Almost a century ago, Marcel Mauss coined the term 'techniques of the body'. By it, he meant to describe how societies around the world use their bodies in ways that are learned rather than 'natural'. The way we walk, sit, sleep, and stand are all particular techniques our bodies learned over time. Although he demarcated these techniques as being separate and distinct from the technical know-how of tool usage, digital technologies have become, in their own way, techniques of the body: Devices converted into bodily extensions, creators of purely virtual and synthetic realities.
It's not uncommon to find ourselves in front of a tool we don't know how to use, and despite the intuitive gestures integrated into the designs of our devices, there was a time when we didn't know how to use them. After all, moving a finger up and down a screen as a way to scroll the page is an arbitrary convention. We have developed a series of techniques for our technologies, and the examples are, literally, at the tip of our fingers. When thinking about how technology alters, mediates, projects, expands, and damages our bodies, our hands come as an essential component - although arguably less and less so. It is with our hands that we usually interact with devices we use every day in an ever-expanding list of gestures and motions.
Whether these are techniques of the body or simply the use of tools I don't know. Perhaps it's a little bit of both. Digital technologies start to live in that space-between as they creep into our bodily functions and become interfaces of, towards and away from the world. They certainly seem to be more than just tools by now.
This series of short texts and drawings meditate on these techniques and relate them to the meaning of the 'digital' from its etymological roots. 'Digits' denote the numerals from 0 to 9, the decimal system which correlates with the number of fingers in our hands. Our fingers, then, are the 'digits' we first encounter. They are the 'tools' we have at our disposal when we first begin counting or pointing at things. They are our first calculator. So our hands and fingers might just be the most technical part of ourselves. They have been, at least until now, very important mediums with which we use technology today. In our becoming-cyborg, incorporeal, or worse still, redundant, this might soon stop being the case. This series progresses from the concrete to the abstract, from scrolling, pushing, and tapping into the virtual bodies, promises, and disembodied minds. Or is it the other way around?
This is an exploration of the human body and a future without humans, or enhanced for humans, but certainly not only for them.