Shubh .Laabh
Carnegie Mellon University
Robotic Incremental Metal Forming
Collaborators: Vignesh Harikrishnan, Yale ‘22
Hands are thresholds. They leave marks, they summon presence, they bless, they ward, they connect. From the earliest cave walls to present-day rituals, the handprint ritual has persisted as a gesture of invocation.
In India, this tradition continues — from prehistoric rock shelters to contemporary folk and tribal practices, in which hands are pressed against gates, temples, and sacred sites during births, marriages, and ceremonies of protection. These impressions of auspiciousness and gain are not decoration but blessing, a way of binding the body to the well-being of family, home, and land.
We return to that gesture: the hand dipped, pressed, and lifted away, leaving its aura behind. “Shubh–Laabh” reimagines that act through Aluminium and sound. Two engraved Aluminium plates — one concave, one convex — bear the imprint of a hand, fabricated with a robotic arm at Carnegie Mellon University’s Design Fabrication Lab. When touched, the plates awaken with sound. A single person may bridge them both, or two or more people may reach across — sound exists only through connection.
Here, the hand does not leave a static mark but an invocation renewed. The Aluminium relic hums when touched, extending an ancient blessing into contemporary form — carrying forward a lineage of gestures from pigment to metal, from silence to sound.