zoom: apple gestures series part 1 from liat berdugo on Vimeo.
Description of work:
Apple, Inc. is patent hungry, holding roughly 15,500 patents, about 8.500 of which are U.S. patents. In U.S. patent number 7877707 B2, filed on Jan 25, 2011, Apple patented the gesture of of pinching and spreading to zoom on a responsive, multi-touch screen.
Figures from US Patent 7877707 B2
Whilst Apple Inc. may hold the patent to such motions on responsive tablets, I own the copyright to the bdanceb of zooming myself, as under U.S. Copyright Law, works of dance are copyrightable:
Video stills from Zoom
After all, intimate relations are relations of proximity and closeness, both metaphorically but also quite literally. With intimacy bodies get closer. Bodies have many gestures of getting closer, but digital technologies have mostly one: zooming. Zoom explores this gesture of getting closer in technology -- this gesture of enlarging what was once small, touching devices as if we wanted to become intimate with them -- or at least, with their contents. Zoom is part of an ongoing series that recontextualizes the multi-touch gestures of iPhones, and copyrights these dances in response to Applebs patenting of the physical motions. Zoom highlights these new movements by removing the digital device from the picture entirely, leaving only their gestures behind, and by further asking the body to move in place of the device.
Liat Berdugo is an American artist and writer whose work focuses on the strange, delightful and increasingly ambiguous terrain between the digital and the analog, the online and the offline, and the scientific and the literary. Her work has been exhibited in galleries and festivals internationally, including The Simultan Festival in Romania, STIGMART/10 in Italy, Athens Video */ Art Festival, and DysTorpia Media Project in New York. She is the 2012 winner of the Anomalous Press Chapbook Competition and her book, The Everyday Maths, will be published in March 2013. More at http://digikits.ch.