MEDIATIC HANDOLOGY SHAPING IMAGES INTERA

Hands emerge as decisive operators of visibility, shaping perception through gesture, care, and visualization.

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 as 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 works as a Permanent Researcher at THALIM/CNRS. She focuses on the relations between art (mainly cinema and painting) as well as on cultural exchanges between Soviet Union, Europe, and the United States. Among her most recent publications: A biblioteca infinita de Sergei Eisenstein/The infinite Library of Sergei Eisenstein (2019) and Eisenstein et Daumier, des affinités électives (2013). She has curated the show "The Ecstatic Eye", for the Centre Pompidou-Metz.

Andrea Pinotti is professor in Aesthetics at the Department of Philosophy, State University of Milan, and fellow of IEA, Paris and ZfL, Berlin. His research focuses on image theories and visual culture studies; among his publications: Empathie (2016) and Cultura visuale (with Antonio Somaini, 2016). Awarded with the Wissenschaftspreis der Aby-Warburg-Stiftung, he is currently directing an ERC project (An-Iconology. History, Theory, and Practices of Environmental Images.