GestureCloud is an art research collaboration in Toronto and Beijing.

GestureCloud is the concept of artists Fei Jun, Jim Ruxton and Judith Doyle. We began in Toronto in January 2010, along with virtual studio manager Ian Murray, to identify the central research question : can labour be transposed via gesture across virtual conditions, to have material effects elsewhere in the world? For example, could surplus labour in a factory in China activate events in virtual conditions, accruing value that would return to the factory workers?

We planned our intensive art research collaboration for Summer 2010 at the Central Academy of Fine Arts (CAFA) Digital Media Lab in Beijing. We would prototype an artwork to be installed simultaneously in galleries in Beijing and Canada, linked by sensor/actuators, as engines to transpose labour through a virtual environment in SecondLife. Our medium, our working material as artists, is the production, harvesting and display of gesture.

GestureCloud includes the ambitious idea of an extensive, even massive inventory of gesture as language.