作品

About the work

Both Hands Their Backs Rubbing (2020) documents a tentative practice of co-writing with Macbook’s Touch Bar, and a study of Taoist hand gestures with fingers in spasm.

The standard QWERTY keyboard has accommodated us with the optimized setting of typing gestures to reduce fingers crossing to the minimum. On the contrary, the Taoist hand gestures are almost against ergonomics. Choreographed to communicate with celestial beings, its complexity reassures the efficacy of mediation that it entails: exclusive and erratic. 

Lay right in front of the typing hands and placed in between the keyboard and the screen, the Touch Bar as an input interface disguises itself as an alternative output so as to tamper with the generative process of my thoughts. 

About the artist

Dakota Guo (b.1994) is a Chinese artist currently based in Rotterdam. Integrating video, performance, and installation, her work takes on a hauntological approach towards rituals, corpses, texts and non-human kins. Through practice-as-research, she attempts to formulate a strategy of “gesturing” whereby she speculates on the syntactical affinities between heterogenous materials, organisms, and ecologies. Dakota holds a MA in Performance Practice as Research and is currently pursuing MA in Art Praxis and Critical Theory at the Dutch Art Institute.