lockdown

"Sentenced to Covid: Voices of the Pandemic" displays our single-sentence responses to the pandemic. You can read the responses in either manual or auto mode (the latter which provides an endless looping display of the responses). If you want, you can write your own response for others to see.

Source: exhibition documentation

Confinement Spaces is an existential visual narrative of living in the United Arab Emirates under lockdown from March-August 2020. The initial days of the lockdown, when work turned to Zoom-time and simple actions like grocery shopping became an exercise in epidemiology, created a mix of anxiety and ennui that led to scanning the environment with an iPhone and 3D scanning software, creating beautiful, glitched dreamlike landscapes. As time passed and restrictions eased, other spaces, like the Cultural Foundation and Louvre Abu Dhabi opened again, and the artist went out to progressively scan the pandemic landscape. Eventually restrictions eased to allow travel to the other Emirates, and sites in Dubai, Sharjah, and the legendary airplane from the movie Lord of War (in Umm al Quwain) were captured as an allegory for the universality of the isolation being experienced in the UAE and around the globe.

The result is a visual narrative of the glitched landscape of the pandemic UAE, six months collapsed into a single experience (following the author's work in Spatial Form), as a series of twelve interactive spaces rendered as pastiches of the 82 scanned spaces made during this time. The project proposed is an initial version created for The Foundry in Dubai, and the ELO version will incproporate deeper narratological structures in text, spoken word and video.

Source: exhibition documentation

In our piece we explore themes of intimacy, proximity, disruption and mediation through our audio-only documentation of suspended being(s) in the emerging and familiar spaces, patterns and troubled times of contemporary 2020 COVID existence inside the many rooms of Apt. 3B (wherever that is). We draw creative inspiration from personal historical accounts of plague and disease narratives (Boccaccio’s Decameron, Pepys’ Diary of Samuel Pepys, Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper,” for example), as well as reflections on home and storytelling (from Ursula K. LeGuin and others), combined with original texts, recordings and contemporary (2020) news reporting focused on global destruction, recovery, resistance, and homage. We remix, re-design and (sound) engineer an audio experience deliberately intended to evoke curiosity from eavesdropper-users, drawing them in, while distancing them through confusion and discomfort.

Our interactive audio experience moves between deep materiality and immaterial illusion, and it is captured through spatial dis/orientation, fragmentation, layered affects, embodied response, and confession, all reconstructed by a single eavesdropper-user, also ideally in semi-isolation. Created as a web-based interface (but with downloadable versions for PC and MAC available), and with no identifiable graphics, other than a full-screen black square, the eavesdropper-user wears headphones (and ideally a face mask, blindfold, or plague doctor hood, if available) and may only move a computer mouse blindly across the flat surface of a desk in front of the blackened computer monitor. Hidden sound files, which also move and shift, must be discovered by the eavesdropper-user, who accesses them through a further limited sense of human touch, mediated through the mouse. The sound files shift and are layered to create the manifold and multiplicitous spaces (‘rooms’) of “Apt. 3B,” both a site-specific—and therefore bounded location—but also a conceptual space of endless limitation and resonance. (Left mouse clicks allow users to move from room to room, signaled by opening/closing door creaks, and right clicks allow escape.)

(Source: author's abstract)

Coronation is a webcomic created by the Marino family using digital tools and platforms to document our experience of the COVID-19 Pandemic. Since the beginning of the lockdown and the various homestay orders in Los Angeles, we have been creating and publishing one comic per day, five days a week, using a combination of digital tools, specifically filters and graphics applications. Images include photographs from our family albums, screenshots and downloads from Internet-based news sources, as well as original hand-drawn images created using digital tools. As the pandemic continues to sweep the globe, Coronation documents one family’s experience of the ups and downs of the Corona virus and the surrounding times, including the 2020 US Election and its ensuing drama and the Black Lives Matter protests. The comics are profoundly domestic and yet reflective of a global crisis, focusing on intimate family moments, transformed through digital tools into a visual expression of the ongoing homestay during a time of turmoil. As we craft these together, the webcomic has been a way for our family to take this time of chaos and to respond creatively and collaboratively by reflecting on the life in one household. We try to frame our experience with humor, sensitivity, and a medicine that is in quite short supply, hope.Unlike previous pandemics, such as polio, HIV, and the Spanish flu, COVID-19 has emerged at a moment of tremendous digital connectivity. However, the news and social media feeds have created so-called doom scrolling. We have used the digital tools and platforms available to us to rapidly document events, to transform them into comics, and to share them online with a broader world, inviting them into our homestay as we share our climbs and falls, confusion and epiphanies, all born of some unexpected family time.Although our main platforms for distribution are electronic, we have also been producing individual hand-made print versions as well.

(Source: Author's abstract)

a webcomic born during the Coronavirus outbreakand subsequent social isolation of 2020,written by me with my family.

(Author's description)