English Translation
title: Gesture
subtitle: a re-fold of time
About the concept
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Gesture is the intension that unfolds in space; sometimes intentional, always extensional, it accompanies the act like the shadow the form and, depending on the lighting, precedes it; informs it, comes from it.
Sources
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- activer les possibles, Isabelle Stengers, 2018, ISBN 978-2-35984-101-5
Manuscrit
I prefer to have notes written manually because when I see them, what is activated is not the words, it is the time of preparation, of imagination, during which I decided how I would do it, how I would do it.
Manual writing reactivates the past of the conception while text written on the keyboard sends it back to the now, does it hold now? That’s why I hate reading a conference because the read text is a thing of the past. The question “does it hold?” poisons the present… I’m not really here…
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Posture
When I started composing on the keyboard, I was entering another arrangement and I can no longer really remember the previous one. It’s funny because when I wrote my thesis, I wrote half of it manually, and then I got my first computer. I copied it quite accurately and continued directly on the keyboard. What I do know is that the body’s position has changed. When I wrote by hand, I wrote on a mattress on the floor, sitting cross-legged. There was something that told me it was another activity. Now I have to sit down. There’s another arrangement that certainly changed my handwriting.
The Ensemble
On the keyboard all the text pieces are contemporary. One piece can give you the idea of working on another part, so you work on the whole, you make decisions at a much longer range.
Labyrinthine
Maybe keyboard writing is becoming more labyrinthine… Because the relationship between the local and the whole is more contemporary. While when you write manually, you are where the line stopped, so it’s more linear. The move you’re about to make is like premeditated.
Writing is being in a particular brain arrangement. And it happens that for me, when I switched to writing on a computer, it generated a more experimental writing, where I feel much more than the words engage, have a force that I would say cerebral because it bends, it twists, it connects, that suits me!
From the point of view of readability, it may be a loss for the reader, but from the point of view of the inseparability between reading and creating, it is not a loss for me.
