This work proposes a vocabulary of single gestures traced in darkness with a handheld laser — each drawn in a single, uncorrectable movement. The line records the instant of approach, hesitation, or acknowledgment: fleeting encounters that shape our coexistence with others. These gestures parallel those unspoken exchanges that pass between strangers—allowing eye contact, offering a brief smile, a nod of recognition before the flow of daily life resumes.

In darkness, each gesture becomes both declaration and question. Without sight of its beginning or end, I must act in trust, as in any encounter with the unknown. The drawn light is an attempt to reach toward another, to speak without words, to register an instant of openness. The resulting traces form a fragile lexicon of recognition: arcs of invitation, lines of withdrawal, brief crossings that never fuse.

Philosophically, the project draws on Levinas’s insistence that ethics begins in the face-to-face meeting, before speech or comprehension, and on Han Byung-Chul’s reflections on the erosion of genuine contact in digital culture. These drawings seek to restore that lost friction — to offer illumination not as mastery, but as empathy, each gesture a visible echo of the courage to meet another in passing.