It's Always the Hands

The hand is both powerful and revealing. In this event, Angie Chia-Lin Lee will present her 2025 exhibition project It’s Always the Hands That — Interface/Handshake and screen Invisible Technology by artist Chen Chen. The project takes inspiration from text-to-image AI, where hands often expose the technology’s flaws, producing too many fingers or fused digits.

The notion of the “digital” also traces back to the hand: “digit” means numbers under ten, countable on fingers, while digitus in Latin literally means finger. The hand is both the origin of technology and of calculation, and the primary site of human–machine interaction. This project asks: if technology is not only an extension of the hand, could the hand instead serve as a metaphor for technological diversity? Might artistic practice “fork” technological history, expanding our imagination and giving new meaning to the disappearance of hands in virtual reality?

Angie Chia-Lin Lee is an independent curator based in Taipei. She graduated from the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures at National Taiwan University and the Institute of Contemporary Art & Social Thoughts at the China Academy of Art. She is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in Fine Arts at Taipei National University of the Arts. Her research focuses on the culture, media, and art developed and created in the digital era. Lee is the founder of ZIMU CULTURE, a studio dedicated to producing contemporary art exhibitions and publishing books. chia0.net

Also check out other Arts events in Manchester, Fine Arts events in Manchester, Exhibitions in Manchester.