Both Hands Their Backs Rubbing (2020) juxtaposes Taoist hand gestures with co-writing via the MacBook Touch Bar to examine digital writing and spiritual gesture as parallel forms of mediation. The Touch Bar—a capacitive strip that generates predictive language suggestions—is introduced as an interface that operates like an automated oracle.

While the QWERTY keyboard is designed to minimize finger crossing, Taoist hand gestures operate almost against ergonomic logic. Choreographed for communication with celestial beings, their complexity reinforces the exclusivity of such mediation. Here, miscommunication is not a deviation but an internal condition: the hand of a non-Taoist, acting as a medium without ritual authority, releases ambiguous signals into a cosmic information field. The Touch Bar becomes its digital counterpart—situated between keyboard and screen, blurring input and output while continuously producing language that may interfere with the writer’s intent.

One writing session was documented. The text began as an instruction—“Both hands, their backs rubbing…”—after which authorship was ceded to the predictive mechanism. The process suspends a stable speaking subject, turning writing into a discursive movement in which meaning mutates at the moment of touch.