Hands and What We Do With Them

Hands: What We Do with Them and Why, by the British psychoanalyst Darian Leader, offers a fascinating thesis on why human beings are inherently a species of desire and the drives that determine our behaviour. Drawing from Lacanian psychoanalysis, art history, and pop-culture anecdotes from Leonardo da Vinci to Die Hard, Leader argues that our hands are not just passive tools, they are vital regulators of bodily tension and individual identity.

He explores how traditions found in many cultures, like prayer beads, fans, and pocket watches have evolved into modern smartphones and tablets, suggesting that our obsession with scrolling and swiping is less about modern alienation and more about an ancient, deeply rooted human need to use manual activity to manage anxiety, seek autonomy, and physically negotiate our relationship with the world around us.

On this workshop we explore our own hand gestures, our relationship with the external world mediated through our hands and crucially what we might be unconsciously communicating with them. This workshop comes at a time when working online has, to some extent, made our hands redundant because they are not visible. Our hands are changing due to effortless control afforded by frictionless technology and we will examine what this might mean for us as more advanced technologies such as artificial intelligence evolve.