The haptic nature of gesture: Rethinking gesture with new multitouch digital technologies

This paper is about re-thinking gesture in order to reckon with its material and haptic nature, especially in the current multitouch technology environment. This re-thinking of gesture returns to the principle of indexicality found in Peirce’s material semiotics, and develops this principle through the work of Gilles Châtelet and Gilles Deleuze around hand-eye relationships. Drawing on the work of Jürgen Streek, we propose and discuss the notion of the tangible gesture, in the context of mathematical explorations of young children with a multitouch iPad environment designed to promote counting on and with the fingers.