DIGITAL MUDRA

Mudra gestures
Similar gestures from USA (above) and Egypt express contentment.

Mudra is from Sanskrit and means gesture. Digital Mudra is a multimedia-interdisciplinary installation in which viewer participants interact with a computer. They recompose Mudra word meanings and images into linear extensions of gesture language in the aesthetic layerings of poetry, dance and philosophy. Cross-cultural differences and similarities of hand gestures and their trans-cultural meanings are revealed in an environment that includes slide projections of topical personalities unwittingly using ancient Mudra gestures. This demonstrates cultural congruences and contrasts as the gesticulating personalities are juxtaposed with slides of similar Mudra gestures. A videotape of Mudra gestures presents Kathakali dancer Kunhiraman interpreting into dance form the poems participants had created at an earlier time using words from the Mudra word list.

The source for the selected Mudra word list is exhibited in a wall Glossary of plexi-glass see-through boxes. On the covers of the boxes are drawings of Mudra gestures. These drawing overlay photographs of similar western gestures that are inside the box. The photographs had been taken at a previous Rapoport event, Biorhythm, where participants were asked to express with their hands "how they were feeling" that evening.

Viewers becomes participants at the computer where they create a poetic phrase from three key words in the Mudra word list. The word-Mudra images have been printed on 3" x 5" cards from which the participant can select the key words. These words are typed into the computer. The Mudra images that correspond to the key words become transcribed into a Kathakali gesture dance on the screen. The Kathakali dance positions are printed and then interpreted by a visiting "philosopher" to convey a philosophic guideline from the writings of Rabindranath Tagore.

A "golden" wall of temple writings is created by participants hanging gilded aluminum tag icon duplicates of the word-gesture card selections. In a variable format of 10 feet in width, an acrostic can be created in which the tags (3" x 5") can be moved about to make new and meaningful phrases. An electric fan situated behind the wall effectively moves the tags back and forth as if in a dance.

KALA Institute in Berkeley , California initiated and presented this installation in 1987. Digital Mudra, in book format, was sponsered by the United States Information Agency to travel world-wide in a book exhibition from 1990-1992.
John Watkins was the computer design engineer.