Anja Borowicz Richardson

___Our physical and haptic engagement is shifting – gestural movements at work and play are becoming smaller, our material encounters are increasingly digital. Yet the same mirror neurons are activated when performing a gesture, and when watching others perform, move and engage. These empathic mirroring connections with other bodies expand our own embodied awareness, our ‘techniques of the body’. Can we extend these embodied techniques through artificial stimulation of different sensual modalities?___

The idea of Gesture Labs was developed in conversations with a neuroscientist. For the first GL, we presented selected footage of working gestures and asked visitors to mimic a range of movements. Participants' response to stimuli of different modalities was measured in a purpose build booth. Their gestic responses were viewed live [shadow projection] and recorded for further study. 

___The brief for the participant was simple: in the privacy of the booth, she will watch a selection of different body labours on a small monitor whilst mimicking the movements to the best of her ability. She consents explicitly to her gestures being filmed from the inside of the booth (and implicitly to her shadow being watched from the outside). Thus she enters into a relationship with three screens: 

(1) the monitor for her sole viewing in the private darkened setting, (2) the eye of the camera that diligently and greedily records her (re)actions; and (3) the plastic skin that captures her projected shadow, her flattened abstraction reflected back onto her and exposed to those that watch outside. The watching is watched and watches himself back.____

Further Gesture Labs included expanded multimodal inputs, from the archives of recorded body labours to dissected phrases of instructions and extractions of gestic echoes. In addition to gestic movement, I explored the aural aspects and the idea of sounding-out and listening-in to the effort.

The transcriptions explore the modalities of object-gesture events — textual, aural and visual dimensions — and their metaphoric associations. The material comes from my collection of images and videos of body labour, taken in public and semi-public spaces, on construction sites or in hairdressing salons. I would record soundscapes of ‘gestic echoes’ and gather ‘textual extractions’ from instructional manuals. These collections were enhanced by samples from online archives (British Pathe films, BBC Sound and Internet Archive) and social media (YouTube tutorials or ASMR resources) or performed as scores by volunteer readers.