Thorbjørn Uldam better known for the design work he’s done with fashion brands, GOETZE, MISBHV and 032C is the man behind the Instagram account @manual_singularity. The account that he describes as a “sexual biography of the life of a hand” started as a reference to the problematic culture with the concept of “time” in our current digital age. Uldam was inspired by a 10,000 year old handprint he saw in Verner Herzog’s documentary, Cave of Forgotten Dreams. Seeing this old handprint made him realise how us ever-evolving humans are all still just simple creatures, alike, not superior to anyone or anything and so he started an account to convey those thoughts through imagery.

The work displayed on manual singularity pushes the boundaries of social media’s censorship policy by way of design; manipulating and cropping images making it mostly unrecognisable by Instagram’s censorship algorithm.

How would you describe your work?
If I am to talk about the work understood as the work I do on the Instagram account, ‘manual singularity’, I would describe it as a sexual biography of the life of a hand, fading into digital oblivion.

You have a background in fashion so how did you fall into making the work you do on @manual_singularity?
It actually happened a bit by coincidence. I prepared a fashion collection, after receiving support do so by the Danish Art foundation, which I titled ‘The Return’. A great source of inspiration for it was the documentary, Cave of Forgotten Dreams by Verner Herzog, about the cave paintings of the Chauvet cave in southern France. The Chauvet cave was covered in ice during the ice-age, for which reason everything inside has been permanently imprinted, from wall paintings to footprints, due to ice crystallisation. In one sequence in the documentary, Herzog describes the footprints of a girl, estimated to be about 9 years old, found right next to the footprints of a sable tiger, literally a few centimetres apart; were they there at the same time? Or, is this a pure coincidence created by the crystallisation and they were actually there 1000 years apart? In the same cave, there is this imprint of the contour of a hand, a negative of human existence. What was the purpose of this hand print? Either way someone was there 10,000 years ago and imprinted this hand for some symbolic probably ritualistic purpose, permanently engraved into a wall. 10,000 years ago… Existential questions have always interested me, I would consider myself a phenomenologist.

We live in a digital age that has changed conception of time itself - where everything is going faster and faster. We have an awkward relationship to “time", problematic yet fascinating, because it continuously shows how much we are able to do but always in as short a time as possible. I wanted in this collection to refer to the hand print and use it as a symbolic reference of a primitive instinct, as a reminder of who we are and where we come from. We have evolved but are still a simple biological species continuously reproducing itself, fragile, ritualistic, symbolic and unique, not from outer space or superior to anyone else. We are still, all of us, sons of the stars, born in the big bang.

We humans really like to complicate things.

A friend of mine that works as a buyer in fashion told me I had to make an Instagram account to communicate my work, which I did. I posted pictures of the collection I developed, but fashion is a reduced medium of communication, and perhaps I felt I should communicate more the story behind its development. So, I started posting images of inspiration, which I slowly personalised more and more. The instagram was born in the non-censored tumblr age. I’m not good in separating things so slowly the two online platforms faded into one where sex and the hand became predominant references. Of course the instagram I used to communicate my fashion work slowly slid away from its original purpose and finally got blocked and deleted; I was forced to separate the two not because I wanted to but because I had to. In the meantime, starting a fashion brand isn’t easy and I realised the financial investment it requires so manual singularity became what it is now.

Your work solely focuses on hands, why?
Instagram is very much a platform for personal digital diaries. Me and my story I wish to communicate to my friends and the world. I wanted manual singularity to simply be the story of a hand, sometimes it is my hand, sometimes random hands found in images I crop or manipulate digitally so it can exist on Instagram. Censorship, I find fascinating; somehow we came to the conclusion that certain body parts should be censored from the rest in order to exist. If I blur a nipple, I can show a breast but I can’t show liquids in a context where it would remind of sperm because this would refer to a sexual act. Then on top of that, someone out there is deciding, algorithm or a human being, what is acceptable to digitally exist. I mean, it is completely absurd yet I understand the purpose of it. After Tumblr turned to censorship, they used digital algorithms for censorship with AI, unable to categorise reality, ending up censoring fallic objects like trees or miniature penises from ancient Roman statues, claiming images digitally representing these objects, unacceptable and unfit to exist. I find this dilemma fascinating: how can we separate the intentional from the unintentional? So: how can I modify the body so much that it remains recognisable yet it becomes decontextualised and fades into fiction and able to exist? This could be the existential question of the hand on Manual Singularity.

Do you see yourself expanding your work in any way? If so, how?
Im absolutely open to any kind of proposal.