'We call it the pinch...Isn't that cool?': Digital gestures and museum objects

On the 9th of January in 2007, Steve Jobs gave the keynote address at a Macworld event in San Francisco and revealed the first iPhone. Showing off its different features, he told the audience that the phone relied on what he called ‘the best pointing device in the world’ – the human finger. Now usable with ‘multi-touch’ technology, it allowed ‘multi-finger gestures’ and worked like ‘magic’ according to Jobs. To the sound of audience gasps and claps, he then explained the ‘swipe’ and the ‘pinch’ which allowed users to move between photos in the phone’s library and to zoom in on different parts.

Though Apple were not the first to use this technology, it was their product that popularised it and effectively choreographed many of our bodily interactions with the digital ever since.1 With many museums digitising and giving access to digital 3D models of items from their collections, in this short article I explore how this choreography of gestures fits into a longer history of user interactions with museum objects and consider what associations these digital gestures might bring instead.