NIXEDMEDIA™

Bodo Winter’s “Why Study Gesture?” is a light-hearted introductory chapter into the importance of gestures and the study of them. In the opening of this chapter, Winter emphasizes the commonality of gestures in everyday life by making a few varying examples. His example of someone gesturing while on the phone, despite the person on the other end of the call not being able to see them, stood out especially (p. 1-2). While I do use gestures to help explain actions and gestures that are unrelated to language, I definitely find myself gesturing basically anytime I’m on the phone. I found the point that Winter makes after presenting these examples, which was that “Sometimes, people gesture ‘for themselves’,” interesting because it is a common occurrence that I have never acknowledged before (p. 2).

Although gesturing has become so integrated with language and communication, Winter notes that there are still plenty of people that believe that it, ultimately, is not useful. These individuals analyze language from a Chomskyan perspective and view it “as an abstract piece of mental software that forms an isolated subsystem in the brain” (p. 3). Because I am so accustomed to seeing and using gestures in my everyday life, this was a surprising fact to learn. It made me think about how life would be if gestures were less common or eliminated altogether, and I believe that there would be a drastic difference. Gesturing may not be a required part of communication but it certainly contributes to it greatly. Beyond aspects such as word choice, delivery, or inflection, gesturing provides another way to convey personality. Personally, I consider myself to be a little silly, and I think that a lot of the gestures and facial expressions I make reflect that, especially as they are often used to accentuate my jokes.

Besides all of the communication-related uses of gesturing, Winter also mentioned how intertwined gesturing is with various other fields. These fields include computer graphics, art, anthropology and cultural studies, and many more (p. 7-8). As I read through this list, I realized two things: 1) gesturing is everywhere, and 2) gesturing is multi-modal as it possible to convey messages non-verbally, present a visual act to view, and produce a sound depending on the gesture. These realizations only reaffirm the usefulness of gesturing as they show how universal it is.

 

Regarding the Composing the Gestural Mode Project, there are a few ideas that I’m considering. The first would be to record myself performing various gestures that I do in my everyday life, such as folding my arms or holding my chin during conversations, wrinkling my nose, or tossing my hands up like a scale when I’m trying to make a decision. I think that this would be fun to make and it would allow me to see the various expressions and gestures that others see when I talk to them. This idea is also partly inspired by some friends who told me that I have a number of poses/gestures that I make during conversations. The second idea would be to record myself drawing something on paper, then drawing that same thing on a tablet to compare the way that I approach drawing on the different surfaces. Because paper and a screen provide different amounts of friction, it would be interesting to focus in on my gesturing, since I am usually focused on the actual drawing. The last idea would be to record a skit in which someone sits down between two other people working on homework, and continuously switches their expression and gestures/pose as they realize they are mirroring the people working on either side of them. This would be a fun video to make and would reflect something I do a lot because I do not want other people to think that I am copying them intentionally when I happen to mirror them.