Corporeal or Gesturo-haptic Writing

Abstract

expressionism exhausted itself long ago, its relation to the traced body of the artist giving way to the live mobile presence of his or her body in performance art, or by a transfer of embodi428 Configurations 6. James Elkins, What Painting Is (London: Routledge, 1999), p. 5. ment from artist to viewer in installation art, where the viewing body is kinematically augmented by being required to move in, through, and out of the space created by the installation. But though the installation’s eclipse of the traditional flat image effectively terminated the function of the brushstroke as frozen movement, the presence of that sort of mediated trace of the body’s action did not disappear but migrated to digital technology, where the potential for directly capturing gesture, as well as recording or tracing it in painting, has been given a new and still developing itinerary—an itinerary whose emergence from the original haptic device of the computer mouse was unintentional. Thus, as one knows, the mouse is the enabling technology of the Graphic User Interface; invented thirty years ago as a move-and-click device for registering the user’s (x,y)-position, it has in addition to this function since become a digital paintbrush able to capture (traces of) the highly restricted movements and gestures of the hand swiveling at the wrist and sweeping across a flat surface. The resulting brushstrokes can be used to create certain kinds of digital paintings (mousegrams one might call them) that exhibit these gestures—or, rather, reduced, metonymic projections of them—in a captured state.7 Action painting, and painting generally, captured traces of the artist’s activities—imprints or residues of movement; whatever thought and feeling painting was able to embed in the painted surface via its pourings and brushstrokes had to be accomplished through these immobile reductions of the dynamic gestures and movements of the body. Motion capture is able to avoid mere residues, and on the contrary delivers a form of kinematic writing not confined to such stationary traces.