In my last post, I discussed gesture in James Cameron’s Avatar. In a response, Josh Landy asked me to think a bit beyond the terms I’d set up in that piece (which focused on what gesture means) to consider what it is we do when we gesture.

A new trend in the arts is to use human and animal organic tissues (mixed or grown together) instead of paint, clay or other traditional media as the primary material for art. The artificiality in art is literal, and yet subverted, the artificial becoming natural, being grown out of the natural world, and - more disturbingling - creating a new "natural" or at least living world.

Pornographic literature is dismissed as an oxymoron by many scholars because we expect ‘literature’ to imply form, while the endless repetition of unproblematic sex acts denies us the comforting format of beginning, middle, and end.

There is the question of the influence of technology (or absence thereof) on the way we think and write. But I recently came across the question of the biology of writing: what are we writing with? Our minds, our hands, our guts, or an immaterial mix of subconscious/reason/emotion peppered with cruise-controlled linguistic automatisms?