If tactile meanings are expressed through the body, touching, tasting, or smelling objects, gestural meanings are made through bodily appearances, movement, and positioning. Gestural meaning includes body location, hand and arm movement, facial expressions, our gaze. They are inseparable from what we do to sculpt the appearance of our bodies with the clothing that we choose, the hairstyles, makeup perhaps, jewelry, and of course body modification. >> Moving on now to gestural meanings, they're essentially about embodiment. Here I am, I'm a person in the world, I have a physical presence in the world, and that includes bodily appearances. I look like something, that the movement I have in the world, the way in which I'm positioned and I move in the world, and my positioning. What I want to do is I want to unpack several aspects of this world of gesture. And the first one is a very interesting, obscure, and under thought about area of human activity, which is gesticulation. See, I'm doing this, that. I'm doing this, I'm doing this. I'm doing all sorts of things, and I don't, I'm semiconscious of what I'm doing. I don't quite know what it means. It adds something. We're all the time gesticulating. And, in fact, it is incredibly complex. It's like conducting my own speech. And there are incredible differences between one person and another. And it all means something, even though I'm barely conscious of what it means. So, what it is, it's narrowly defined as movements of the hands and arms that accompany talking, or mental images of talking. So, in other words, when you think of me talking later, you might see the characteristic ways in which I gesticulate. Or imaginings of how I'm about to talk or recordings of talking. This is a video, and you can see my gesticulation because it's been recorded. And the kind of basic form of gesticulation is preparation, which I move my hands to a place. Stroke, which is I do this. And then retraction, which is. So, in other words, the stroke is the real meaning, but I've gotta move my hands and arms to that position, and when I'm finished, I have to take them back to wherever they are somewhere else. So, there are these three basic elements, and unpacking those elements unpacks the differences between these different types of gesticulation. There's a whole, there's a not very well noticed but brilliant literature which is on about passing gesticulation, and looking at the range of different gesticulations that there are in the world. The next image is one example of this. This is from a book called Hand and Mind, and which it's on the website and it's referred to in the book. And here, what we're doing is building a kind of a grammar of what's going on when you do this. What do this mean? And this is an interpretation of what this means. But in this book there are hundreds of these gesticulations, as well as trying to build a grammar of interpreting those gesticulations, and interpreting how they overlay spoken language. Now, there are other gesticulations which we use without spoken language. We want to stop somebody even though they can't hear us, and so on. So there are gesticulations that happen without language as well, which are pretty important. Look, I'm pointing to something. But a lot of them overlay spoken language. The next area I want to talk about in this area of gesture, what we define as gesture, is bodily configuration, which is bodily spacium. I might be a long way from the person, I might be close. Orientation and posture. Am I looking down on the person? Am I being over-bearing? Am I dominating? And the reverse. What's my posture? And there's a whole area of, for interpreting these body spacings as an area called proxemics. There's also things about bodily movement, feelings of motion, and so on which is often kinesthesia. That's another whole universe about bodily motion and what those motions mean to us, and mean to the people who see them. And then, there's another area called gaze, which is I'm looking now directly at the camera. But if I was looking over here, you would be, and talking to this person over here, you would only be a voyeur on that relationship. And the gaze tells you a lot about the grammatical form that's going on. So, it's like the difference between I'm talking to you directly now, first person, second person, third person. We can figure those meanings via gaze, and it's really where the gestural meets the visual because gaze is also a phenomenon of seen as well. And seeing the scene, if you know what I mean. And also, related to gaze, not quite the same but sort of related, is facial expressions. The human face has a phenomenal range of expressions which it can make. And also, touching. I'm with somebody, I touch their arm, I touch their back. It might be patronizing, it might be insulting, it might be reassuring. Those things mean things. So, these are a set of gestural aspects of bodily configuration. But the third major area that we want to include under gesture is what we call bodily appearances, which might be physical form, which is my physique. My physiology affects my identity. It represents something. But, and I might want to modify that form in one way or another, body sculpting, cosmetics. I might want to adapt the way I look in particular circumstances. I might do body piercing, I might do, and of course body sculpting these days includes a whole lot of issues around transgender. I can even change the way I appear, whether I appear to be a male or female. And there are, it's not just male or female options, there are 1,000 options around the way in which we actively configure our bodily appearance. But also, what we do is we do fashion. We dress in ways which are distinctive to ourselves, appropriate to situations. We might wear jewelry. So, these are all things which we, in this very broad definition of gesture, define as bodily appearances, which are in fact forms of gesture, forms of presentation in the world. Now here, we go back to the quite wonderful work of Erving Goffman, three or four years, three or four decades ago, who talked about, his very nice phrase and the title of his book was The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. We present ourselves in every day life in all kinds of ways, and that affects our meanings. And it's overlaid with the visual, it's overlaid with the, with spoken language, all of these things come together. Now, finally, just a couple of little examples. This is a nice project, again from our colleagues in South Africa, where they got students to build self-portraits by lying on the ground and drawing the outline of each student's body, putting their name down the side. So it was a kind of a self-portrait exercise which actually involved a full-scale version of the person's own body and their own imagination of themselves. So, in other words, a transposition from the world of gesture to the world of image. Another multimodal exercise here is this is an elaborate parsing of gesture in a science classroom, right? So, in other words, when I'm doing an experiment, there's stuff tactile happening. I've got the beaker, I'm pouring stuff in, I'm feeling it, I'm feeling whether it's warm or hot, I'm seeing things. But in fact, what you do in a demonstration is do this, do that, point to this, point to that. In other words, it's gesture which builds the meaning. I might be talking as a science teacher around something that I'm demonstrating, but it's the gestures as well which point to things in really important ways. A very interesting example of this, by the way, is that, in the field of surgery, and in fact, a number of science fields, but surgery's a good example, there are now video journals which, peer reviewed journals, not print journals with articles, but video journals where the article, or the equivalent of the article, is a video. So, the way to show a surgical technique that you've invented is this kind of gestural stuff. Cut the thing, open this, do this, move this around. And the video representation is as much gestural as the voice over where the person's explaining what they're doing. So, in other words, these are new forms of multimodal representation, which are supported by video, I might say. In other words, video has become a really great way of making gesture-like writing. So, historically, gesture was something which could only happen person-to-person in the same space and the same time. What video's done, it's made gesture something which, like writing, defies time and space. So, in other words, I can record it now, look at it later. I can record it now, put it on the web and somebody sees it at the other end of the Earth. So, it's turned gesture into writing in some very interesting ways.