of knowledge of the new human sciences (biology, geology, archaeology, anthropology, history, and art

history); objects are no longer arranged as parts of taxonomic **95** tables but instead identified or distinguished according to their position within evolutionary series and arranged as parts of a sequence such as the history of earth, life, or civilization (Bennett 1995, 96). According to Bennett these conditions of knowledge are at the core of the democratization process that drives the institutionalization of the museum: the aim is to make art, or rather knowledge, available to everyone. This is in stark contrast to the private collections that were accessible to a very restricted and elitist public only. However, to make art more democratic, the body of the museum visitor needed to be disciplined. Those who did not respect the new rules of public behavior were excluded from the democratization process.

# **The Exhibitionary Architecture of the Modern Museum**

As Bennett further argues, the new "order of things" goes together with a new museum *dispositif*: the modern museum is a space of observation and regulation with an architectural structure that is inspired not by the *Wunderkammer* or labyrinthine private galleries but by spaces of (public) surveillance. Central to the new museum architecture is the idea of autoregulation: each museum visitor can watch the behavior of the other museum visitors and therefore knows that he or she is also watched, and therefore behaves "correctly," keeping their hands off the exposed artworks. This is the known principle of Jeremy Bentham's Panopticon, designed in 1791, that is, two years before the inauguration of the Louvre in Paris. Conceived as a circular building, the Panopticon has a central tower from which the guardian can observe all the prisoners. The prisoners, however, are unable to know whether or not they are indeed watched. Yet, knowing that there is the possibility of being watched, due to the particular arrangement of the prison, the prisoners would behave well and maintain order in an almost automatic way.

**96** Bennett refers to the model of the Panopticon in his discussion of the new architectural structure of the museum, pointing out some important differences between the prison and the museum: punishment vs. education, segregation vs. mixture (of people, of publics), closedness vs. openness. Even if the exhibitionary architecture of the museum seems to reverse the Panopticon design, turning a closed system into an open public space, Bennett insists that it incorporates "aspects of [the Panopticon] principles together with those of the panorama, forming a technology of vision which served not to atomize and disperse the crowd but to regulate it, and to do so by rendering it visible to itself, by making the crowd itself the ultimate spectacle." It is all about "to see and be seen" (Bennett 1995, 68–69).

Not all museumgoers will succeed in acquiring (or intuiting) this implicit rule of seeing while being seen, of looking at things on display while being on display themselves. A comparison could be drawn to the rube figure of early cinema. In his essay "Expanded Rube Cinema," Seung-hoon Jeong (2012) discusses two screen performances by Jerry Lewis that are telling in this respect: his mischievous act of pulling a string and causing the fall of a huge Samson statue in *The Errand Boy* (1961) and his clumsy yet creative "encounter" with a woman's clay bust on display in the hotel lobby in *The Bellboy* (1960). While in the former scene Lewis seems to act out of (naïve, childlike) curiosity, in the latter he is incited to touch the artwork by its accompanying sign "wet paint" which leads to a laborious gender transformation, from young woman to old man with monocle and cigarette. Citing Steven Shaviro (1993), Jeong sees in this deforming act of art touching "a masochistic abjection that comes from [Lewis's] hyperdisciplined state; he becomes 'an anarchist not in spite of, but because of, his hyperconformism'" (Jeong 2012, 243). In other words, Lewis perfectly knows that he is not supposed to touch artworks on display, but he cannot resist their force of attraction. I would argue that especially the scene with the clay bust has a playful dimension; besides acting like an avant-garde (and blasphemous) artist, Lewis is clearly having fun.

For this rube, as for children, the Panopticon's (or panorama's) **97** technology of vision remains without effect.

Besides the Panopticon and the panorama, Bennett discusses other forms of exhibitionary architecture that served as direct models for the first public museums. Among these models are shopping arcades, department stores, and fairs (with elevated platforms, galleries around a central hall, display cases, etc.). Like those contemporary public spaces, the museum became a space that organized the gaze. Alison Griffiths has described this context using the notion of "promenade cinema," a form of proto-cinema seen particularly in museums of natural history that exhibited objects along an itinerary (or "promenade") of display cases with so-called life groups. As with early cinema, these nineteenth-century museums allowed the public to travel to remote places, even though such journeys excluded direct contact with the objects on display because they were protected behind glass (Griffiths 1996).

#### **The Museum Touchscreen**

Paradoxically, while during the nineteenth century the process of democratization excluded touch, in more recent days, at the end of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first century, touch is reintroduced into the museum precisely for the same reason. In 1995, Bennett commented on this new hands-on tendency with skepticism:

In order to attract sufficient visitors to justify continuing public funding, [the museums] now often seek to imitate rather than distinguish themselves from places of popular assembly: interactive computer displays competing with video parlours, for example, "touch and feel" exhibits, [etc.]. While these attempts to democratize the ethos of the museum are to be welcomed, their capacity to substantially alter the visitor profiles of museums is difficult to assess. (1995, 104–05)

**98** More recently, Ulrike Bergermann has questioned the merits of "hands-on knowledge" through the use of tactile devices. Looking at the case of science museums, science centers, and other places of popularization of scientific knowledge, she warns against a too-simplistic assumption that touching leads to a better understanding of things, as if a hands-on approach would give us access to the world "in its most objective form" (Bergermann 2006, 318). This critique of the "aesthetics of immediacy" (*Asthetik der Unmittelbarkeit*) could also be applied to early museum culture, more specifically to the touchable collections of the private galleries and curiosity cabinets. Yet Bergermann aims at the pedagogical validity of haptics for knowledge transfer, rather than at the early museumgoer's right to touch (art) objects on display.

Sometimes the touchscreen interface is chosen as a compromise with the hands-off museum rule, allowing for the indirect touching of the "real" object; for instance, in the first decade of the twentieth century, the New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science installed a so-called Fossil Viewer that permitted visitors to touch, via the touchscreen, the fossil on display at a safe (hands-off) distance. Viewing and touching are here in a complex relationship, where touching seems to complement or even dominate viewing but only as a surrogate of touch itself. Here again the tactile *dispositif* makes use of the touchscreen for (merely) didactic reasons of knowledge transfer, which requires a focus on the operative side of media use, as opposed to the artistic dimension of tactile art.

As a topical anecdote, I might mention here my visit to the *Van Eyck in Bruges* exhibition at the Groeningemuseum in Bruges, Belgium, in August 2020. Organized around two masterpieces by Jan van Eyck, *Portrait of Margaret van Eyck* (or *Margaret, the Artist's Wife*) (1439) and *The Virgin and Child with Canon van der Paele* (1434–36), the exhibition nicely documented the restoration process of the latter, disclosing the operation of infrared reflectography as it registers the carbonaceous material in the

oil painting and reveals Van Eyck's underdrawing, which allows, **99** in various areas of the showpiece, for a comparison between the first sketch and the final result. The didactic explanation was supported by a large touchscreen table, the surface of which the visitor was, absurdly enough, not permitted to touch. As the accompanying sign reads: "Please do not touch this touch table. You are currently seeing a demonstration. The content of this table is available at www.museabrugge.be/closer-to-van-derpaele" (fig. 8a–b). Obviously, the phenomenon of the untouchable touchscreen is a contingency of the COVID-19 times.

Another curiosity for the archaeology of the electronic touchscreen concerns experimentation with the user interface by means of the "museum kiosk," which was one of the earliest applications of the touchscreen in the public sphere, together with sales kiosks and public information services. The logic behind these first implementations was very simple; as Catherine Plaisant, senior research scientist at the University of Maryland's Human–Computer Interaction Laboratory, put it, "Mice were unpractical in public settings, so touchscreens were the natural choice!" (Plaisant 1999). In the late 1980s and early 1990s, research at the University of Maryland focused on so-called high-precision touchscreens for better selection strategies. The museum was used as a test case for one of their experiments in "hypertext exploration": the Guide to Opportunities in Volunteer Archaeology, which basically consisted of an interface to sign up as volunteer for an archaeological project somewhere (according to your hypertext exploration) in the world.5 Not only did the touchscreen not render the exhibition of archaeological objects more tactile, it also had no direct connection with the museum or its exhibits.

5 This program was tested in 1988 at the Smithsonian Museum. For a video demonstration, see "Overcoming Limitations to Access (1992 University of Maryland UIS Broadcast)," https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=NFpVHGLSDLM.

[Figure 8a–b] Non-touchable touchscreen *dispositif*, Groeningemuseum, Bruges. From author's personal archive, August 2020.

# **101 Futurist "Tactilism" and Tactile Tables**

Going back in time, at the beginning of the twentieth century, the path for touch-based art installations and interactions was explicitly (and provocatively) explored by historical avantgarde movements, such as Futurism, Dada, and Surrealism. The emergence of early forms of tactile art can be connected in particular to the notion of "tactilism" (*tattilismo*), invented by the founder of Italian Futurism, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti.6 Conceived in the early 1920s, in collaboration with his wife, Benedetta, tactilism signified a decisive (albeit not definitive) turn in the bellicose and virile program of Futurism, a move toward a more gentle or subtle approach to "reality." Central to this new art view was the artist's own fragility and the reeducation of the senses. In the corresponding manifesto "Tactilism," dated January 16, 1921, Marinetti narrates:

I began my own tactile education by submitting my sense of touch to intensive therapy, localizing the confused phenomena of will and thought on the different parts of my body, and especially on the palms of my hands. This education was slow, but also easy, and all healthy bodies can use this education to get precise and surprising results. (2009, 266)

The manifesto proposes six categories of tactile sensations subdivided according to two scales, planes vs. volumes. Furthermore, it introduces the notion of the Futurist "tactile table." The Italian word for the latter is *tavola tattile*, which would have been a nice term for referring to the electronic tablet if modern Italian had not opted for the English loanword. Its diminutive, *tavoletta*, is even closer to the English term "tablet" and has the same (original) meaning of flat inscription surface or writing pad. Yet Marinetti's "tactile tables" are not to be inscribed or carved

6 Parts of this discussion on Marinetti's "tactilism" have been published previously in Strauven 2005a and 2018.

**102** like the stone tablets of Moses. They are also not necessarily flat or smooth like the glass surface of smartphones and tablets. On the contrary, they are characterized by a mixture of textures to be explored by travelling fingertips.

Among the ten different applications of tactilism, Marinetti describes tactile tables for "hand travels," "different sexes," and "free-wordist improvisations," which are exercises for the new initiates who are not yet fully trained in tactile sensibility and are blindfold during the performance. Of specific interest for a history of tactile media are the "tactile shirts and clothes," precursors of today's wearables, and "tactile theatres," that prefigure Huxley's Feelies and today's virtual reality experiments, making use of moving and rotating "tactile ribbons" on which the spectators must rest their hands (Marinetti 2009, 267–68).

Marinetti stresses that tactilism has nothing to do with plastic art: the tactile tables are no painting, no sculpture. However, in an effort to provide evidence of the Futurist anticipation of Dadaist tactile creations, Marinetti cites the plastic art technique known as polymaterialism (*polimaterico*), which painter and sculptor Umberto Boccioni had been experimenting with since 1911.7 In a revised version of the "Tactilism" manifesto (1924), besides citing Boccioni's pioneering in the field, Marinetti also refers to the research of Charles Henry, director of the Laboratoire de Physiologie des sensations de la Sorbonne. Unlike Dadaism, Futurism pretends thus to have "scientific" foundations.

Marinetti also questioned the "distinction between the five senses" and therefore its hierarchy. He was convinced that "many other senses" would be discovered and catalogued into the future (Marinetti 2009, 269). Likewise, Sergei M. Eisenstein proposed in 1929 an original reading of the fourth dimension, namely

7 From the moment Marinetti launched his ideas on tactilism, he got himself into a heated debate with Picabia, regarding the paternity of this new art form—a discussion that was documented in both the French and the American press. See Naumann 2003.

as exploration of new sensations, of new sensorial perceptions. **103** This fourth dimension is indispensable to the expression of overtones. In Eisenstein's view, overtones are not merely audible or visible, but instead tangible, sensible, and physically perceptible. Therefore, he claimed, "For the musical overtone (a throb) it is not strictly fitting to say: 'I hear.' Nor for the visual overtone: 'I see.' For both, a new uniform must enter our vocabulary: 'I feel'" (Eisenstein 1977, 71). Eisenstein aimed at sensitizing the spectators to new sensorial perceptions; they had to learn how to feel the overtones, as they had to learn how to think dialectically, to be able to enter the "filmic fourth dimension." Whereas Eisenstein is clearly driven by synesthesia as new mode of perception (see also his later essay "Synchronization of the Senses," 1943), Marinetti's tactilism was in the first place an overt provocation in the face of the institutionalized museum culture. It was a reversal of the traditional hierarchy of the senses and the dominant ethos: "Please don't look, but touch!" In other words, it reopened the possibilities for tactile art.

To illustrate his concept of "hand travel," Marinetti made the tactile table *Sudan-Paris*, which consisted of a wooden board on which different types of material were attached, divided into three horizontal areas or sections: top (Sudan), middle (sea), and bottom (Paris). As one can read in the manifesto of "Tactilism":

In its *Sudan* part this table contains tactile values that are crude, greasy, rough, sharp, burning (spongy material, sandpaper, wool, pig's bristle, and wire bristle). In the *Sea* part, the table contains tactile values that are slippery, metallic, cool (different grades of emery paper). In the *Paris* part, the table contains tactile values that are soft, very delicate, caressable, warm and cool at the same time (silk, velvet, and large and small feathers). (Marinetti 2009, 267)

The *Sudan-Paris* tactile table was used as a sample during Marinetti's public lectures on tactilism. He would let the work circulate among the audience in order to test his thesis on

**104** tactile values, according to which material qualities like softness or smoothness would not automatically imply positive tactile experiences, while sharp or rough surfaces would instead trigger pleasant feelings. Art historian Caro Verbeek has tested Marinetti's thesis with contemporary audiences. In 2010, she created, with the help of artist Edward Janssen, a replica of Marinetti's tactile board. Verbeek writes:

> I have used it in many lectures and let it be passed around audiences, just like Marinetti did, always curious about the reactions of the public. Unexpectedly, the rough and sharp parts at the top often seemed to evoke positive associations, in contrast to the smooth, elaborate textures at the bottom, which frequently made people giggle, squeak, and sometimes even shiver, especially when pausing at the feathers. (2012, 229)

In other words, it seems that to increase our sensory perception we need surfaces that are rougher, coarser. This is perhaps the tactile problem of today's media devices: while touching their very smooth screens without buttons, protrusions, or roughness, we do not *feel* anything.

Verbeek's essay is entitled "Prière de toucher!" It is a direct reference to Marcel Duchamp's 1947 provocation of the same name, a book whose cover presents a female breast made out of foam surrounded by black velvet, with a blue-bordered label on the back that offers the invitation: Please touch. Both Marinetti's *Sudan-Paris* and Duchamp's *Prière de toucher* are clear examples of irreverent intervention, telling us that art is not sacred, or "untouchable." The message is unequivocal: art should not be put on a pedestal but instead made accessible and be consumed. However, these two classic examples of the historical avant-garde are not just about the tactility of Art with capital A. Marinetti's tactile table was more an element of study than a true work of art to put on display in a museum. As seen above, it was used during his lectures as a test case. Ironically, when this tactile

board is exhibited today, it is always protected by a glass plate, **105** which prevents the visitor from directly touching it and which is of course a result of the institutionalization of Futurism itself.8 As far as Duchamp's provocation is concerned, let us not forget that his object is a book, which is a medium that you literally take in your hand. Of all the media screens and display surfaces, the book cover is—or, at least, used to be, before the introduction of the touchscreen—the most touchable and most touched. Thus, Duchamp's provocation lies not so much in touching the book (or the object of art), but rather in touching the (polystyrene) breast. In sum, it is more an infraction of an erotic taboo than an infraction of a museum rule.

Here one could make a connection with the provocative street performance *Tapp und Tastkino* (*Tap and Touch Cinema*, 1968) by Valie Export, mentioned in Chapter 1. Verbeek proposes a comparison between Export's touch cinema and Duchamp's *Prière de toucher* to mark the fundamental difference between the two provocations: whereas Export compels the audience to touch her breasts in the banal yet concrete setting of the street, Duchamp's instigation remains purely conceptual because the naked breast on the catalogue cover is unmistakably fake. In this fakeness resides also, according to Verbeek, the fundamental difference with Marinetti's sensory education: "Duchamp was not seeking a pure tactile sensation or the obtaining of knowledge through the epidermis; the role of touch in *Prière de toucher* was conceptual" (Verbeek 2012, 232). Indeed, in Duchamp's case, there is no skinto-skin contact. Another important difference to point out is that Export's naked screen stays hidden from sight, behind the little curtain of the cardboard box that is attached around her upper body, while Duchamp's fake breast is there for the eyes too. It basically remains a visual spectacle, inviting the sense of touch to join the experience.

8 This is how I have seen Marinetti's tactile table on display, protected by a glass plate, in Brussels at one of the Europalia 2003 exhibitions: *Futurismo 1909–1926*, Musée d'Ixelles, October 16, 2003–January 11, 2004.

**106** Another artist to mention in this discussion of "tactile tables" is Bruno Munari. Known for his idea of organizing hands-on laboratories for children in museums and schools in the late 1970s, Munari started his career as a Futurist artist. In 1926, at age of 19, he joined the group of Milanese Futurists (Marinetti, Paolo Buzzi, Enrico Prampolini, Farfa, Fillia, et al.). In this period, which marked the so-called Second Wave of Futurism (1920s–1930s), Munari made not only his first "useless machines," which I mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, but also some "tactile tables," following Marinetti's example. Made of wooden planks, Munari's creations combined materials such as sandpaper and cork to provide different visual and tactile sensations. Of particular interest is his 1938 *Tavola tattile* (Tactile table), on which Munari provided indications of the reading tempo, as if it were a musical score: slowly (*lento*), loudly (*forte*), with velocity (*veloce*), and as quickly as possible (*velocissimo*). Yet the reading of the table, which is a long and flat piece of organic wood (122 x 13 x 3 cm), should best be executed with closed eyes, so that the travelling hand can focus on the various textures, from left to right: felt, sandpaper, different types of cotton thread and cord wrapped around a thin stick, plastic, cloth, nails, fur, and iron. Thus, like Marinetti, Munari aimed at reversing the traditional hierarchy of the senses by saying, "Please don't look, but touch!"

## **(Non)interactive Tactile Art**

The Futurist tactile tables can be considered early forms of "interactive tactile art." With this term, I refer to art that is interactive through touch, that is, those installations where the act of touching is necessary to make the artwork "visible" (or "readable," or "hearable"): in other words, the visitor *must* intervene not only to experience the artwork but also to bring it to life. A good case in point is Janet Cardiff's sound installation *To Touch* (1993). It shares the wooden materiality of the Futurist tables, but the visitor's tactile interaction provides an auditory output. The installation consists of an old carpenter's table, which is surrounded by small audio speakers mounted on the walls of a darkened gallery **107** space. By running their hands over the rough wooden surface of the table, visitors activate photocells that, in turn, trigger specific sound bites, ranging from human dialogue and whispers to music and environmental sounds. Despite its rough and low-tech appearance, Cardiff's installation relies on electronic circuits.

The term "interactive tactile art" is intended also to cover artworks unrelated to new technology. As Peter Weibel illustrates in "It is Forbidden Not to Touch: Some Remarks on the (Forgotten Parts of the) History of Interactivity and Virtuality" (2007), there is a whole prehistory of non-computer-based art that relies on mechanical or manual interactivity. Weibel cites various examples of kinetic or programmed art, based on (intuitive) algorithms, as for instance Gianni Colombo's *Spazio elastico* (Elastic space, 1967). Here, the visitor is invited to walk in darkness through a cube-shape stereometric structure, made of white rubber bands attached to the walls and rendered luminescent by neon light. The elasticity of the space is only achieved thanks to the presence of (and the physical contact with) the human body in motion. Likewise, Erkki Huhtamo has drawn attention to the possible past(s) of computer-based interactive art. In "Twin-Touch-Test-Redux: Media Archaeological Approach to Art, Interactivity, and Tactility" (2007), he discusses Marinetti's manifesto "Tactilism" (1921), without however looking into the Futurist tactile tables. Instead his focus is on Duchamp's readymades and his collaboration with Frederick Kiesler for the 1943 Twin-Touch-Test experiment that invited visitors to caress a chicken wire fence between their hand palms. Among the many efforts to release the "tactiloclasmic tensions" in traditional museum culture, Huhtamo (2006) also mentions the nonprofit organization Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.), launched in 1967, as a creative cooperation between artists and engineers.

It is not my purpose to offer here an exhaustive overview of non-computer-based and computer-based interactive art (Kwastek 2013; Stern 2013). Instead, I want to question the notion **108** of "interactivity" in relation to actions of screen touching. If the term "tactile art" is reserved to designate those artworks that rely on the active intervention of the user, the term "touchable art" could be used to include those works of (visual) art that may be touched but do not undergo any (visible) change when being touched. In other words, there might be action from the side of the user, but no true interaction. Yet this is a rather problematic definition because it implies making a strict distinction between action and interaction, between feedback and lack thereof. For instance, when considering again the cactus artwork described in the Introduction, *Una storia* (2012), one could claim that it is an example of "touchable art" that is not truly interactive. Yet the two girls felt some pain (feedback) when touching it. One could also argue that the artist, Federica Barbieri, did not intend to make a touchable artwork and only the children turned it into a truly tactile experience. And what about the girl touching the panels of Bill Viola's *Going Forth by Day* (2002) at the Grand Palais? Was she not truly interacting with the video installation, even if she could not change its prerecorded narrative or unfolding?

I am particularly fascinated by children's interactions with noninteractive media art installations, by their "improper" engagement with non-touchscreens which they treat as touchable screens, in short, by their appropriation of the screen as a playground. Below are four examples to illustrate this point, four anecdotes from my private life, relating to my daughter between the ages of three and six, alone as well as in the company of other children. The examples are all "unique instances," embedded in a very specific historical and artistic context, but I take them to be symptomatic of a general trend of hands-on play and imagination among young children. The first two examples concern the "manual" (that is, by hand) touching of wall installations, while the last two are about floor screens touched by feet.9

9 The last two examples also feature in De Rosa and Strauven 2020, while the second anecdote was previously published in Strauven 2016.

The first instance took place at the Eye Filmmuseum in **109** Amsterdam. When in 2012 I visited the new building located on the northern bank of the river IJ, there was a projection of soap bubbles on one of the walls in the basement. My then four-year-old daughter was immediately attracted by this rather minimalistic show. She jumped up to the wall and tried to catch the bubbles, or better, to make them burst (fig. 9). Since it was not an interactive installation, but just a prerecorded loop, nothing happened to the (projected) bubbles when she managed to actually touch them. Yet my daughter did not care. She went on jumping and chasing them, following—to say it with Walter Benjamin—"the great law that presides over the rules and rhythms of the entire world of play: the law of repetition" (2005, 120). Because for the child, "repetition is the soul of play . . . nothing gives [her] greater pleasure than to 'Do it again!'" (120). Two years later, we visited the Water Design event in Bologna, Italy, where my daughter got involved in a more complex interaction with a noninteractive shower installation. Designed by Diego Grandi for Zucchetti, the installation was entitled *Get Closer!* and consisted of several exhibits, among which an animation video that was projected on a huge wall and shown in a loop. My daughter and two other girls did indeed "get closer" and started to touch the animated bathroom items that appeared on the wall. The repetition, without any variation, did not stop the girls from touching the projection. Quite the opposite. Their interaction actually increased after each repetition, when they started to understand the little narrative and tried to choreograph their actions on time, so that they could take a "real" shower by standing, at the right moment, under the image of the water splash (fig. 10).

[Figure 9] Soap bubble projection, Eye Filmmuseum, Amsterdam. From author's personal archive, May 2012.

[Figure 10] *Get Closer!* by Diego Grandi, Water Design, Bologna. From author's personal archive, September 2014.

In February 2011, in a different museum context, my then **111** three-year-old had a lot of fun by walking and jumping upon a floor projection. This took place at the Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Science in Brussels, where a noninteractive animation video was projected onto the floor, creating the pastoral setting of a green field with flowers, butterflies, snails, ducks, and birds. My daughter was soon joined by a little boy in her "feet-on" action of trampling the flowers and her attempts to catch the birds and make the ducks fly. The play quickly became an innocent, yet slightly competitive game. A similar principle was at stake in the fourth and last instance of noninteractive interaction that took place during the White Night of Bologna ArtCity in January 2015. In the inner court of Palazzo Bevilacqua, artists Marta Coletti and Larry Bird showed the second part of their installation *Spill Life* (2014–15), entitled *SPILL LIFE #2—Versus Natura* (2015).10 At the well, located in the center of the old palazzo's court, visitors were invited to "spill" water into a receiving sink. When a certain level of water was reached it would trigger and put into motion the projection of a computer animation onto the ground. Like the floor screen of the Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Science, this stone carpet became a playground for my daughter who tried to catch the butterflies flying above the colorful flowers that continued to grow thanks to the water being poured. Even if the installation was truly interactive because of the water-spilling action, the animation video that my daughter was interacting with was again noninteractive.

Why are these children putting their hands and feet on projected images? Is it only because they expect that their touch will make something happen, like on a "real" touchscreen? Perhaps initially, yes, but when they realize that the installation is not interactive

10 The first installment took place at the Water Design event in Bologna in October 2014. The title of the installation is an obvious pun on "still life," which in Italian is called *natura morta* (dead nature). *Spill Life* is about the tension between nature and technology, between the (digitally) animated *natura morta* and the low-tech gesture of the human hand.

**112** (and, surely, they realize it quite soon), why do they continue touching it? When observing my daughter and other children in such situations, I have often wondered whether they really believe they are interacting with the artwork. Is it not more likely that they like to *pretend* that they believe it? In other words, the screen of these media art installations becomes a play area where the act of touching is to be understood as a strategy of the pretend play, by which children are not just pretending that the work is responding to their touch, but they are also pretending that they believe this is really happening.

It is precisely this "childish" approach of tactile screen interaction that revealed to me a different way to look at the behavior of the rubes at the movie theater, in particular Michel-Ange's persistent touching of the screen in Godard's *Les Carabiniers* (1963). As discussed in Chapter 1, Godard's rube does not touch the screen only once, but continues touching it, caressing the projected image of the society lady's leg, as if he is not able to discern touching a human body from touching the screen. I would argue, however, that Michel-Ange is *pretending* that (he believes that) he touches the real body of a real woman. Like the children, he is fooling us, the film spectators, in making us believe that he believes.

## **The Art of Touchscreen Gestures**

Opposed to these seemingly naïve but conceptually rather sophisticated actions of screen touching by children and rubes (where interaction is made possible even if the projected work is noninteractive), there are several contemporary media artists who turn the touchscreen interaction into a visual spectacle to be looked at from a safe distance, allowing thus no interaction from the side of the museumgoer or user. A telling example is the video installation *Touching Reality* (2012) by the Swiss artist Thomas Hirschhorn. In a five-minute video we watch an index finger of a female hand scrolling through images on a touchscreen device. The images are horrifying photos of mutilated,

blood-covered bodies, on which the index finger, with the help **113** of the thumb, zooms in by means of the pinching gesture (see Chapter 3). Despite the title *Touching Reality*, the index finger does not touch reality but merely glides over the material surface of a smartphone or electronic tablet; it touches a touchscreen without touching what is on display.11 Moreover, the spectator remains excluded from the act of touching. In the art gallery, the touchscreen footage is projected on a huge wall or screen that prevents the spectator from engaging directly, tangibly, with the artwork. Like a well-disciplined museumgoer, she will contemplate from a safe distance this distant choreography of touchscreen gestures, performed by a female hand (as if it were some form of invisible labor).12

Here one can also make mention of art installations that fall under the denominator of "desktop cinema" and that display real-time actions executed by the artist on a computer desktop. Most often, these actions do not consist of touchscreen gestures, as in *Touching Reality*, but are instead undertaken by the clicking of a mouse. Thus, the choreography of gestures acquires a ghostly dimension because the source of the operation—that is, the hand—remains invisible. Examples of this new form of media art shot with special screen-capturing techniques are, for instance, Camille Henrot's *Grosse Fatigue* (Tiredness, 2013) and Kevin B. Lee's desktop documentary video-essays, such as

**114** *Transformers: The Premake* (2014). Besides integrating non-touchscreen gestures into computer-based videos, some artists also like to play with fake touchscreen gestures, imitating typical touchscreen actions, such as pointing and swiping, without using the interface of a touchscreen—not only in the exhibition setting but also during the production process. In *Belle Captive 1* (2013) by Victoria Fu, we see touchscreen gestures operating on a nontouchscreen: like in Hirschhorn's *Touching Reality* the gesture is performed by a huge index finger, but there is no physical contact with the surface upon which it is supposedly acting. It is like two layers that are not connected, but some images (pretend to) react to the touching gesture: for instance, a girl turns around when touched by the huge finger. In *Velvet Peel 1* (2015) by the same artist, fake touchscreen gestures are performed with the entire body instead of with the fingers: not only the head but also the butt are swiping (fig. 11).13

I would like to end this chapter with the multi-touch finger paintings by the American artist Evan Roth, who also turns the touchscreen experience into a visual spectacle*.* However, unlike Hirschhorn's *Touching Reality*, Roth's paintings are not so much about the (moving) gesture, but rather about its effects or traces, about what is left behind on the screen. The artist makes black ink prints of his own fingerprints on touchscreen devices, from the very simple gesture of "slide to unlock" to more complex multi-touching, such as typing with ten fingers on a keyboard or playing touchscreen games. A particularly striking example, called *Level Cleared* (2012), consists of 300 sheets of tracing paper that have the same size as the iPhone on which the game *Angry Birds* was played, hung along the wall, one by one, with the aid of a needle in each corner (fig. 12).

13 For a more in-depth discussion of these and other art installations, see De Rosa and Strauven 2020.

[Figure 11] *Velvet Peel 1* (Victoria Fu, 2015). Video installation with sound, 13 min. loop. Courtesy of the artist.

[Figure 12] *Level Cleared* (Evan Roth, 2012). Ink on tracing paper, 2230 cm x 260 cm. Photo by Vinciane Verguethen. Courtesy of XPO Gallery.

**116** However remote this might seem from the notion of "tactile art," Roth's paintings make us aware of our actual touching of the screen. His paintings are nothing more (and nothing less) than traces of a real, physical skin-to-screen contact. The images underneath the fingers have disappeared; what remains is the visualization of the "hand travels" over the surface of the screen. Roth's work seems to reverse Duchamp's *Prière de toucher*: it addresses the eye by turning the traces of a tactile experience into a *Prière de regarder* (Please look). However, because of the presence of the needles that pierce the four corners of each paper screen, the installation foregrounds its tangibility. Even if the points of the needles are punctured into the wall, it somehow evokes a fakir's bed of nails as well as the cactus of Barbieri's *Una storia* (2012) with its spines that pierce the paper eyes.

Look, but do not touch? Or: touch, but do not look? It is exactly this tension, or ambiguity, between viewing and touching that is at work in contemporary art installations displaying touchscreen gestures. But as long as there is no "touch it!" sign, (adult) museum visitors will most likely keep their distance and observe the still dominant hands-off rule.

# **[3] Sketching, Zapping, Pinching, Clicking, Thumbing**

*A corpus of tact: skimming, grazing, squeezing, thrusting, pressing, smoothing, scraping, rubbing, caressing, palpating, fingering, kneading, massaging, entwining, hugging, striking, pinching, biting, sucking, moistening, taking, releasing, licking, jerking off, looking, listening, smelling, tasting, ducking, fucking, rocking, balancing, carrying, weighing . . . Jean-Luc Nancy*

#### **Hand Gestures, Hands-On Gestures**

A wide variety of tactile screen gestures have already passed in review: pricking (cactus), ticking against the wall (bubbles), stomping on the ground (meadow), thumbing (flipbook), grabbing and tearing (early rube films), caressing with full palm (Michel-Ange), hugging (Joe), sword slashing (Don Quixote), breast tapping (Export), hand travelling (Marinetti), pinching (Hirschhorn), and butt and head swiping (Fu). This list shows that the notion of "screen gestures" is not limited to the hands, but can involve other specific body parts (such as the feet) or the full body. However, as noted in the Introduction, the concrete act of screen touching is usually executed by the hand and, in particular, by the index finger and the thumb. Because of the operability of the fingers during the process of screen touching, it is possible to talk about "digital gestures" (that is, gestures performed by digits) long before the introduction of the computer screen. In fact, as I will briefly discuss at the end of Chapter 4, the projection table of

**118** the camera obscura or the sheet of the magic lantern show were such surfaces for "digital gestures," to be understood as actions of direct contact.

On the connection between digit (as finger) and digital (as numerical), Mary Ann Doane observed that—besides the obvious gesture of counting to which fingers lend themselves—there is "the finger's preeminent status as the organ of touch, of contact, of sensation, of connection with the concrete" (2007, 142). Therefore, she adds, "the unconscious of the digital, that most abstract of logics/forms of representation, is touch" (142). In fact, "digitality" in its modern meaning and usage tends to repress this sense of touch, which I intend to bring to the fore again by putting the emphasis on the gesture as an action of direct contact.

The gesture is not just an action but rather the process of an action, which creates a contact between objects and humans, between screens and users. The gesture mediates/communicates. Defined by Agamben as the "exhibition of a mediality," or also the "communication of a communicability" (2000, 57–58), the gesture constitutes a morphological element of our body language.1 Especially manual and digital gestures, but also facial ones, are expressive units in our interaction with other actants, both human and nonhuman. Impatient computer users might, for instance, express anger when an application is not responding, by increasing the pressure of the fingers on the keyboard or making furious grimaces at the screen.

About the interpretation of gestures, Vilém Flusser has observed that the "more information a gesture contains, the more difficult it apparently is for a receiver to read it" (2014, 8). In other words, an "empty" or information-low gesture communicates better than a complicated rich one. Flusser compares it with the deciphering of a code. A nice illustration of how gestures

1 It is beyond the scope of this book to look into sign language for the hearing impaired, which is a discussion à part.

convey "coded" information in very specific contexts is Bruno **119** Munari's *Supplement to the Italian Dictionary* (first published in 1958). Leaving out the most vulgar and obscene gestures, Munari aimed at documenting and making comprehensible to foreigners visiting Italy the rich gesturality used by his compatriots. Reissued with the title *Speak Italian: The Fine Art of the Gesture* in an Italian-English bilingual edition, the pocket-sized lexicon with its charming black-and-white hand illustrations features on its cover one of the most typical gestures of Italian communication, which derives from Neapolitan and is widely used in the entire nation: "Che vuoi?" ("What do you expect?").2 Munari describes and explains the gesture as follows:

The tips of all fingers of one hand are brought sharply together to form an upward-pointing cone. The hand can either be held motionless or be shaken more or less violently up and down, according to the degree of impatience expressed. (2015, 22)

Of particular interest, in light of this study on the touchscreen, are the Italian/Munarian gestures that use the hand as a kind of tablet or media surface. Most obvious are the hand signs meaning "to read" and "to write" that both evoke similarities with touchscreen actions, respectively swiping, whereby "the index finger of the right hand runs across the left hand as on a page" (86), and pen computing, whereby "the right hand pretends to write on the left hand, or vice versa" (84). Less obvious for nonnative speakers is the gesture meaning "to insist," whereby "the

2 The gesture even has a Wikipedia entry, which gives a more literal translation: "What do you want?" The entry adds other Italian interpretations: "Ma che vuoi?" (But what do you want?), "Ma che dici?" or "Ma che stai dicendo?" (But what are you saying?), or simply "Che?" (What?). See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Che\_vuoi. According to *Italy Magazine*, who asked D&G male models to perform some of the typical Italian hand gestures, it is more appropriate to translate the "Che vuoi?" sign as "WTF." See https://www.italymagazine.com/ learn-italian-hand-gestures-translating-dg-models-written-italian.

**120** index finger jabs rhythmically on the palm of the other hand" (106), as if on a nonresponsive smartphone screen. Yet the Italian gesture is not so much about a repetitive action by the speaker (or hand gesticulator) but rather aims at expressing annoyance about the interlocutor who does not know when to stop (and keeps on insisting).

In this chapter I do not intend to provide a comprehensive lexicon of hand gestures, which could consist of a cross-reading of Munari's gestural dictionary, Flusser's theory of gestures, and Jean-Luc Nancy's "corpus of tact," but instead I will focus on some typical media gestures that are executed by the hand and connected to the screen. The hand gestures I am interested in are, thus, all "hands-on": both in the sense of acting upon and of putting literally one's hands on something. More in particular, I will look at hand gestures related to (film) animation, TV zapping, and various hands-on operations of digital devices, ranging from the computer mouse to the smartphone's touchscreen. I will focus on these media gestures as concrete actions, or processes, and on the dexterity of our hands and digits while executing these actions.

## **A Praxeology of Media Gestures**

Rooted in the work of French philosophers Louis Bourdeau and Alfred Espinas, praxeology as the theory of human action is to be considered as a science that incorporates different fields of science. Very generally, it departs from the notion that human actions are driven by purposeful behavior, as opposed to reflexes or involuntary bodily movements. Here I would like to make a connection with the notion of "thick description" as American anthropologist Clifford Geertz borrowed it from British philosopher Gilbert Ryle. In his canonical text of 1973, Geertz reflects upon Ryle's example of the difference between a twitch (as an involuntary muscle contraction of the eyelids) and a wink (as a conspiratorial signal). Geertz observes that the "two movements

are, as movements, identical" (1973, 6). That is, "from an I-am- **121** a-camera, 'phenomenalistic' observation" (6) of the movements alone, without context, one could not tell the difference. Yet when considering the two movements in their specific context, relying on concrete experiences, one knows that the difference is vast. The wink is an intentional action; it is a gesture, a gesture of communication. As Geertz puts it, "The winker is . . . indeed communicating in a quite precise and special way" (6).3

Apart from discussions of praxeology and reflexology, I suggest the need to address the technicity of gestures. Focusing on touch as a gesture, as a process or action of *touching*, this chapter will emphasize the bodily techniques involved, in particular those executed or practiced by the hand, from shadow casting to pencil drawing, from operating a TV remote control to clicking a computer mouse. It should be stressed that the dexterity of our hands and digits in their "encounter" or interaction with tactile devices is a historical given. Following French sociologist Marcel Mauss, bodily techniques are tied to their historical time and societal-educational context. In *Techniques du corps* (*Techniques of the Body*, originally published in 1934), Mauss looks at the specific techniques of swimming and walking, which both changed over time due to changes in technical instruction (such as new diving techniques) and fashion (as showcased by cinema).4

As a very simple gesture of communication, we can think here of the handshake, which due to the COVID-19 pandemic has

**122** disappeared from the landscape of social interaction, tentatively replaced by elbow bumping. In this chapter, I will look at specific media techniques in which the body, as "man's first and most natural instrument" (Mauss 1973, 75), uses other technical objects, such as a pen, mouse, smartphone. For instance, techniques of writing (handwriting, typewriting, texting, thumbing, etc.) change over time and sometimes cause physiological changes in the hand and its digits. The use of the smartphone, on the other hand, gives shape to various techniques of the body: texting (as writing) vs. calling (as speaking), looking down (as reading) vs. holding close to one's ear (as listening). Its hands-free devices, such as ear buds with microphone, gave the user's body more freedom of movement, and in particular of gesticulation, which, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, blurred our distinction, at least at first sight ("from an I-am-a-camera, 'phenomenalistic' observation," to repeat Geertz's phrasing), between a crazy vagabond and a busy entrepreneur (Elsaesser 2003; Strauven 2013).

As pointed out by Benoît Turquety, in the French language the plural term *techniques* refers, as evidenced by Mauss's study, to technical objects and procedures, whereas *technologie* is the science that studies these techniques. In English the situation is quite different, with *technology* demarcating "the realm of the hardware-related, the machines, and their components" and *techniques* denoting "what concerns gestures, practices, and the conscious choices implied on the operators' side"; referring to Rick Altman's study on sound, the microphone is a matter of technology, while the practice of miking is "a set of techniques" (Turquety 2018, 242). In other words, the English term "technique" is more restricted than the French one, as it separates the gesture from the machine (or technical object). In what follows, I will adopt a broad notion of gesture, which comes close to the French notion of technique, as a concrete (bodily) action or procedure involving (technical) objects.

# **123 Performing/Animating Hands**

In the previous chapter, I proposed reading the performance of the female hand of Hirschhorn's installation *Touching Reality* (2012) not only in terms of specific touchscreen gestures, such as swiping and pinching, but also as a choreography of cold detachment, or as a form of invisible labor, similar to that of the female technician in the medical context (see also Cartwright 1992). In a very limited way, the hand also animates the images on display: swiping makes images appear and disappear, while pinching magnifies and resizes them. Both are hands-on hand gestures that directly act upon the screen. As I will discuss below, the technique of pinching is a curious case of what Mauss calls "habit" (from the Latin *habitus*).

Concerning the "prehistory" and early history of cinema, some obvious hand performances are worth mentioning as techniques of both screen touching and image animation. In most cases the screen is not touched directly by the hand, but the hand's performance is directly responsible for what happens on the screen. For instance, the art of shadow play (shadowgraphy or ombromanie) relies on performing hands that cast shadows upon a screen; if the hands are not physically touching the screen, their shadows do. Likewise, the hand of the lantern-slide projectionist is instrumental in the techniques of projecting images on screen and creating special effects, such as dissolving views.

Moreover, as Lisa Cartwright discusses, projection was experienced as a source of pleasure, as "a process that was not simply in the service of making visible but which also entailed the pleasure of holding and manipulating the object at hand" (2011, 448). This physical relationship extended to the entire body, as the slides were stored in a wooden box that the itinerant projectionist strapped on his back, travelling from town to town, the box becoming "an extension of the body through its habitual wearing and carrying" (450).

**124** Besides the live shows of the slide-lantern projectionist, another popular form of "pre-cinematic" entertainment was the so-called chalk talk, equally live and hands-on, this time with the hand truly in action in front of the audience. The chalk talk consisted of a lecture that was accompanied by live, real-time, illustration on a chalkboard.  These performances came to be known as "lightning sketches" or "lightning cartoons." The gesture of sketching, of drawing with chalk on a black surface, returns as a central motif in early animated films, made by professional chalk-talkers and cartoonists, such as James Stuart Blackton, Winsor McCay, and Georges Méliès. Most of these films combined a documentary dimension with the basic trick of stop motion. For instance, Blackton's *The Enchanted Drawing* (1900) first shows the cartoonist in medium full shot performing lightning sketches with charcoal on a white sheet, only to surprise the audience with the trick of grabbing his own drawings of a wine bottle and goblet and transforming them into real objects. Blackton's later *Humorous Phases of Funny Faces* (1906) further accentuates these hands-on gestures, featuring the hand variously drawing and erasing in close-up, without showing the full body of the cartoonist. Here, the lightning sketches truly "come to life," as they are put into motion, animated by means of the stop motion trick, whether or not in combination with the trick of reverse action.

Regarding this context of early animation, Edwin Carels has called attention to the pioneering role of the French caricaturist Émile Cohl (pseudonym of Émile Eugène Jean Louis Courtet), whose *Fantasmagorie* (*A Fantasy*, 1908) is "the first film where this documentary contextualisation is absent, and where the lively movement of the line drawings is more important than the figuration" (Carels 2012, 38). Carels adds: "For Émile Cohl, action was more important than representation, or as Panofsky would put it: animation is about space and time, not about the human figure" (38). Nevertheless, this first fully animated film also

contains two instances of the animator's performing hand, first at **125** the very beginning to draw the lines before they are coaxed into movement and then toward the end to glue together the "broken" stick figure after it has fallen out of a window (fig. 13).5

From the shadow play to the lightning sketch, the performing hand is clearly the hand of the creator, of the person creating the spectacle to be looked at, as opposed to the hand of the user, of the person putting his or her hands on the media device or artwork (as in the case of the Futurist tactile tables). More examples of cinematic hand scenarios could be mentioned here, from Claude Autant-Lara's *Faits Divers* (1923) to Robert Bresson's *Pickpocket* (1959), from Richard Serra's *Hand Catching Lead* (1968) to Bill Viola's *Four Hands* (2001). Or one could look more closely at the invisible hand at work over the course of the film production process, whether in animation or live action. For instance, as far as the editing process is concerned, Harun Farocki's *Schnittstelle* (*Interface*, 1995) demonstrates the operational differences between film editing and video editing in terms of fingertip activity, showing in close-up, on the one hand, fingers touching the filmstrip to feel the cut and the glue and, on the other, those pushing the buttons of the video editing console without physical contact with the video tape (fig. 14).

In the next sections, I propose to shift the focus from the maker's point of view to the user's act of screen touching. I will discuss hand gestures in relation to the TV set, the computer monitor, and cell phone screen, which oscillate between direct and indirect touch, always keeping in mind the concrete encounter between user and media object.

5 *Fantasmagorie* plays with some typical film genres of the early days, such as the chase film. Most remarkably, it starts at the movie theater where an animated film is shown and a woman wearing a very sumptuous and huge feathery hat gets a seat in the front row to the great annoyance of the gentleman behind her. Cohl anticipates here D. W. Griffith's *Those Awful Hats* (1909), which can be said to belong to the genre of "didactic" rube films.

[Figure 13] *Fantasmagorie* (Émile Cohl, 1908).

[Figure 14] *Schnittstelle* (Harun Farocki, 1995).

# **127 Hands-On TV Watching**

On September 11, 1982, the French TV channel Antenne 2 broadcast the first episode of *Télétactica*, a curious series for children that was truly hands-on. Created by Albert Champeaux and Jean-Paul Blondeau, the program came with a kit of plastic geometric figures, the so-called *télétacs*, available in bookstores. Children could interact in each episode by placing the *télétacs*, at specific scripted moments, on the cartoon images on screen. The *télétacs* would stick to the TV screen thanks to its static electricity, literally put into effect as a McLuhanian medium of tactility. A typical challenge was, for instance, to get a little box up to a chalet at the top of a mountain. You simply had to wait for a dotted line figure to appear on screen, then select the corresponding *télétac* (in this case a big circle) and stick it on the dotted lines. In this way, the circle would turn into a hot air balloon that would bring the box to the chalet.6

Whereas *Télétactica* is an example of closeness and direct screen touching that for all its novelty was a dead-end in TV history, the remote control is a hands-on practice from a distance that has endured. As a technique, or televisual gesture, the practice of flipping through channels is connected not only to the technical object of the remote control but also to the phenomenon of TV advertisement.7 According to the *Oxford English Dictionary*, the term "zapping," as a "practice of skipping advertisements when watching television programmes," emerged only in the early 1970s. To a certain degree, this new practice turned TV viewing

**128** into a more tactile experience, although *away* from the screen. As Lorenz Engell similarly observes with reference to McLuhan's theory of touch,

> The small size of the television screen makes it a feature not of distance but of closeness; its coarse pixel structure leads to a scanning procedure in perception that has more to do with haptic than visual activities. The gaze itself becomes tactile. This idea is even more relevant if one takes into account the use of the remote control, in which the fingertip takes over the leading function from the gaze. (Engell 2013, 327)

Zapping can be a two-hand operation, with one palm holding the remote control and the index finger of the other hand pushing the buttons, or it can involve a single hand using the thumb as a controller. Engell points out how the single-hand use of the remote control brought about a change in the relationship between index finger and thumb, a tendency that will be pushed further by more recent media devices, such as the computer mouse and the touchscreen. He writes:

In the use of the remote control, the old order of the thumb as counterweight and the index has already been partially subverted. Either you need two of your hands to operate it (in this case the index can keep its function) or you have to turn your hand around, take palm and fingers as solid ground for the remote control, and use the thumb both as deictic tool and means of causation. (334)

In other words, the will or intention, traditionally correlated with the use of the index finger, is conferred instead to the thumb when we zap using only one hand.

#### **From Zaptitude to Zoomtitude**

The original meaning of the verb "to zap," however, is not to operate a remote control but, according to the *Oxford English Dictionary*, "to kill, esp. with a gun; to deal a sudden blow to." Its etymology is onomatopoeic: *zap* imitates the sound of shooting. **129** This echoic usage probably finds its origin in early comic strips, which were rather violent. In today's computer jargon, zapping means "to erase or change (an item in a program)" (*Oxford English Dictionary*). This is confirmed by *The Jargon File*, where the verb is associated with spicy food that can make non-hackers suffer, alongside more specific meanings of erasing, resetting, modifying, or correcting "with a debugger or binary patching tool" and "fry[ing] a chip with static electricity" (Raymond 2004). The connotation remains, thus, mainly destructive.

This original meaning of zapping as killing allows making a connection with TV watching as "killing time." As Thomas Elsaesser observed in the mid 1990s, reflecting on fifty years of television culture:

The fact that Western Europe has been without a war, a famine, a plague or any other event that really went to the heart of everyday experience for precisely these 50 years of television . . . means that we have the luxury of building a culture and a cultural memory of the banal, the everyday, of what interests ordinary people, what amused them and what moved them, what they saw in the movies and on TV: a history of leisure and of "killing time," alongside the history of all the killing fields on television. (1994, 58–59)

Elsaesser's remark must be placed in a pre-9/11 world, when TV watching was more about cultivating idleness than about instilling panic (through breaking news and looped disaster footage). On the other hand, the tragic events of 9/11 were somehow anticipated by Belgian video artist Johan Grimonprez's *dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y* (1997). This controversial video artwork looks at hijacking through the mode of zapping, which Grimonprez considers a form of "iconoclastic pleasure" (Bal-Blanc and Margerin 1998). But the viewer no longer needs to do any channel surfing because it is already done by the TV channels themselves: "No need to zap though, the poetry is right there on CNN." Hence

**130** Grimonprez suggests watching this TV poetry *on mute* and "tun[ing] the stereo to some inflight groove" (Obrist 2011, 268).

With the advent of channels such as CNN and MTV in the 1980s, something profound has happened. Grimonprez talks about an epistemological shift. The practice of TV zapping has led to a new attitude, which he proposes to call "zaptitude."  It would rather point at an epistemological shift in how a "zaptitude" has transformed the way we look at reality. A jumpy fast-forward vision has replaced our conventional models of perception and experience. Sometimes I don't even know anymore if we're still in the middle of the commercial break or whether the film has already started. Soon we'll be mistaking reality for a commercial break. (Obrist 2011, 271)

*dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y* portrays mostly airports, airplanes, and people (both hijackers and victims), but we also see images of buildings collapsing and being hit by planes. It is a destructive process. But it is also, importantly, a process of de-contextualization (and re-contextualization). Grimonprez explains how the "theme of hijacking planes can be read as a metaphor for the hijacking of images out of their context" (Bal-Blanc and Margerin 1998). Zapping, thus, destroys and de-contextualizes. More generally, one could say that the televisual mode of zapping has the effect of fragmenting both our reality and our imagination.

At the beginning of the twenty-first century, we might wonder if we are still in the episteme of "zaptitude." Rather than confronting channel surfing (TV) with net surfing (computer), I propose to look at the practice of zooming and describe what can be considered as a shift to "zoomtitude." By zooming I mean *digital* zooming, which ranges from high professional filmmaking to daily life practices by means of simple tools, such as the zoom levers of nonprofessional digital cameras, the magnifying tool in software

photo-editing programs, the zooming in (+) and out (-) tool of **131** Google Maps, etc. Zooming has become a very common practice, especially when engaging with pictures on the small screens of our mobile devices. Today's digital *flâneur* uses the zoom option to get closer to (or farther away from) a specific location, turning a visual map into a tactile field. The gesture of pinching, whereby one touches the screen with two fingers, either away from each other to zoom in or toward each other to zoom out, operates as a visual form of tactility. Zooming by pinching allows digging into the image, into its countless digital layers. One touches the screen to *see* better, to get closer and penetrate the image.

Symptomatic of today's "zoomtitude" is the phenomenon of the so-called cosmic zoom in contemporary cinema. For instance, the opening and end credits of *Burn After Reading* (Coen Brothers, 2008) take us from an earth view to the CIA Headquarters in Langley, Virginia, and back again. Another famous example is the opening zoom of *Moulin Rouge!* (Baz Luhrman, 2001), which brings the film spectator to the heart of Paris and to the entrance of the cabaret. This second example is taken from Jennifer Barker, who borrows the term "cosmic zoom" from Garrett Stewart to discuss how it visually renders the "phenomenological process of synaesthetic experience" (Barker 2009a, 313). According to Stewart, the cosmic zoom is "a technique of digital rhetoric capable of drastic shifts in scale—as when plummeting from satellite-range to a facial close-up, or lifting back out again" (2007, 283). The cosmic zoom is a digital (or "postfilmic") zoom. Unlike the optical zoom, it does not flatten the image; on the contrary, it allows for a true travelling through countless layers, thanks to new laws of parallax. Unlike the optical zoom, the digital zoom makes it possible to look behind the object we zoom into and opens up new perspectives that broaden our vision.8

8 As such, the cosmic zoom is closer to the filmic dolly shot or crane shot because we can change direction and physically move through space.

**132** As Barker observes, the cosmic zoom bears resemblance to synesthesia because it operates between the sense of vision and the sense of touch:

> We do not *see* the spaces of the "past" as much as *feel* them rush by as we plunge through them. As an effect and event, the cosmic zoom is not only somewhere between the conventional zoom and the travelling, tracking, or dolly shot; it is also somewhere between optical and kinetic movement, and more generally between vision and touch. (2009a, 312–13)

Yet the film spectator does not actually touch the layers through which the cosmic zoom moves. The viewer can see or even feel a delving into the digital depth of the image, but that does not mean that the operation is under the control of the viewer's hands. Zooming in and out by pinching a touchscreen, however, is truly hands-on.

#### **To Pinch Is to Seize with Love**

Pinching is a multi-touch gesture, primarily intended to be carried out by the index finger and thumb jointly, but other fingers can also be involved or take over. The gesture is directly linked to capacitive touchscreen technology, popularized by the introduction of Apple's iPhone in 2007. Before the wide adoption of the smartphone, the competitive touchscreen technology was the resistive screen, implemented and promoted by Blackberry and Nokia. The resistive screen is composed of two layers of conductive material that, when you touch the screen, come into contact with one another enabling the device to determine the location of the touch. The advantage of this type of screen is that you can operate it with normal winter gloves on (which in Finland, Nokia's home country, was an asset not to be underestimated). The capacitive screen, on the other hand, opened up the possibilities for multi-touch gestures for the ungloved hand, as it requires "the intimacy of the bare finger as a working principle" (Kaerlein 2012, **133** 184).9

As Alexandra Schneider observes, Steve Jobs cleverly decided to introduce a new vocabulary for the innovative Apple gestures when launching the iPhone in January 2007. The expression "pinching" was a real find, even if it finally did not catch on with the general public. In Apple language, to pinch means to touch the screen with a soft and gentle gesture whereby two fingers either move toward each other (*pinch-in*) to zoom out or pull away from each other (*pinch-out*) to zoom in. The delicateness Jobs envisioned for these digital movements counters, of course, the "habit" of pinching as a painful gesture. Schneider writes: "The idea of being 'pinched' does not necessarily evoke the sense of a tender touch, and the etymology of the corresponding French verb *pincer* (from which the English word derives) confirms this intuition" (2012, 54). One could indeed say that we are pinching the skin of our mobile device, that we literally squeeze it between our fingers, because of its capacitive (or skin-based) technology. However, as Schneider points out, the French verb *pincer* originally also meant *saisir d'amour*, referring to "a state of being touched (or moved) by a feeling of love" (54). So, interestingly enough, Jobs's twenty-first-century neologism goes back to a centuries-old expression (from the twelfth century, to be exact).

Even if it does not fully reflect our personal experiences of daily screen interaction, I would like to emphasize the (possible) origins of these terms, with "zapping" falling into the category of violent gestures and "pinching" in contrast belonging to the register of love. Pinching intended as a tender touch, as a soft caressing of the touchscreen, evokes the language-game that my daughter invented at the age of three when she "robbed" me of my iPad and named it her "aaienpet." As narrated in the Introduction, this

9 In COVID-19 times, I experienced that latex gloves, though not to the same degree as special capacitive touchscreen gloves, allow for some simple gestures such as sliding-to-unlock the iPhone.

**134** phonetic interpretation of the "i" of iPad works only in Dutch: it sounds like the verb *aaien* (pronunciation: /ˈaːi̯ə(n)/), which means "caressing." Thus, the term "aaienpet" could be freely translated as "tablet to caress," a not far-fetched interpretation since it is confirmed by the activity of caressing itself. It is a good example of how language is woven into an action, as implied by Wittgenstein's notion of "language-game" (*Sprachspiel*). According to Wittgenstein, the meaning of words depends on the languagegame in which they are used; so, the same word, for instance "to pinch" or "I," can change meaning when becoming part of a specific activity. As the philosopher states, "the term '*language-game*' is meant to bring into prominence the fact that the *speaking* of language is part of an activity, or of a form of life" (Wittgenstein 1986, §23).

The glass surface of Apple's iPhone and its successors and competitors is, however, too smooth to be fully tactile. Or better: it still relies too much on the eye, for we cannot operate our smartphones without looking at them, as we could instead in the "good old days" of the first cellular phones with a 12-button keypad. As I will discuss further below in this chapter, the eye dependency of touchscreen gestures has led to the looking-down attitude of today's *phubbers* (neologism from phone + snubbing). The antisocial trend of phone snubbing is generally seen as a disturbing form of addiction that could, however, also be read as a love affair with a technical, touch-based object, as a state of being touched ("pinched") by a feeling of love.10

At the extreme other end of the spectrum is the solution of Google Glass: a touchless wearable. Google Glass reintroduces the screen in the shape of (reading) glasses. It is a screen that is placed between the user and the world, to be looked through and

10 This double reading of the user's relationship with her smartphone is emblematic of the "irreducible ambivalence" of technology in general and of the twenty-first-century technological process in particular (Stiegler 2012). For technology is "both enhancing human capabilities and delegating them with detrimental or 'toxic' effects" (Kaerlein 2012, 188).

looked at, but not to be touched. Yet it is only partly a hands-free **135** device: besides the round power button located on the inner right side of the device, which must be pressed to turn the Glass on or off, there is also a touchpad on the outer right side, near your temple. In fact, alongside voice control, Google Glass introduces a whole range of new head and hand gestures. In 2011, Google filed a patent on "hand gestures to signify what is important," to be connected to and recognized by its wearable head-mounted display (Gomez et al. 2013). For instance, the "field of view" handgesture, which consists of two L shapes formed by index finger and thumb of both hands, serves to "frame" something and take a snapshot. Coming back to the register of love, there is also the popular hand heart that Google Glass users can use in front of any object or image to "like" it (fig. 15a–b).

[Figure 15a–b] "Hand gestures to signify what is important." Google patent, October 15, 2013. https://patents.google.com/patent/US8558759B1/.

**136** The very first claim of the Google patent, filed on July 8, 2011, and registered under the number US 8,558,759 on October 15, 2013, reads as follows:

> In a wearable head-mounted display (HMD), a computerimplemented method comprising: making a determination that video data from a video camera of the wearable HMD includes a hand gesture forming an area bounded by two hands in a shape of a symbolic heart; determining that the two hands are associated with the wearable HMD via analysis of the video data including the hand gesture; generating an image from the video data, wherein the image includes the area bounded by the two hands; matching the shape of the symbolic heart with a predetermined action associated with the image; and executing the predetermined action on a processor of the wearable HMD. (Gomez et al. 2013)

Especially widespread and well-liked among the youngest generations of media users who do not wear smart glasses, the hand heart has become a true media gesture, or even screen gesture, usually performed in the air, that is, between users and screens.  Or one could call it a double-hand screen, which enables you to display pictures, including your own portrait, as you "curl the index fingers on both hands with the thumbs pointing down and join them to make a heart shape" (Meltzer 2011). It is a sign of approval, a sign of love, that can also be made by two users together.

# **The Clicking Hand Cursor**

In the mid 1960s, Jean Baudrillard observed that the hand was "no longer the prehensile organ that focuses effort" but instead "nothing more than the abstract *sign* of manipulability" (2005, 55).  Here the hand seems to be reduced to **137** the level of a sign, a sign of detachment, of lack of engagement. It is not abstract insofar as it can be identified as a female hand; however, it could be anyone's hand, travelling over any kind of images. Hirschhorn observes that this "Apple gesture" does not distinguish, for instance, between war pictures and holiday pictures; it remains the very same gesture, super cold ("hyper froid") and uncommitted ("non-engagé") (2012).

In 1964, around the same time that Baudrillard made the above observation, Douglas Engelbart invented the computer mouse as a device for selecting text on the computer screen.11 The cursor or mouse pointer, called a "bug" by Engelbart's team, was originally a "stick arrow, about the height of a single character, pointing straight up" (Reimer 2005). The diagonally oriented arrow-shaped cursor appeared with the Xerox Alto computer in 1973. The hand cursor icon, which turned the hand literally into an "abstract sign of manipulability," made its appearance in the early Macintosh design of the 1980s. We need to distinguish between the open-hand cursor, designed by Susan Kare for the original 1984 Macintosh, and the pointing-finger cursor, introduced in 1987 with the release of HyperCard (fig. 16a). The former was designed to grab and pan, while the latter designated the ability to navigate stacks and later to click hyperlinks. Of course, as we know, it is not the hand cursor itself but the hand on the mouse that clicks. Nevertheless, the hand cursor has become the sign of this screen interaction or operability. In the late 1990s, before the launch of Mac OS 9, the computer mouse's operations were connected to a gloved-hand cursor, the so-called Mickey Mouse hand pointer, characterized by three black vertical lines on its back (fig. 16b). In 2012, with the release of Mac OS X 10.7.3, this gloved-hand cursor was restyled for high-density displays (fig. 16c). The glove

11 Besides the mouse, Engelbart's team tested also the light pen and the joystick as possible "display-selection," "cursor-controlling," or "bug-positioning" devices (English et al. 1967). For a more extensive history of the computer mouse, see for instance Atkinson 2007.

**138** appears, for instance, when the arrow-shaped cursor hovers over buttons or clickable hyperlinks when browsing online.

[Figure 16a–c] Evolution of Apple's hand pointer from the 1987 to 2012 until the release of Mac OS X 10.7.3. https://osxdaily.com/2012/02/07/high-dpi-cursorsfound-in-os-x-10-7-3/.

As discussed on *User Experience Stack Exchange*, an Internet forum for UX researchers and experts, Mickey's hand had already been used as a "pointer" since the 1930s, notably as a clock hand to indicate the time on the Mickey Mouse watch. It is also well known that Mickey and Minnie made their fi rst appearance on the silver screen without gloves, in the short cartoon *Steamboat Willie* (1928).   As Philippa Jones observes,

The icon is evidently a right hand. This is deduced from the fact that we are viewing it from the front with the palm behind and invisible. . . . So the hand's usability credentials rest on the depiction of a right hand with its index fi nger on the point of clicking a mouse. (2011, 238)

Pointing and clicking are the two actions undertaken by the cursor, two actions that the hand cannot fulfi ll directly upon the screen, but which it commands via the mouse; in other words, these are indirect hands-on gestures, performed by a hand sign or arrow.

[Figure 17] Interactive music video for the song "Kilo." Source: Moniker 2013.

The cursor is a concrete indication that we are dealing with a non-touchscreen, that is, a cursor-based or pointer-based screen. In the near future, the cursor will probably become a relic of the pre-touchscreen area. To mark the impending end of the cursor, design studio Moniker created a crowd-sourced music video in 2013 for a song called "Kilo" by Dutch band Light Light. On their website, one can read the following statement:

We celebrate the 50th anniversary of the computer pointer. For decades this ubiquitous, yet inconspicuous arrow has formed the essential interface connecting user and computer. With the rise of multi-touch interfaces, we are slowly seeing these disconnected phantom limbs disappear.  (Moniker 2013)

After starting the clip on donottouch.org, the user is invited to stay (and click) with the cursor in the green zone, which starts as a dot against a black background, then grows to take diff erent

**140** forms, and finally becomes the green screen of a computer. A zoom out brings us into a room, presumably the design studio, where the band is playing, and the user is challenged, among other things, to form the (invisible) opponent in front of a boxing woman (fig. 17). The result is an ever-changing music video, for it records the actions of the cursor and accumulates a multitude of arrows as they continue to appear with each new viewing. The screen is covered by a swarm of cursors, akin to bugs (to use Engelbart's term for the pointer), that go with the rhythm of the song "Kilo."

Another curious creation with a mouse cursor was made in July 2012 by a first-grader for her mother. The creation was a foldable "paper laptop" with birthday wishes on the screen and a movable cutout cursor in the shape of a black arrow. Here the cursor is a sign of hands-on operability that needs to be manually moved over the paper screen. In other words, there is a conflation between direct touch (the finger) and indirect touch (the cursor), in that the latter is moved by the former. Interestingly enough, this creation made by a post-Millennial girl points toward the obsolescence of the mouse, which remains absent in the media *bricolage*. 12 Or, to put it differently, the non-touchscreen is simply conceived as a touchscreen.

## **Thumbelina's Gesturality**

Whereas today's children are commonly referred to as post-Millennials, their predecessors belong to the so-called Generation Y. Born between the early 1980s and the early 2000s, they are called Millennials. French philosopher Michel Serres has coined the name "Thumbelina," or in French "Petite Poucette,"13

to indicate today's young adult, who no longer has the same body **141** as her parents and who interacts with the world via (mobile) screens. The Millennials live in a different space and think differently because, as Serres observes, they write differently, very rapidly and with two thumbs:

He or she writes differently. While observing them, with admiration, send an SMS more quickly than I could ever do with my clumsy fingers, I have named them, with as much tenderness as a grandfather can express, Thumbelina (*Petite Poucette*) and Tom Thumb (*Petit Poucet*). These are their real names, much nicer than the old pseudo-scientific French word, *dactylos* (typists). (2015, 7)

In other words, it is not so much the touchscreen experience as the writing of text messages with the thumb ("au pouce") that prompted the notion of "Petite Poucette" or "Thumbelina." While having some problems with Serres's fairy tale's naïve reading of our control society, I am nevertheless charmed by his tenderness as a grandfather and his unconditional faith in the new generation of media users, condemned by so many others precisely because of their too-invasive media usage. Serres is asking for our understanding for the new youth, who need to reinvent everything, to learn everything anew, because the world has changed so drastically over the last decennia.

When interviewed by *Le Journal du dimanche*, on the occasion of publishing his provocative essay, Serres told an anecdote about one of his grandsons, who came to visit him on his motorbike. The grandson had a mechanical breakdown. So he dismantled the gear of his bike, but there was a little piece he did not know where to put back. He asked his grandfather for his mobile phone and, in no time, found the solution to his problem. For Serres (2012), this was a telling example of how the new generation lives "in" the computer, whereas the old generation still lives "with" the computer.

**142** In the same interview, Serres explains that Petite Poucette was born in the early 1980s, with the arrival of new technologies such as the personal computer. So she is about thirty years old now. Yet the big changes came about a decade later, in the 1990s, with the growing network of mobile telecommunications and the popularization of the short message service (SMS) protocol, which is at the origin of the practice of thumbing. Limited to 160 characters per message and dependent on a 12-button keypad (from 1 to 9, plus 0, \*, and #), the original SMS protocol was rather cumbersome. For instance, the input of the word "feet" required the following steps:

> First, the "3" key must be pressed three times to enter the "f" character. A short pause is then necessary before the "3" key can be used to input the first "e" (rather than change the already typed "f" character). The pause allows the phone to recognise that a new character is to be inputted. A further pause is then needed before the "3" key can be pressed again to input the second "e." Finally, the "8" key is pressed once to input the "t." (Taylor and Vincent 2005, 78)

It should be remembered that SMS was not designed for use on mobile phones but instead conceived as a one-way communication system for call centers to send short messages such as voice mail notifications to subscribers (when their phone was off, for instance, or when they were out of reach). The GSM group who started offering this service in the early 1990s could never have foreseen the immense success that this "unsexy" protocol was to have, especially among young people, as a point-to-point application (Taylor and Vincent 2005, 79). And youngsters started to develop a new language, the SMS shorthand, with its text-based emoticons, and became very dexterous in adopting the rather complex multi-tap writing method—a gesture which, apparently,

started to cause physiological changes of the thumb at the begin- **143** ning of the twenty-first century (Cloosterman 2002).14

Most interestingly, in media-archaeological terms, is the repurposing of an existing media device to recreate the features of older media. That is, through the use and appropriation of the SMS protocol, adolescents turned the telephone (transmission of the *spoken* word) back into a telegraph (transmission of the *written* word). Or, more simply, the telephone became a handheld writing machine. Consequently, the gesture of telephoning became a gesture of writing, a gesture of no longer holding the phone with one hand pressed against one's ear but of holding it with two hands and typing with both thumbs on the 12-button keypad. In his theory of gestures, Flusser opposes the gesture of writing on the machine to that of writing with a (fountain) pen:

Writing on the machine is a gesture in which particular keys are chosen in accordance with the specific criteria of orthography, grammar, semantics, information theory, communication theory, and more, with the intention of producing a text. It may be that even more refined articulations of thought will develop through the use of word processing. (2014, 21)

The Czech-born philosopher refers here to writing on a typewriter or computer keyboard, hypothesizing a possible change in our mental operations, in the way we formulate ideas and thoughts. The SMS shorthand can be considered as the beginning of such a transformation, which has continued and intensified with the advent and wide adoption of the smartphone. At first it looked like the iPhone, when introduced in 2007, announced another trend—away from the gesture of writing. On the one hand, the cell phone became a screen, that is, a surface to look at as well as to touch; on the other, it was very quickly adopted

14 The new argot of SMS was characterized by the omission of subject pronouns and the use of abbreviations such as CUL8R ("see you later"), acronyms such as LOL ("lots of laughter"), and text-based emoticons such as :-), :-(, :-0, 8-), ;-), not to forget the mathematical kisses (xxx).

**144** as an image-capturing device, a pocket-sized camera, that you always carry with you. However, as a multi-purpose device, the smartphone again brought the gesture of writing to the fore, at the expense of making regular phone calls. Why do we still call it a "phone"? Especially among the youngest generation of media users we see that chatting via text is more popular than chatting via speech (even if the phenomenon of voice messages may be changing the picture). Chatting via text means also and especially posting smileys, emoijs, GIFs, and memes. These are all new "gestures of technology" modeled, according to Flusser, on the "gesture of searching" (2014, 147). This new gestural paradigm resides, quite literally, in the hands of the new generation of media users, who are reinventing how to live and how to learn. To paraphrase Serres, it is via hands-on gestures of thumbing that Millennials and post-Millennials access the world, that they use search engines online, that they app and post on social media. Their thumbs, as well as index fingers when necessary, no longer touch physical buttons but icons on a touchscreen. Yet their gestures in texting, as well as their conventions for abbreviation, remain quite close to those of the early SMS users.

As mentioned above, the touchscreen gestures of thumbing, pointing, swiping, and pinching are often accompanied by a posture of looking down, which in the long term might lead to further physiological changes of both the neck and the spine.15 Despite her gestural dexterity, Thumbelina cannot operate her smartphone without looking at it, with the exception of some (mainly audio-based) gestures, such as making phone calls, recording voice messages, and listening to sound tracks with ear buds. The looking-down attitude has become emblematic of the so-called

15 In reference to Bernard Stiegler and his writings about pharmacology, Gerald Moore observes how, according to the French philosopher, "technical objects bring about a function-shift in our physiological organs, transforming our field of experience. Just as the experiential coordinates of the drunk revolve around inebriation, those of one who lives through their smartphone will be mediated by the habituation of their eyes and hand to the touchscreen" (Moore 2018, 196).

phubbers, who are constantly looking at their phone, constantly **145** checking their social media platforms, and therefore constantly ignoring their offline surroundings and interlocutors.

The typical present-day habit of walking around while looking down at your mobile device, possibly colliding with other users, was already envisioned, quite brilliantly, in a 1947 French documentary film directed by J. K. Raymond-Millet, *La Télévision, oeil de demain* (Television, tomorrow's eye). Inspired by René Barjavel's *Cinéma Total: Essai sur les formes futures du cinéma* (Total cinema: Essay on the future forms of cinema, 1944), the film imagines various future TV applications, including a portable pocket-sized screenic device and 3D television.16 The latter recalls Albert Robida's *téléphonoscope*, as it brings live holographic images into the bedroom and invites the male TV viewer to reach out and touch a bohemian girl who is dancing on his bed. The film depicts an angry wife who taps her husband on the fingers and scolds: "I forbid you to caress the images!" Especially uncanny is the footage with the portable TV because it captures so well, in anachronistic black-and-white images, how today's users depend on their smartphones to provide a constant feed of moving images. Their gaze is glued to the small screen, held at breast level, causing their upper body to bend down.17

In the last decade, many cartoons and videos ridiculing the asocial behavior of social media users have made their appearance online.18 Apposite for my history of hand gestures is Dan Piraro's satirical depiction of the afterlife, which shows future heaven dwellers looking down and staring at their empty hands. Whereas previously the cursor stood for the hand, now the hand stands for the smartphone. An empty hand is a hand without smartphone.

**146** Without wanting to pass judgment on the many phubbers, who, incidentally, do not belong exclusively to the generations of Millennials and post-Millennials, my goal is here to draw attention to the specific gestures of interaction with mobile screens. Thumbelina's hands-on operation is not limited to thumbing but also involves the actions of sliding, swiping, and scrolling. These are new ways of accessing the world that young children quite intuitively acquire and master as elements of a new tactile language. Instead of blaming the new media for changing or damaging children's cognitive learning processes, I believe there is a heuristic potential in Serres's turn toward youth and the unconditional trust in this new generation of media users. Most importantly, Serres's essay denotes a reversal in the learning process: that is, today's children are media users (and even media producers) before they start learning about media in a more traditional way of (passive) knowledge transfer. And that is how, I would argue, they are actively making media history.

To conclude this discussion, I want to recall a YouTube clip that went viral in the fall of 2011. Entitled "A Magazine Is an iPad That Does Not Work," the clip shows a one-year old girl applying typical touchscreen gestures, such as scrolling and pinching, to an electronic tablet and a paper magazine.19 The magazine images, obviously, did not respond to her gestures. Whereas the father, who edited and posted the video clip on YouTube, referred this hands-on interaction in terms of an "OS upgrade," many posts that commented on the clip doubted the true digital intuition of the baby, pointing out for instance that she did not know how to read the iPad properly (since she held it upside down). This is not a matter of "coding" the baby's brain, but, as I see it, a very simple and typical play of trial-and-error. As opposed to pretend play, this is a play of exploration, of trying out the effects of one's actions, similar to the gesture of dropping objects on the floor or knocking over a block tower; the play's logic is that the child

repeats these actions over and over again to find out whether **147** they will lead to the same chain of reactions (among which also the reaction of the assisting adults). Undoubtedly, the iPad gave the little girl the idea of checking out, repeatedly, whether her finger also worked on other touchable surfaces, the magazine pages as well as her chubby leg. Through this play of trial-anderror, the one-year-old is learning hands-on what the difference is between a touchscreen and a non-touchscreen, between a clickable icon and non-clickable icon, between capacitive glass and human skin, by employing new "gestures of technology."

PART TWO: SCREEN AS TOUCHABLE OBJECT

# **[4] Hands-On Screenology**

*And immediately I thought of making of this lady a screen before the truth: and I pretended to it so often in so short a time that my secret was believed known by most of the people who speculated about me. Dante Alighieri*

#### **Between Surface and Interface**

From the perspective of cinema and media studies, the screen is most commonly considered a surface for projection or display. As such it also disappears as an object. It makes itself invisible in order to make visible what is projected or displayed: ranging from the moving images of a filmstrip to the data flow of algorithms translated into graphs, texts, and pictures. In this chapter I will propose to think of the screen as an interface, as something that literally stands in between, as a medium (singular of media). As suggested in the Introduction, my working definition of media approximates the idea of channels, not so much for their auxiliary quality (media as means) but more for their intermediate position (media as middles, as things that are, physically, located in the middle or in between). In the thirteenth century, Italian poet Dante Alighieri used the notion of a "screen lady" to indicate a beautiful woman seated between him and his true love Beatrice. Intercepting the line of their gazes, the screen lady concealed the truth, making others believe that Dante was instead in love with

**152** her. As pointed out by Giorgio Avezzù, Dante's screen lady is both a surface, that is, a screen of "illusory, deceptive representation," and an interface, that is, a screen of protection and separation, of "setting the beloved woman apart" (Avezzù 2016, 33). For the audience, she is the image on display, but in fact she only covers—or functions as the interface of—the image of Beatrice. In a similar way, Seung-hoon Jeong has proposed the terms "interface" and "interfaciality" to designate the "contact surface between image and spectator" (2012, 230). In Jeong's analysis of rube cinema, this contact surface is a touchable interface, allowing for tactile experience.

Chapter 4 will study the screen as an object that continually oscillates between surface and interface, by making evident that the notion of in-between-ness characterizes the original meaning(s) and usage(s) of the screen. The tension between surface and interface emerges throughout history and persists until today due to the omnipresence of interactive screens, those screens that are both surfaces to be touched and interfaces (or portals) to the world. Or as Francesco Casetti puts it, screens are no longer surfaces on which reality is simply represented but have become "transit points," that is, places where "free-floating images stop for a moment, make themselves available to users, allow themselves to be manipulated, and then take off again along new routes" (2014, 103–04). Whereas Casetti talks about this transformed screen in terms of display, Simone Arcagni suggests that today's screens, in particular the mobile or portable screens, are in fact all computers, because they are interactive screens, connected to the Internet, with their own storage capacity, programs, and apps (Arcagni 2012, 76). So, it seems that the screen and the computer are colliding. The question, however, remains: Is the interactive screen by definition a computer screen? Or can we think of an interactive screen in a pre-computer age?

In "Towards an Archaeology of the Computer Screen" (1998), Lev Manovich sees the interactive computer screen as the fourth (and, for the time being, final) stage in the screen's development. In his linear overview, Manovich traces the following steps: **153** 1) the classical screen of painting and photography which offers a fixed image; 2) the dynamic screen of cinema which adds to the classical screen the property to display an image that changes in time, that is, a moving image; 3) the "real-time" screen of television which shows an image that changes (or moves) in real time; and 4) the interactive screen in which changes in the image happen not only in real time but also as a result of user action and intervention, as by changing computer data. In Manovich's genealogy, the characteristics of the various stages are accumulative. Or as Manovich puts it, "In my genealogy, the computer screen represents an interactive type, a subtype of the real-time type, which is a subtype of the dynamic type, which is a subtype of the classical type" (1998, 34).

Importantly, the starting point for Manovich is the definition of screen as a flat surface. In Manovich's words the classical screen is "a flat, rectangular surface," which is "intended for frontal viewing" (1998, 28). All the elements of such a definition—flat, rectangular, surface, frontal, and viewing—can be questioned when looking into the screen's etymology and various historical usages. Taking inspiration from Erkki Huhtamo's "screenology" (or screen archaeology) in its departure from the history of the word "screen," I will trace six different etymological lineages, which I propose to analyze in tactile terms. My hands-on screenology will discuss all kinds of screens that are not flat or rectangular: from the fire screen to the decorative lady's fan, from the gate to the closet, from the shield to the mirror, from the skin to the skirt, from the wall to the sheet and the sieve. The "from . . . to . . ." construction might seem to imply a teleological progression, but the various lineages are bifurcations of multiple etymological roots that go back and forth in time and often overlap. In other words, it is a media-archaeological mapping of the screen as a written instance or discursive unit.

At the center of the discussion is the materiality of the screen, which is also the focus of Giuliana Bruno's *Surface: Matters of*

**154** *Aesthetics, Materiality, and Media* (2014). Bruno's main areas of interest are clothing, architectural walls, canvases, and other art and projection surfaces. For Bruno, "surface matters" because it is where artistic expression takes shape. She proposes to "think about the surface as a place of connection, as a meeting place, beginning with the fact that our primary form of habitation is our skin" (Oppenheimer 2014).

We could say that the screen is a material phenomenon because its surface is. The surface is a thing, to rephrase Charles Acland, who bluntly notes:

Screens are things: they are the products of industry and labour; they take up space; they are made of solid substance; they change people's bodily orientation; and they send light into our eyes and, with the audio component of most screens, soundwaves into our ears. There is nothing immaterial about any of this. (2009, 149)