TYLER CALKIN
Projects
Tags
Info/CV
Contact
Gesture Analog Mapping Experiment
tags:gesture, play
2015
Gesture Analog Mapping Experiment (G.A.M.E.) is an effort to collectively develop new gestures for use in social communication.
Gesture maps tie 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. Nights are spaces 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. Winning players record their new gesture-function pairs onto an analog surface - paper - to include it in a growing Library of Alternative Gestures.