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. Lisa Samuels calls this piece, “hand to 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.

In this page design four squares are arranged around a center replicating Escher’s use of space, in his print Drawing Hands, where four points connect the drawing hands. The dense quality of the square form is a common symbol for physicality and manual l activity, which leads to material creation of objects, and this form is implied in shape of the letter “M”.

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