Can you recall your earliest gesture? Perhaps not consciously, but traces of these first attempts to orient our bodies in space linger in our everyday experiences. 

This winter break, I had the opportunity to do a studio visit with Halsey Rodman, whose piece The Wolves from Three Angles is up in a three-person show “A Room in Three Movements,” currently at Sue Scott Gallery (http://www.suescottgallery.com/).

"Okay! As we continue our guitar journey, we need to talk about how you're going to be attacking the strings. And I'm going to recommend that you use a pick." David's tone is upbeat and encouraging, as always, and he seems to be looking right at me -- his ability to make eye contact with the camera is uncanny.

In my last blog post, I wrote about the ways the Israeli artist Ohad Meromi’s recent installation “Creative Circle” allows its viewers to bodily encounter a set of objects that already exist in relationship. It’s understandable that we’d feel embodiment when we encounter performance (and, as Allison Carruth points out in her post on Jònsi, the gestural often hums along under the radar of critical engagement: when we attend to it, our own somatic encounters with performance can be startling).

Yesterday evening at Berkeley's Zellerbach Theater, Icelandic musician Jónsi (of Sigur Rós) performed. The show was spectacular, perhaps the most compelling live performance I have experienced.

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.

Like many of you, I saw James Cameron’s Avatar over the winter break. The film offers a theory of representation based on a genetic (but technologically sealed) connection between a human interloper’s body and an “Avatar,” a modified, organic, native Na’vi body that can be moved by thought via a semi-organic, “plugged in” technological matrix.