M. C. Escher’s surrealistic lithograph Drawing Hands depicts the breakdown of boundaries between subjective/objective, and the artist and the artistic work in an unending recursion. The picture of drawing hands is altered with the insertion of a computer mouse. Escher’s art enjoyed a popular resurgence in the 1960’s the period when assertions of embodied consciousness blossomed.

This page includes a fragment from Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel, of the hands of God touching Adam. The figure is overwritten with the name “Adam,” transformed into the word “madam,” by the typographic features of spatial arrangement and font, incorporating the polemic of gender and the feminine as encoded in the letter “M” unto the word “adam”.

“M” and “D” are two of the first sounds uttered during the speech acquisition phase of infancy, and the words “mom” and “dad’ are among the first words learned. The paradigm of birth and death through time are depicted in the horizontal line of boxed text containing words related to “mother”, “meal” and “mortuary”.

Malleable meaning is a metaphor for the physical manipulations of consciousness through experience. The image also engages the poststructuralist concepts of a socially constructed self and gender role. Malleability is a factor in mediated communications which rely on physical devices to produce and transmit content.

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