March 3 – 7, 2021
2021년 3월 3일 – 7일
M Gallery, CICA Museum
Social Stress Test is a two-channel video work responding to the social ramifications of the COVID-19 pandemic.
On one channel, 3D models of hand gestures fracture and explode. These models originated in a pre-pandemic body of work documenting and translating social connection. Motion capture recordings were made of individuals communicating through social gestures, and thus coming into contact with one another through handshakes, high fives, and hugs.
With the spread of COVID-19 a global shift has occurred, stressing and breaking social customs and norms.
The colorful forms in the video explode through simple physics animations. Each model is cracked with fault lines and put through a simulation of gravity. In a sense, obsolete gestures are brought from digital preservation back into a world of friction and physics. The forms are too complex and intertwined for straightforward gravity to apply, so they fly apart. Shattering is the natural result of putting stress on delicate social structures.
These explosions unfold over backdrops of translated stay-at-home orders from global coronavirus epicenters. Statements published in the spring of 2020 by the Prime Minister of India, the President of the Council of Ministers of Italy, and the Governor of the State of New York describe socially restrictive measures to prevent coronavirus transmission, and contain appeals to collective resolve and social obligation. Excerpts of these statements, translated into Morse code, form a soundtrack of distorted MIDI and piano performance. Digital and analog waveforms overlap in a convoluted accompaniment to a repeating process of coming apart.
On another channel, two gold statues, motion captured waves, sit vaulted on pedestals. Separated at a safe distance and surrounded by marble, these idealized gestures are the new model for social interaction. But vitrines quarantine the gestures further, and the glass becomes opaque, rendering the waves invisible. The light changes as an artificial sun sets on these commemorations to a new social world.
Together, the two looping videos form a dialectic of contradictory impulses, ideas, and adaptations to a dangerous social quandary.
Tyler Calkin is an interdisciplinary artist and educator. He received his MFA in Art and Integrated Media from the California Institute of the Arts in 2011. His work has been exhibited and performed in art and educational institutions around the world, including in Italy, South Korea, China, Nepal, Mexico, England, Germany, and across the United States.
Calkin is the head of Digital Media in the Department of Art at the University of Nevada, Reno, where he teaches virtual and augmented reality, game design, experimental fabrication, performance, creative coding, theory, and critique.
Tyler Calkin, “Social Stress Test” (2020)