Touchscreen Archaeology Touchscreen Archaeology: Tracing Histories of Hands-On Media Practices Wanda Strauven Funded by the Bibliographical Information of the German National Library The German National Library lists this publication in the Deutsche National bibliografie (German National Bibliogra- phy); detailed bibliographic information is available online at http://dnb.d-nb.de. Published in 2021 by meson press, Lüneburg, Germany www.meson.press Design concept: Torsten Köchlin, Silke Krieg Cover image: Detail from Una storia (2014) by Federica Barbieri Copy editing: Kyle Stine The print edition of this book is printed by Lightning Source, Milton Keynes, United Kingdom. ISBN (Print): 978-3-95796-186-0 ISBN (PDF): 978-3-95796-187-7 ISBN (EPUB): 978-3-95796-188-4 DOI: 10.14619/1860 The digital editions of this publication can be downloaded freely at: www.meson.press This Publication is licensed under a CC BY-SA 4.0 (Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 4.0 International) license. To view a copy of this license, visit: http://creativecommons.org/ licenses/by-sa/4.0/. To my daughter Contents Foreword 9 Introduction: Is This a Touchscreen? 11 PART ONE: TOUCH AS MEDIA PRACTICE [ 1 ] A Little History of Hands-On Film Spectatorship 53 Two Founding Myths of the Early Film Spectator The Early Rube Films Ali Barbouyou and Don Quixote Michel-Ange’s Lure or Pretend Play The Avant-Garde Rube of the 1920s Expanded Cinema Rubes The Technological Rube of the Twenty-First Century Today’s Children as Rubes [ 2 ] Early Museum’s Hands-On Ethos 83 Please Do Not | Touch It The Early Museum The User of the Cabinet of Curiosities The Exhibitionary Architecture of the Modern Museum The Museum Touchscreen Futurist “Tactilism” and Tactile Tables (Non)interactive Tactile Art The Art of Touchscreen Gestures [ 3 ] Sketching, Zapping, Pinching, Clicking, Thumbing 117 Hand Gestures, Hands-On Gestures A Praxeology of Media Gestures Performing/Animating Hands Hands-On TV Watching From Zaptitude to Zoomtitude To Pinch Is to Seize with Love The Clicking Hand Cursor Thumbelina’s Gesturality PART TWO: SCREEN AS TOUCHABLE OBJECT [4] Hands-On Screenology 151 Between Surface and Interface Screen’s Etymological Lineages Some Notes on the Electronic Touchscreen Post-Scriptum: Early Media Screens [ 5 ] Manually Operated Optical Toys 187 Mischievousness From Handheld to “Handled” Optical Devices The Philosophy of Toys Object Lesson as Early Model of Hands-On Teaching Tactile (Media) Pedagogy [ 6 ] The Image as Screenic Surface and Interface 223 Screen’s Cues for Action The Notion of the Screenic Image From Data-Based to Multi-Purpose Image From Windowed to Screenic Viewing The iTouch Generation The Neo-Spectators of Relocated Cinema Do-It-Yourself Cinema Conclusion: I Touch, Therefore I Am 243 References 247 Foreword Untimely as it might seem, this book invites the reader to delve into a century-long history of tactility in the arts and media. In these strange times when people are asked to keep distance from other human beings due to the spread of an invisible pathogenic agent and when touching displayed objects in public is consid- ered risky and even transgressive, I propose to study historical and contemporary hands-on media practices as playful and meaningful acts. I would like to emphasize that the present book was written well before the coronavirus pandemic. Its conception thus predates the safety measurements of social distancing, wearing facemasks and latex gloves, and not touching touchscreens. Yet I revised the manuscript during the early days of the pandemic’s outbreak, more precisely during the first strictly regulated lockdown in Italy, and finalized it when so-called second waves hit populations worldwide. Even if these experiences did not affect the overall concept of the book, I cannot circumvent the subject and ignore the current distrust in touching (screen) surfaces and nurturing social contacts. The pandemic is topical to the content of this book, as it urges us to rethink the activity of screen touching, somehow reversing the logic of the touchscreen as a screen that must not be touched. Indeed, as I will briefly address, the global health crisis had direct consequences for the use of touchscreen-based devices in museums. And when discussing manual gestures in terms of communication, I also needed to acknowledge that the hand- shake, for instance, underwent a change in meaning in response to COVID-19. On the other hand, the interest of this book lies precisely in the excavation of changing meanings, of topoi that return as unique instances throughout history, with a renewed or altered function. I propose to think of the touchscreen as a low-tech, touchable 10 media object, as a surface and interface that existed long before computers and smartphones. Today’s touchscreen, potentially contagious, is only one of the occurrences of what constitutes the object of knowledge for my media-archaeological quest. January 2021 Introduction: Is This a Touchscreen? In the beginning, touch; at the origin, the medium. Michel Serres Three Opening Anecdotes In the spring of 2012, I visited the then-recently-inaugurated Eye Filmmuseum Amsterdam in the Netherlands and tried out the Video Flipbook machine installed in its basement. This machine allows visitors to make a personalized flipbook by recording a short selfie video, saved as a sequence of still images, that can be printed and assembled for a small fee in the Eye Shop. At that time, the interactive installation consisted of a wall with screens on the front and back: one screen serving as a preview of the recording and another displaying the first images of the videos that various people had just recorded. Above the outward facing screen was a caption that warned: “NO TOUCHSCREEN” (fig. 1a–b). The sign was attached with transparent tape, in a rather pro- visional way. I assume the staff realized only after the museum opened that the setup was inviting people to touch the screen, probably because the individual images looked like clickable icons. 12 [Figure 1a–b] Video Flipbook Machine, Eye Filmmuseum Amsterdam. From author’s personal archive, May 2012. I was struck by the historically reversed situation, whereby a 13 “high-tech” but not touch-based video screen was incorporated into a setting for creating a “low-tech,” century-old media toy, a flipbook, that required active touch to create the illusion of movement. The kineograph, as the flipbook was patented in 1868, came also to be known as “thumb cinema” in reference to its manual operation: it can be browsed from front to back with the right thumb and from back to front with the left thumb, while its flipping movement can be stopped at any page, so that a detail can be indicated with the finger. Thanks to its small size, it fits perfectly in your shirt pocket. The flipbook as portable, pocket- sized and hands-on cinema is in stark contrast to the fixed built-in computer screen that cannot be touched. Yet the warning sign of the Video Flipbook machine is also clearly symptomatic of a change in our screen culture, of the fact that the touchscreen is becoming the default technology for screens and that we need a new term to indicate the non-touchscreen or non-touchable screen, which is, obviously, not necessarily obsolete. In a similar vein, after the introduction of the CD in the music industry, the LP was no longer called “record” (or record album) but persisted and made its revival as “vinyl.” What could be such a new/old name for the non-touchscreen? Can we think of a comparable connection with its (original) materiality? In autumn 2014, another museum visit, while not resolving this terminological matter, inspired further reflection on the ontology of the touchscreen. Accompanied by a group of young children, I happened to drop in on a temporary exhibition organized by the independent artist collective Casagallery at the Resistance Museum of Bologna in Italy. At the entrance of the exhibition, entitled Infiltrazioni (Infiltrations, October 7–17, 2014), stood a huge round cactus covered with cutout paper eyes, which were all pierced, one by one, by the cactus spines. It was fascinating to see how the kids were immediately attracted by this spiky artwork, entitled Una storia (A story, 2014), by Federica Barbieri. Two little girls could not resist touching it. They did so in a very 14 delicate way, as if they wanted to caress the cactus (fig. 2). Or maybe they were just curious to find out if it was a real cactus, if it was hurting despite its “huggable” appearance. And, of course, it did hurt. But it was not an ordinary cactus they were touching: it was a cactus with innumerable eyes that were looking back at them. When I posted a picture of this “encounter” on Facebook, one of my friends, besides referring to Un chien andalou (1929) by Luis Buñuel, also made the following astute observation: “Touch screens that look back at you.”1 [Figure 2] Una storia (2014) by Federica Barbieri, Museo della Resistenza, Bologna. From author’s personal archive, October 2014. Are these cutout paper eyes indeed touchscreens? Why would one call them that? Because of their materiality and the fact we can touch them? Or rather because of their (painful) feedback and the fact they are looking back at us? To be sure, the artwork questions—even pokes at—the culturally established hierarchy 1 Jan Teurlings on my Facebook wall, October 16, 2014. of the senses, that is, Western ocularcentrism. In fact, over the 15 course of not only Western history but also each human life, the first and primal sense of touch is constantly disciplined by and subordinated to the other senses and, in particular, vision (as the mind’s eye).