Join us to the next seminar of the REM@KE Permanent Seminar Series with our guest speaker, Tim Ingold, on Friday, June 26, starting at 17:00 CEST / 16:00 BST.


At the Keyboard: Fingerwork and Digitalization

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Abstract:

For millennia, human beings have used their fingers in skilled manual operations, ranging from knotting and weaving through breadmaking and milking to embroidery and handwriting. They have also used them for playing a variety of musical instruments, including keyboard instruments such as the piano, and stringed instruments such as the cello. Drawing on personal experience of playing both the cello and the piano, this talk will compare the varieties of fingerwork each instrument demands, placing them in the context of a wider field of variation including practices of drawing, writing and typing. We show that with technologies of digitisation, the work of the hand has been removed to the fingertips. These tips, while they mediate the transmission of information in a virtual world, have no purchase in the real world of forces and materials. They cannot feel its surface textures, nor can they intertwine with one another, curl around things, squeeze, grasp, hold or carry. Today, as digital technology increasingly invades the theatres of everyday life, we are close to losing precious modalities of sentience and expression. For the sake of coming generations, it is vitally important that we keep the skills of fingerwork alive.

 

Tim Ingold is Professor Emeritus of Social Anthropology at the University of Aberdeen. He has carried out fieldwork among Saami and Finnish people in Lapland, and has written on environment, technology and social organisation in the circumpolar North, on animals in human society, and on human ecology and evolutionary theory. His more recent work explores environmental perception and skilled practice. Ingold’s current interests lie on the interface between anthropology, archaeology, art and architecture. His recent books include The Perception of the Environment (2000), Lines (2007), Being Alive (2011), Making (2013), The Life of Lines (2015), Anthropology and/as Education (2018), Anthropology: Why it Matters (2018), Correspondences (2020), Imagining for Real (2022) and The Rise and Fall of Generation Now (2023). Ingold is a Fellow of the British Academy and the Royal Society of Edinburgh. In 2022 he was made a CBE for services to Anthropology.

 

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Location

Zoom online meeting