'BCC' Exhibition Text: 'Loveletter for you'

RE: Loveletter for you

From: Liz Smith

To: ingoodhands@mail.com

Tuesday 30 June, 21:53

You’re in good hands

In the films of Robert Bresson, he uses hands instead of faces to tell stories. All the energy of the face is transferred into the hand.

There’s that little hand that wears white gloves. It points you in a direction, guiding you and letting you know that this icon, or that set of underlined words, is a link to more information or another digital world entirely. Writer Masha Tupitsyn quotes the Buddhist Monk Thich Nhat Hanh, who says that “Love is action and the symbol of the action is the hand. When you enter a Tibetan or Vietnamese monastery, you can see a Bodhisattva with one thousand arms. It means the Bodhisattva has one thousand ways of loving and seeing.”

Then there’s that hand hitting send on an email containing a loveletter of sorts from a computer in Manila on Thursday 4 May, 2000. The email is sparse; only the words “Kindly check the attached LOVELETTER coming from me.”, along with the attachment LOVE-LETTER-FOR-YOU.TXT.vbs, appear in the landscape. These days, this kind of correspondence seems like a relic from a bygone era of the digital realm. However, sometimes the deeper something is buried, the brighter it becomes. It glows in your inbox like an open palm. I imagine a human hand guiding its cursor to the email attachment, the cursor flickering as it transforms into the small gloved hand pointing with its tiny index finger, selecting to open the fateful attachment.

Its body is pure action. It worms its way into contacts, files, hardware, heart, and motherboard, establishing a hold on the world; enough to jeopardise entire networks. In this loveletter the receiving subject projects all its possible hopes, desires, curiosity, anticipation, answers, wishes, yearnings, and miracles onto that seamless gesture of love. The mundane act of the tiny gloved hand selecting the attachment rearranges everything as the malware takes over. Files continue to look “compellingly unchanged” at the same time as their shape and “meaning is up for grabs” and rematerialised. Duplication, erasure and masquerading are its key functions, leaving a trail that is imperceptible to the human eye; the love “never shows and the show never ends.”

A hand can tell the story of a gentle loving caress, a murderous blow, or a show of mercy. With our hands, we choose to be human as well as inhuman; guiding the state of our hearts as we traverse realities.

References

Masha Tupitsyn, Picture Cycle, in the essay ‘On Robert Bresson,’ p. 229

Ben Lerner, 10:04, p.19 & p.32

ILOVEYOU: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ILOVEYOU