Key-Swipe Finger-Calligraphy
The space will be open for visitors to learn and practice key-swipe finger-calligraphy. Visitors can use a custom fingertip stylus and CMYK paint to trace the forms of 20 sample words. The forms are derived from the shapes traced onto virtual swipe keyboards. These samples have been randomly selected from the one hundred most common words in the English language. As gestural icons they offer a replacement to alphabetic symbols and serve as an introduction to this new mode of writing.
Gesture Analog Mapping Experiment Night
G.A.M.E. Night is the inauguration of an effort to collectively develop new gestures for use in social communication. Gesture maps tie different hand motions to various functions for touchscreen devices. In the last several years, hundreds of these maps have been patented by corporations like Apple. As smartphones, tablets, and multi-touch trackpads have become ubiquitous, so have gesture map interfaces. After repeated performance of these gestures, our bodies start to remember them. In this way companies colonize our bodies and we no longer perform ourselves; we perform patents.
G.A.M.E. Night is a space to improvise new body language by recombining the gestures and functions of Apple’s patents. Three card games let players take screen-based movements beyond the screen into social and spatial communication. Successful players can record their new gesture-function pairs onto an analog surface - paper - to include it in a growing Library of Alternative Gestures.
Tyler Calkin is an interdisciplinary artist living and working in Los Angeles. He received his MFA in Art and Integrated Media from California Institute of the Arts and has since shown his work across the US and internationally. He has also led gameplay-based artist workshops in Nepal and Mexico.His participatory projects examine social constructions, habits, and anxieties through play and improvisation. Drawing particularly from safety and hygiene products and developing digital interfaces, Tyler rearranges material culture into social catalysts. The resulting situations propose new models for interpersonal and inter-object relations.