Both Hands Their Backs Rubbing (2020) examines digital writing and spiritual gesture as parallel forms of mediation by juxtaposing unfamiliar Taoist hand gestures with the practice of co-writing through the MacBook Touch Bar—a capacitive strip that predicts words like an automated oracle.

The QWERTY keyboard is designed to minimize finger crossing; Taoist hand gestures, choreographed to communicate with celestial beings, operate almost against ergonomic principles. Their complexity reaffirms the exclusivity of such mediation—erratic and precise at once. What remains auxiliary is miscommunication itself: the hand as medium inevitably transmits ambiguous signals into the cosmic information field. The Touch Bar serves as its digital counterpart—situated between keyboard and screen, yet blurring input and output. It displays associative words that interfere with the writer’s intent, continuing to “write” even when ignored—a database formed through countless human–machine exchanges that both remembers and plagiarizes prior texts.

One of these input sessions was documented. The text began as an instruction—“Both hands, their backs rubbing…”—before authorship was surrendered to the predictive mechanism. The process suspends the idea of a stable speaking subject, turning writing into a game of discursive movement in which every proposed word carries spores of indeterminate meaning, mutating at the moment of touch.