Throwing Gestures. Protest, Economy and the Imperceptible

Abstract

Gesture in focus—Gestural body movements play an increasingly vital role in disciplines across the board, including politics, art, the media, and technology. In Throwing Gestures, contributors examine the recent intensification of interest in gesture and the entanglement between gesture, media, and politics. The gestures discussed pass from body to body and between states of medial representation. Protest movements, the respective aesthetics specific to those movements, the perpetuation of socio-economic crises over many decades, the plight of gig workers in precarious employment and mechanisms for the quantification of work and leisure are some of the issues addressed. What do gestures communicate about society and politics in the context of transformation driven by ubiquitous technology and media? 

Fourteen contributors, including curators and art critics, from diverse fields ranging from visual and performing arts, cultural studies, and cultural history, to media theory and political science, shed light on the many aspects that comprise mediatized gestures today. Developed from independent approaches brought together through interdisciplinary collaborations, Throwing Gestures combines conversational, artistic, and essayistic contributions with scientific articles. Image and text are juxtaposed. Readers are invited to leaf through the collection or approach the volume as a flipbook. The associative, artistic, performative, and scientific examinations in the preceding research project have found a continuation in both the contents of the book, and in the book itself as a tangible artefact.

Contributors

Florian Bettel (University of Applied Arts Vienna), Dina Boswank (artist, Berlin), Justine A. Chambers (choreographer and dancer, Vancouver), Riccardo E. Chesta (Scuola Normale Superiore, Florence), Timo Herbst (artist, Leipzig), Irina Kaldrack (Braunschweig University of Art), Alexander Koch (curator, Berlin), Martina Leeker (scholar, Berlin), Zoe Lefkofridi (University of Salzburg), Stefanie Kiwi Menrath (Brandenburg University of Technology Cottbus-Senftenberg), Stefan Rieger (Ruhr-Universität Bochum), Tobias Schulze (Braunschweig University of Art), Konrad Strutz (University of Applied Arts Vienna), Anna-Lena Wenzel (art critic, Berlin), Laurie Young (choreographer and dancer, Berlin).

Content

p. 4
Acknowledgements

p. 9
Florian Bettel, Irina Kaldrack, Konrad Strutz: Throwing Gestures. An Introduction

p. 21
Irina Kaldrack: Modeling the Gestural

p. 51
Konrad Strutz: Gestures of Labor. An Artistic Contemplation

p. 65
Stefan Rieger: Naive Physics. Gestures of Intuition

p. 79
Florian Bettel: Contextualizing Praying Bodies—Gestures and the Military

p. 89
Justine A. Chambers in Conversation with Laurie Young: With the Gestures Where We Feel Charge

p. 105
Florian Bettel: At the Center of Attention—Gesture, Police, and the Commodification of Protest

p. 135
Timo Herbst, Marcus Nebe: Play by Rules

p. 161
Riccardo E. Chesta, Zoe Lefkofridi: Symbolic Gestures in Contemporary Protest Movements

p. 183
Laurie Young: Ambit

p. 201
Alexander Koch in Conversation with Timo Herbst: Artistic Gestures—Political Gestures

p. 213
Exhibition Views

p. 245
Anna-Lena Wenzel: Gestures of an Exhibition

p. 259
Irina Kaldrack, Tobias Schulze: Dancing Fists

p. 325
Stefanie Kiwi Menrath: Artistic-Scientific Complicities. The Entanglement between Gesture, Media, and Politics Project from an Empirical-Cultural Anthropological Perspective

p. 347
Biographies