quarantine

RE\VERSE: an elegiac e-poem (2020-21) results from the collaboration between cyberliterary artist collective wr3ad1ng d1g1t5 and visual artist Daniela Reis during the first 40 days after the Covid-19 pandemic status (March – April 2020). Following a random plus (pre-)combinatorial logic, 40 textual verses and 40 pictorial fragments intertwine in order to provoke a self-reflective reading of the verse(s) and reverse(s) characterizing the first quarantine period of pandemic confinement by COVID-19. On one side, a painter making use of the sparse materials she had at home, locked up in a small apartment and without access to her studio, dividing her attention between two children, a husband and a dog; on the other side a poet ekphrastically writing a verse per day as suspended portraits of a collective experience of fear, uncertainty, and emptiness that assaulted the whole world. Combined, in the sum of their verses and reverses, image and text (un)veil a dialogic path that, although necessarily entropic, is made of continuous renewal.

(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)