Bibliography of the Tool and the Hand

“the wheel
is an extension of the foot
the book
is an extension of the eye
clothing, an extension of the skin,
electric circuitry,
an extension of
the
central
nervous
system”

— Marshall McLuhan

One of artist Lygia Clark's Sensorial Objects, a mobius strip binding together two hands.

“We can note how an instrumental relation can be predicated on sympathy: to be in sympathy with the whole body is to be useful to that body. An instrument can also thus be understood as the loss of externality: becoming useful as becoming part. Pascal suggests that usefulness is a form of memory: to be useful is to remember what you are for. Not to be useful is to forget you are part of the body, to forget what you are for. For Pascal the foot refers to human beings, who must remember they are part of God’s kingdom. It implies we are all parts and that as parts we must be willing to be of use or of service to the whole. But as I explored in Willful Subjects (2014), some individuals come to be treated as the limbs of a social body, as being for others to use (or more simply as being for). If the workers become arms, the arms of the factory owner are freed. If some are shaped by the requirement to be useful, others are released from that requirement.”
— Sara Ahmed

Clean your screen, a project by net artist Olia Lialina

“Digital platforms are changing the senses of reading for everyone. Our tactile learning extends to books, smart phones, and computers. Although visual readers tend to think of reading as only visual, reading almost always involves a combination of senses. How we make sense of the ways we read depends on how we pay attention to our senses.”
– Touch This Page exhibition website

The Medium is the Massage (1967) – Marshall McLuhan, Quentin Fiore

“Techniques can extend all those human aspects for which we possess a mechanical understanding, that is, we know how it works” (1993, p. 16). These are human faculties that can be conceived of as “a faculty, appendable by a device” (p. 16), such as our eyes, or our hands. What is not extended are faculties that cannot be conceived of as appendable or mechanizable, which are our faculties of judgment, morality and “the sense of place.”
— Philip Brey quoting David Rothenberg

TMESIS TMOUSES, project by Siena Damiani, student at Rice University, Fall 2024

“The first public demonstration of a mouse controlling a computer system was done by Douglas Engelbart in 1968 as part of the Mother of All Demos.”

“Human biology and mentality started to radically change in 1983 with the arrival of the cell phone. The blinking, buzzing and beeping object has become an integral part of body and brain. There are now more active cell phones on the planet than people. Perception, social interaction, memory, and even thought itself have become increasingly cellular. The cell phone… has taken over much of what used to be defined as the responsibility of shelter in terms of sense of security, space, orientation and representation. The cell phone is not simply carried, looked at, or touched or by a person since the person is unthinkable without the device. Most people feel extreme anxiety when they misplace their phone, lose reception, or the battery simply runs out. The cell phone has become an integral part of the sense of self.”
– Beatriz Colomina and Mark Wigley

“This paper is an attempt to describe the nature of a new calculative background that is currently coming into existence, a background that will both guide and constitute what counts as ‘thinking’. It begins by providing a capsule history of how this background has become a more and more pervasive quality of Euro-American cultures as a result of the rise of ‘qualculation’. It then moves on to consider how this qualculative background is producing new apprehensions of space and time before ending by considering how new kinds of sensorium may now be becoming possible. In this final section, I illustrate my argument by considering the changing presence of the hand, co-ordinate systems and language, thereby attempting to conjure up the lineaments of a new kind of movement-space.”
— Nigel Thrift

Initially when popular AI image-generator tools were introduced to the mass public, numerous articles decried their inability to draw hands.
See also "The Uncanny Failures of A.I.-Generated Hands" by Kyle Chayka
But the same image-generators have improved rapidly. More accurately put, the software engineering power and force of capital behind AI—raw resources, channeled to it, versus other targets—are evident.