Ambiguous Standards of Unicodification:
Hands and Gestures
From A School of Schools, 2018
Could what we communicate through our hands be quantified or reduced to standard signs and symbols? Hand gestures, as carriers of information and means of communication, have always been contingent on culture and geographical context. The increase of indirect and nonverbal modes of communication has led to a proliferation of hand-gesture emojis, or ideograms, used in electronic messages. As a result, hand signals have become ubiquitous forms of communication, but they are always affected by cultural discrepancies. In addition to being reduced to a static representation through formal and contextual abstraction, emojis are also limited by overly generalised skin colours, further complicating their cultural transferability.
Contents (in alphabetical order): 3-D–printed hands (non-painted PLA) including backhand index pointing right, backhand index pointing up, call me hand, clapping hands, crossed fingers, folded hands, middle finger, love-you gesture, OK hand, oncoming fist, open hands, palms up together, pinching hand, raised fist, raised hand, raising hands, the sign of the horns, thumbs down, thumbs up, victory hand, Vulcan salute and a video of underrepresented gestures with annotations.