Unruly Gestures: Seven Cine-Paragraphs on Reading/Writing Practices in our Post-Digital Condition

Janneke Adema; Kamila Kuc

doi:10.3384/cu.2000.1525.2019111190

Authors

Janneke Adema Coventry University
Kamila Kuc Coventry University

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.3384/cu.2000.1525.2019111190

Keywords:

Reading/writing Gestures, Gestural Agency, Corporate Gesture Control, Textual Media, Cutting, Iteration, Media Archaeology

Abstract

Unruly gestures presents a hybrid performative intervention by means of video, text, and still images. With this experimental essay we aspire to break down various preconceptions about reading/writing gestures. Breaking away from a narrative that sees these gestures foremost as passive entities – as either embodiments of pure subjective intentionality, or as bodily movements shaped and controlled by media technologies (enabling specific sensory engagements with texts) – we aim to reappraise them. Indeed, in this essay we identify numerous dominant narratives that relate to gestural agency, to the media-specificity of gestures, and to their (linear) historicity, naturalness and humanism. This essay disrupts these preconceptions, and by doing so, it unfolds an alternative genealogy of ‘unruly gestures.’ These are gestures that challenge gestural conditioning through particular media technologies, cultural power structures, hegemonic discourses, and the biopolitical self. We focus on reading/writing gestures that have disrupted gestural hegemonies and material-discursive forms of gestural control through time and across media. Informed by Tristan Tzara’s cut-up techniques, where through the gesture of cutting the Dadaists subverted established traditions of authorship, intentionality, and linearity, this essay has been cut-up into seven semi-autonomous cine-paragraphs (accessible in video and print). Each of these cine-paragraphs confronts specific gestural preconceptions while simultaneously showcasing various unruly gestures.

* The article has been updated since first publication. The only change is the URL to the video that is referred in the article, which has been changed since the journal has been migrated to a new system.

Author Biographies

Janneke Adema, Coventry University

Research Fellow Digital Media, Post Digital Cultures Research Centre, Coventry University

Kamila Kuc, Coventry University

Course Director, Media Production, School of Media and Performing Arts, Faculty of Arts and Humanities, Coventry University

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