During the first weeks of lockdown, we all became performers. With the new rules of no-touch that were introduced in the pandemic, our cameras were switched on, our bedrooms became the main stage, Zoom turned into a household name overnight, and a new split between body and mind was introduced. An overactive mind in a grounded body. The external pause brought on by the pandemic offered a new hybridization of passivity and activity. A new amalgamation of body, mind, and technology that blends the traditional dichotomy of mobilization as well as the definition of private space. How did bodies contend with the new spatiality of confinement? As telecommunication became the main apparatus of connecting to the world outside of one’s room, sitting in front of a screen became a prime method of being in the world. Being with others often meant living from the shoulders and up. It brought a very different kind of way of being in the body. What kind of disembodiment took place? Can we perform the space that we are lacking? What kind of performance is possible and where does such performance take place? Measure of Closeness: A Lexicon of Gestures is a collaboration between Evann Siebens, Stella Geppert, and me. It is a piece that only lives online. It was initiated, developed, rehearsed, and presented via Zoom platform. The performance is an ever-mutating creation that evolved based on the shifting sensations that emerge in response to time in confinement and to the meaning of attending a performance in such times. From our separate locations, we collectively engaged in a series of movement exercises, choreographic figures, conversations, and chat rooms in order to prompt contemplation about how we think through the mediation of online space and its formation of political, poetic, spatial, and corporeal narratives. A new nexus of body and nobody.

As creators, we were interested in what the body can do to know the new spatial relations and what sort of lexicon of gestures emerges from the new measures of closeness. Working somewhere in the fold between a performance and a workshop, Measure of Closeness: A Lexicon of Gestures followed a series of scores and provocations. We used our bodies as a measuring tool for learning the distance between our bodies, the physical space they inhabit, and the technological apparatuses used to connect us.

It started with measuring spaces that can actually be measured with one’s body: The distance between my eyes is four fingers; it continued to more infrastructural and poetic spaces—the distance between my next word and your ear is 17 air kisses. Measurement became a form of touching, an embodied technique of recalculation of proximities and intimacies.

At some point, we were breathing on the camera. We were blowing our humid, hot, internal air on the lens until it was foggy. We got the camera wet. The platform functions were melting by our saliva. The lens was affected, the gaze was affected. The inside was turning outside and changing its performance. Our lips, teeth, and tongues covered the frames. But as we got closer, we could no longer see each other, and we were performing for a common imagination of what the Zoom meeting room looks like in the absence of our eyes. Physical and visual closeness intertwined and allowed a further layer of detail to be revealed. Is detailing equivalent to coming closer? There is something about the Zoom platform and its inability to zoom that makes it more similar to body-to-body interaction. Since there is no zoom-in function, the only way of creating this illusion of distance is via movement of the body or objects around the space.

In search of closeness, we give up the image of the whole and remain with the visual aspect of only a few organs. In physical closeness, we give up the encounter with an object as a whole and we encounter parts. This uncanny sense of otherness from one’s body is conceptualized by Karen Barad’s notion of a proximity of otherness, where she writes that 'brings the other nearly as close as oneself. Perhaps closer.'[1] We got so close to the camera it was nearly as close as oneself. Perhaps closer. We started to produce collective sounds. Words like wow allowed us to blow and exhale the maximal amount of air while also producing a sound that is utterly ridiculous in the videoconferencing context, a response that leads to the releasing of more air through laughter. We became mouths without a body. Like Lisa Dawn’s famous mouth in Samuel Beckett’s play Not I, or like the smile of the Cheshire Cat that persists alone, even when the cat’s body is no longer there. If the mouths were too close to the camera, our bodies were so far away. They were left behind our mouths’ breath, like a defunct tail. Bodies stayed seated while lips were coupling and decoupling, producing their own visual hapticity. Muscles were moving, hot air and voice came out, lips almost touching the camera and one another, yet organized on a grid. It flooded us with strange and wonderful intimacies, grossed distortion, primal memories, and other moments of sensorial attunements and technological attachments. Maybe it brought us closer to what Barad describes as 'the dizzying feeling of touch'. For a moment, we accepted the screen as a mode of touch. New micro proximities were introduced. A touch without skin. A collapse of the outside in the very particular form of an inside. A detachment of bodies and parts. A collection of organs without bodies.

As Alice said in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, seeing a cat without a grin is a familiar site but a grin without a cat is the most curious thing. Like Alice, the feeling of the body without organs, when body parts are dematerialized or decontextualized from a whole, brought about a curious sensation. Such sensation allowed intimacy, or rather a local and affective temporal state that emerged from localizing the affective event not in the body as a whole but in a specific organ. Locating the event within a single organ is a sterile form of virtuality that is infused by desire. Yet, the propositions of body liquids in their gas state of fog, as they merge coming from many bodies, also brought the potential of a social body where body parts are released from their structural organization and come together, offering a form of collective hapticality. Within the history of visual cultures, the idea of autonomous organs that are no longer attached to a body is often discussed in relation to the idea of the gaze, more likely than not in an authoritarian position, often fetishistic. Similarly, it is associated with systems of ordering used by institutions. Here, such an arrangement of organs is often made possible by the violent act of collecting, archiving, and displaying. Take that system of orders into the aesthetic of late capitalism, the collection of body parts as seen on the standard Zoom 'gallery view' can be read through the unification and utilitarianism of the corporate corporeality. At the same time, I find the spatial, nonhierarchical arrangement of body parts a zone of affective consistency. The potential virtuality of pure affect was located exactly in being extracted from the corporal embeddedness and on the edges of the body. The kind of organs without a body I am thinking about is as far away as possible from the eye of the 'gaze'. Instead, they turn into a tactile vision, the micro proximities between the touching fingers and the touchscreen, they offer skin-seeing, a brain that melted down to the flesh, the bones, the guts, the skin. Measure of closeness approaches hapticality through un-bounding the body from its hierarchical organization toward a state of fleshy being. It approaches the momentarily coalition of hot breath landing on camera retina as a moment of affective alliance. Organs that align without a source, attuned without agreement. The momentarily assemblage of body, matter, and digital derives more from the rhizomatic tendencies that result from an encounter than from the rational linearity of strategies and negotiations. They are too closed or too far away to be captured through a system of categorization, which make them harder to possess. Too wet to cut through. The dematerialization of the body into organs and reorganization of organs without organizational structure can offer a form of collectivity that emerges through the possibility of arrangement of bodies, matter, and technology not as a split but as a temporal alliance. This process happens in the acceptance of the screen as a social agent that can transmits closeness. Through somatic forms that are harder to register in a digital form digitized, they become a pleasure practice that gives the role of thinking through the epidermis.