The intention of using an algorithm to automate the process of gathering images of greeting hands has faded away. I was not able to solve the problem I had with my code and neither the technicians of the advanced digital project’s workshop could help me (possibly in the future I will go back on this issue). Therefore, forced by circumstances I had to riconsider my approach to the project, hence to formulate another procedure to collect the data.
I decided to operate manually: I took more than 100 photos of politicians in the act of greeting each other and I started to isolate the hands using the mask tool of photoshop. I ended up with a collection of images depicting only the hands.
The hands extrapolated from their context allow us to a more meticolous investigation of the action. What could have been seen as a routine and repeated gesture before, now acquires on its own special values. The hands become the protagonist of the analysis, and inevitably we realise how a multitude of minimal micro-movements such as the position of the hand, the inclination of the palm and the span between the fingers eventually tend to shape a complete new narration. What kind of relationship is describable only by looking at the typology of handshake?
I organized my collection of images into an instagram account called hands_dialogues, a taxonomy of sorts which includes the greetings of the G20 world leaders. For each leader I analysed five greetings, and even if it is not a considerable number it already shows some similarities and recurring poses, which we can suppose are typical of a specific leader.
Link of the account ↓
https://www.instagram.com/hands_dialogues/
I gave to the images the same visual treatment so the focus is only addressed to the gesture itself.
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The sensation is of staring at a series of hands which look all the same: those hands could belong to anyone. The use of tags to label the hands completely changes this paradigm so we know those two hands shaking are rispectively Ursula von der Leyen and Pedro Sanchez.
The approach I used for this taxonomy is methodical and analytical so I wrote a format of caption which is repeated through all the posts and allow us to precisely place the handshake in space and time.