Follow Us
The influential computer scientist Mark Weiser once wrote that “a good tool is an invisible tool. By invisible, I mean that the tool does not intrude on your consciousness; you focus on the task, not the tool.” By this definition, many of our digital tools seem to have succeeded completely; they liberate our bodies by becoming invisible to users. By closing the gap between our bodies and our virtual selves, touchless technologies, such as gesture control, voice recognition, and eye tracking aspire to channel our pure, natural expressions.
Such an interface has long been the holy grail for designers. From the Wii motion console to Leap Motion to the gadgets we all now carry in our pockets, these devices aim to erase the boundary between our bodies and our information. These devices promise a future in which our tools are so intuitive, they vanish. Now, it seems that future has arrived.
Though invisible to our conscious minds, our tools indelibly shape us. Technologies are not simply objects but architectures that organise our bodies in space and time, and give form to what I call the digital body: how we feel, move, and become through and alongside digital technologies. And the digital body is not an abstraction—it is us, becoming, again and again, in the technologies we build and the worlds we inhabit.
Living in the era of smartphones and AI, it’s easy to think that we’re in uncharted waters without a map. Our tools have become so frictionless, so invisible, that we forget their historical origins. Long before algorithms and touchscreens, technologies like writing, musical instruments, and even roads reshaped human life. These transformative tools and systems heralded profound changes in how we interact with one another, how we engage with the world around us, and ultimately, how we live.
As increasingly personalised technologies permeate our lives, such urgent questions arise as: How did we get here? What kinds of bodies do our technologies assume, require, or erase? What’s at stake when flesh becomes interface? And how might we redesign our path?
Our interactions with technology are dramas of skin, bone, information, rhythm, and power. Technologies refine, track, translate, and choreograph our behaviours; in doing so, they introduce new ways and languages of being, feeling, moving, and knowing.
Hands
As organs that extend consciousness into our surroundings, hands might be understood as the original interface—or as cartoonist Lynda Barry calls them, “the original digital device”—between human and world.
Paleoanthropologists, neuroscientists, and philosophers have stressed the evolutionary symbiosis of hand and mind. The hand mediates the most complex interactions of the human brain and the realm of technology. At the same time, our gestures have been shaped by an ongoing dialogue with our tools and our environments. As our earliest principal technology for information storage and retrieval, writing embodies this interplay.
Hands are smart. Hands are curious. Hands learn. Hands know things.
Despite the crucial role hands have played in the development of new technologies—and our bodies with them—there have been numerous attempts to automate the human hand out of the equation.
Automata, proto-robots built to act as if working under their own power but actually following a predetermined sequence of operations, have existed for over a millennium. Many of them are dedicated to mimicking the unique human performances of the hand, although they haven’t reproduced its intelligence.