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In June 2012, Chicago, Illinois, Appeals Court Judge Richard Allen Posner dismissed a case of alleged patent infringement between Apple Inc. and Motorola Mobility (now a division of Google Inc.). The case is characteristic of the numerous legal wranglings concerning a plethora of patents that have been registered by the current players, large and small, in the global telecommunications industry. The claims typically concern hardware and software development in the smart phone sector. This particular dispute has been hailed by some as a landmark ruling, with Posner seeming to extort a win for common sense.[1] Among the long list of infringements which Apple was accusing Google was one concerning the means of unlocking the screen with a swipe of the finger, a feature typical on most touchscreen smartphones. Posner rejected this claim, commenting that: “Apple’s argument that a tap is a zero-length swipe is silly. It’s like saying that a point is a zero-length line.”[2] While this particular claim appears to have a genealogy that dates back to Apple’s infamous ‘look and feel’ case against Microsoft,[3] its highlights the endemic industrial skirmishing between these corporative giants over not just the technology but the way in which we use and interact with it. More recently patents have been submitted by Google to protect a number of features on one of their latest products, Google Glass.[4] These relate to gestures that the user can perform with their hands to interact visually, rather than physically, with the device. The gestures, recognised by the device, enable the user to register some aspect of the physical environment to the device and for that information to be subsequently uploaded to an online server. For example, a user makes a ‘heart’ gesture with their two hands would trigger the device to identify the content which the user is viewing, the image of which would then be uploaded to a social media site and it would indicate the user has ‘liked’ the image, whatever it may be. At this time only a small number of such actions have been submitted in the patent, but it does indicate where developments may lie in the future.[5] Both these cases highlight and demonstrate the embodied dimension of new and future communicative technologies; the gestural capacity in which we interface with the devices and engage with the physical environment through them. The technology manifests a spatiality in which the real and the virtual are fused. But this is no cyborg, no melding of body and machine. Rather, it is the embodiment of information as being. With reference to the citation of social media above, we already maintain our online personas, our virtual avatars. Our online presence can indicate our ‘likes’, our preferences and our favourites. While the accuracy or authenticity of the transition or translation of our being from real to virtual can be debated, nevertheless, the link cannot be denied. But in the politics of technological gesturing, these are not simply additional methods in which our preferences, our character and our being are uploaded.
More precisely, these embodied gestures draw what was only virtual into the real; we bring our virtual presence out into the world. Furthermore, these (ontological) gestures are being debated and contested at an industrial level. The global telecommunications corporations are effectively commodifying our gestural capacity. In an absurdist way, may we someday have to pay to make a heart sign with our hands at our lover? Probably not. But it does illustrate both how capital can capture our physical bodies and that our gesturing, and therefore being, is a type of semio-capital.[6] Our embodiment is reduced to information; our being becomes less analogue and more digital. What characterises gesture is that in it nothing is being produced or acted, but rather something is being endured or supported.[7] The conditioning of semio-capital, endured and supported by gesture and interfaced in to a capital regime by the technological device, is nonetheless reducible not only to programming but language. But there is a double paradigm of language functioning here. First there is the coding which does the programing, the software which makes the hardware work. More fundamentally, there is the written document of the patent itself. It is not capital which we are territorialised by, but language, or rather writing. The finitude of the patent is both eternal (subject to the duration of the patent) and absurd (as illustrated by the above comments). In a “struggle against perfect communication”,[8] perfection is something which at times cannot be supported. Dave Loder 2013 [1] Naughton, John (2012) Apple’s patent absurdity exposed at last. [online] The Guardian, 1 July 2012 [2] ibid. [3] Between 1988 and 1994, Apple Computer Inc. brought a copy infringement suit against Microsoft Corporation in an attempt to prevent graphical user interface (GUI) elements similar to Apple’s own operating system being developed as the Windows operating system. The court ruled that Apple could not patent the ‘look and feel’ of a GUI or the metaphor of a ‘desktop’. [4] Google Glass is a wearable computer with a Head Mounted Display (HMD). It is worn in the same manner as a pair of spectacles, with the user viewing his or her environment through the lens, through which graphical information is portrayed to create an ‘augmented reality’ experience. [5] Vincent, James (2013) Google patents the heart hand-gesture to let you ’like’ things with Glass [online] The Independent 17 October 2013 [6] Semio-capital can be defined as the replacement of the industrial means of production by that of a semiological means, whereby capital is generated not by the exchange of products but the exchange of information and signs. [7] Agamben, Giorgio (1992) Infancy & History p.57 [8] Haraway, Donna (1991) A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century [online]
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1. Untitled I (2013) Ball gag, speaker, audio cable, 2no. cassette tapes (5 seconds, looped), cassette player Audio clips of Northern Irish actor Paul Loughran, who provided the voice overs for Sinn Fein President Gerry Adams when he was subject to a broadcast ban by the UK government from 1988 – 1994. Loughran went on to act in numerous UK programs including Heartbeat, Emmerdale and Blue Murder. 2. Untitled II (2013) Digital video, 20 seconds, looped Found footage of Atlas V rocket launch breaking the sound barrier. 3. Massaging the Medium (2013) 12” vinyl record, fabric, cardboard, MDF The vinyl record, a recording of The Medium is the Massage (1967) written and performed by Marshall McLuhan, has had all any use of the word ‘medium’ removed. This has been achieved by purposefully looping or ‘glitching’ the needle to repetitively wear away or erase the relevant sections. 4. Uncertainty Principle (2011) Condom, jewellery box, drawing pin 5. Untitled III (2013) Ordnance Survey maps, veneered plywood