Fifteen Pairs of Mouths is a sculptural installation that investigates the relationship between human body and technological devices and explores the new role of the hand as a vehicle for communication in the post-Internet age.

 

Thirty dismembered hands casted in white plaster, stand on steel mounts in various positions. Each pair is unique in its shape and the gesture it performs, but all mimic a specific way of texting on a cellphone, a way personal and distinctive to each of the fifteen people invited to “lend their” hand for the project. The phone itself remains absent; leaving a negative space in between the fingers that turns these familiar and commonplace gestures into a collection of  figurative sculptures that seem almost abstract.

 

Influenced by Bruce Nauman’s Fifteen Pairs of Hands, which conveyed the various ways one could express themselves through their hands without audible language, Kosmatopoulos in contrast, questions the loss of physical emotion when the vocal motions of our lips and gestures have been replaced by the movement of our thumbs.

 

With the increase of computer-mediated interactions, the cellphones has becomes an extension of the human body that extends its abilities. The hand is transformed along the way into a virtual mouth that verbalizes messages from one screen to the other in a virtual space where audible language and even physical presence are no longer needed. The project comes to challenge the traditional definition of the word “speak” itself at a time where we are increasingly speaking with our  fingers.

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