The Secret Gestural Prehistory of Mobile Devices began with the accidental discovery of an image of a man in the crowd at the Melbourne Cricket Ground; an image discovered, fittingly, at the Olympic Hotel in Preston, a northern suburb of Melbourne. The photograph was of the dramatic climax of the 1500 metre men’s final of the 1956 Melbourne Olympic Games. The man in question (identity unknown) bore the uncanny, yet unmistakable countenance of someone talking on a mobile phone. This discovery prompted an active, forensic search through the archive of visual imagery to see if there were other similar instances of this most contemporary and vernacular gesture. The Secret Gestural Prehistory of Mobile Devices is the result of this research.
The site made a little impact until it was picked up and featured in The Atlantic Monthly online in a story written by Alexis Madrigal and Nicholas Jackson. Suddenly, site traffic went from 2-3 hits a day to over 2000 in 24 hours. Madrigal and Jackson’s interest was first piqued after writer Erik Davis tweeted about the site:
erik_davis Erik DavisBrilliant visual prehistory of the mobile device as gesture. http://secretprehistory.wordpress.com/ Charlie Chaplin, take this!