Digital culture, taken etymologically, means a culture of the fingers (from the Latin digitus). Although our contemporary times are still envisioned through the lens of an over-reigning visual paradigm, our media practice has become mainly bodily, since the role of hands has proven ever more decisive and gestures have increasingly been constructed as tools for thinking and conceptualization. This issue presents crucial case studies in film and visual culture, ranging from classic to experimental cinema, from science visualization to esoteric culture. In every field, filmed hands come to be extraordinary operators of visibility: they depict imaginary worlds which do not rely upon eye perception, they make visible the intimacy of the human being, they give shape to the spectator’s gaze and, in a more concrete fashion, to the image itself through gestures of care and restoration of the filmstrip as well as by anchoring vision through data visualization processes. A hypnotic and a powerful motif, hands represent the corporeal grounds of the cinematic medium and the indelible crystallization of the human in technique.
Ada Ackerman, Barbara Grespi, Andrea Pinotti, Mediatic Handology?
Greta Plaitano, Technologies de l’oeil, psychologie de la main : Nicolae Vaschide et la photographie médico-artistique
Regina Karl, Technological reproduction at odds: Hand and cinematography in Robert Wiene’s The Hands of Orlac
Marie Martin, ‘Rêve d’un geste’ ou la main et l’oeil dans quelques films du handicap sensoriel
Lucia Ruprecht, Minor Gestures: Chantal Akerman’s Un jour Pina a demandé…
Petra Löffler, Hands-on Film: Media Archaeology as Gestural Practice
Filippo Fimiani, Dancing Fingers: Moving Mimicry and Abstract Tactility
Rebecca Puchta, Refining Data by Pointing the Index Finger
BEYOND CINEMA
Federica Cavaletti, Disclosing the (Temporal) World of Depression, by Means of Audiovisual Media: An Exploration between Cinema and Virtual Reality
Olga Moskatova, Vertical Screening: Aesthetics and Formatting of Relocation
REVIEWS / COMPTES-RENDUS
PROJECTS & ABSTRACTS