In High Fives-Apple Fingerworks Multitouch Patents Sheet by Kari Altmann (a particular body of work within Altmann’s on-going No Glove, No Love meme), one views, at first glance anyway, a series of smeared, blood-colored handprints slapped to the surface of black & white printouts of x-y graphs each of which itself contains an orderly representation of both seemingly arbitrary numbers as well undecipherable technical language around a set of black streaks.

*These printouts, as hinted by the title, are part of a patent on multi-touch technology — mapping out the areas of flesh and motion that are copyrighted under this particular brand's interface.

This direct indexical imprint of the biological body over the formal representation of abstracted, automatically copied technical data creates a collision between opposed iconographic elements (each instance of the series suggests either a paint-crazy toddler run amok with their older sibling’s physics homework or a 1980s corporate-office slasher film in which the maniac killer slices up a victim at the copy machine).

The title of the work–High Fives-Apple Fingerworks Multitouch Patents Sheet—points out for the viewer where to go from there.

Each of the diagrams over which the artist places her blood-colored handprint is, it turns out, the schematic diagram of a touchscreen computer technology (a touchscreen computer technology being, for example, the touch responsive interface of the Apple iPhone in which the user scrolls through a Web page by running their finger down the screen as opposed to employing an external device such as a mouse or keyboard to do so).

With this information in mind, one can, then, read the “black streaks” described above as themselves representations of handprints which are labeled with accompanying data.

As such, what one views here, then, is not a collision between the slapping of Altmann’s blood-red handprint over any old data, but rather over data representing the pressure exerted on the screen of a technology which is itself designed to be directly manipulated via pressure from the human hand.

It’s a “high five”—the physical trace of the artist’s handprint colliding with the copied and quantified representation of an anonymous user’s handprint over a touchscreen device.

What’s important to reiterate here is that the immediate impression of each of the iconographic elements colliding in the space of the image doesn’t favor either the technical representation of the handprint in the background nor the messy, bodily handprint in the foreground; rather each are roughly equivalent in graphic power.

This equivalency becomes a site of meaning in the work when one considers that as touchscreen technologies become increasingly mobile and responsive to the physics and ergonomic constraints of the human body in the physical world, they simultaneously become increasingly influential in directing the control of the human body towards the ubiquitous usage of these very technologies.

It’s great that the interface of the iPhone opens up possibilities for greater bodily freedom in the use of computer technologies, but is it great that this interface also enables one to now spend all of their time checking things on the network through their phone, oblivious to their immediate physical environment?

Regarding this point, Altmann writes:

In High Fives the idea is to use red finger paint to represent fake blood, and provide a handprint on this map of flesh and touch interaction being controlled by the interface. Resembling the handprints some of the earliest cave dwellers left as a mark of their civilization, this handprint in blood is a way of leaving a mark on the infrastructure being created by these systems of power and product–the virtual “cave” that technology often expects us to live in more and more, filtered from direct experience. It’s also a way of meeting every interface confrontation with an unexpected and human reaction.

*********

Altmann’s handprint, then, is a sign of the human body confronting the technology which influences its control—yes–but, through her choice of blood-red for the color of the handprints, it becomes something more intense, as well—a sign of aggressively confronting the technology which influences its control.

*It is also a series of cheap print-outs, with fingerpaint hurriedly applied. This is meant as a way of recording every single-use interaction one would have with this interface. So many power systems rely on repetitive impressions and "liquid branding." This is also why the paint must be applied with someone's actual hand, onto an image designed for, distributed by, and printed on hugely powerful technological systems that work through interfaces and surface contact. I'm meeting this confrontation with my own liquid impression that is trying to be super threatening! Though the use of fake blood instead of the actual material implies that as much as I want to "play rough" I know my individual response can only go so far.

Similarly, this meme/series ended very quickly, but not without a few more hurried, serial paintings in which the rigid parameters of a copyright document were blurred into a type of touchscreen submission that brought them closer and farther away at the same time, turning the sun into a metaphor for the physical order of the eye, and the borders into blurring impressions.

 

Like most of my series and memes, this was also expressed as a research database of imagery, one that I believe should be on display along with the works, as they are both descriptors:

 

Noglovenolove.tumblr.com

 

A new series called "Multi-touch Mud", part of the MONSTER NRG meme, picks up where it left off: