Thinking with Your Hand

© 2019 
Robert Bosch GmbH, Wimmelforschung, Akademie Schloss Solitude

 

Anna Gohmert: »Denken mit der Hand / Thinking with Your Hand«

 

In winter 2017/2018, artist and WimmelResearch fellow Anna Gohmert focused in her work at the Bosch Research Campus’ Platform 12 on an important part of our body – the hands. Grasping, controlling, waiting, typing, arranging, and doing nothing are movements and operations in daily work. Gohmert documented the researchers’ manual working processes. Being filmed by the artist during their daily manual operations contributed to a process of awareness of their own daily acts.

In times of automatization and artificial intelligence, increasingly more operations originally executed by the human body are replaced by robotics – themselves not even controlled by hand but by voice or gesture. In consequence, especially hands seem to be more and more useless – but after all hands are indispensable to every human being. Anna Gohmert’s interest is the following: »How can you act as freely as possible?«

In different workspaces at Bosch GmbH in Renningen, Gohmert filmed the characteristic manual operations of Bosch employees, who – confronted by the film set – lived their movements more intensively, or even harder. At the same time, the focus on the working hands provoked by the camera led to the question: What do I really do all day long – subconsciously or consciously? This question characterizes the title of Gohmert’s project Thinking with Your Hand.