At the heart of contactless technology lies the desire for a frictionless motion, the fantasy of moving through an urban environment without strings, without getting stuck. The all-too-known wish to lightly tap one's wallet and swift thought the station's gates before the train leaves the platform, entering an office without taking one's ID out of the pocket, or check in to a work environment without typing or even remembering a password. Such synchronisation of body, data, and finance enabled by contactless technologies enhances a new capitalist kinesthetic that is enabled by computation ubiquities. But as comforting feelings often reveals, there is nothing less free than free movement under the regime of the contactless.

The fantasy of free movement is conditioned by the idea of what movement is. In a recent talk, dance researcher André Lepecki addressed the uncanny feeling of being told not to move freely as advised by authorities during the pandemic. Lepecki notes that in non-Western and Indigenous societies the notion of movement is imminent. In the West, on the other hand, 'the ideal fruit of freedom is ontologically, intrinsically fused and confused with the freedom of movement.'[1] Being free means being able to move freely. As such, the subjects of the nation-state's repertoire of movements are given to them by the state, as their natural movement. The subject's level of freedom is measured by their ability to move freely, to gain access to properties and potencies, and of course, to gain an advantage by moving faster than others. Hence, so-called 'free movement' is in fact a way of using movement to exercise power. Because movement is external and granted, it is always conditional. The ideal of moving forward encapsulates the neoliberal rationale that binds individualism, kineticism, and capital. Such granted movement is also directional, with the ultimate move being forward and upward.

Approaching the kinetic arena as a mechanism of control can be helpful when studying the new urbanism of the 'Contactless' condition. In the tactile arena, the ability to 'go contactless' is an evidence of being close to power. Like free movement, contactless is a form of privilege. The history of colonialism and modernity is conditioned by the definition of who can be mobile and who mobilised others by taking from them their right of mobility. Similarly, today, the privilege of avoiding contact often holds the privilege of life. It is the case within the financial terrain, where the faster one moves the stronger they are, but it is also the case when one is advised to stop moving and stay in place. For example, during the pandemic the ability to stay at home was available for some, while others couldn't afford it, as they had to go out into the public space to earn a living.

The 4 centimetres, like the 2 meters of the social distancing, aren't vacuum spaces. Many of the presumptions of movement as power are encapsulated in what seem to be empty spaces. In them, there is a hyper-activity of governance and governmentality, a hyper-activity without a spectacle. Through those micro spaces, access is being maintained and control is being enforced. The active magnetic fields that are produced by the loop of electric currents are also looping to one's bank information, location, shopping history, credits and debts. They are the active fields of commerce, spatiality, and value that define worth by marking the limits of inclusion and exclusion. With Lepecki, I would like to recognise the edges of the space of the abolition of movement or touch as the conditions of possibilities.[2] On the limits of 'inclusion' and 'exclusion,' a space that is primal to the known binaries of inside/outside, mattering/not-mattering, the feature of auto-sync doesn't work. Instead, there is an ongoing imperfect synchronicity of body, object, and their social and technological milieu that marks the edges of what can be captured and what cannot. Those edges should be the centre of our interest as they represent a space of potential, mostly activated through conjunctions with other entities. The micro-movements in the nontangible spaces carry the potential for and affective 'hapticality', the feelings you can tune into through others.[3] They refuse the clear definition of language, they represent potential leakage of information, the hole in the archivable, and the noise in the computable. The imperfect edges represent spaces of reduced governmentality. As for all our concerns, there is always something that drops out.