English

"Lost Inside: A Digital Inquiry" is a COVID-era digital journal inspired by J.R Carpenter's "Entre Ville" that assumes depths of hypertext, intimate entries, and personal and visual perspectives that highlight a state of stasis due to the quietude and uncertainty of the outer world. The purpose of this work is to create an intimate space for rumination on the experience of life under quarantine and a pandemic. While it does not necessarily comment on politics and the status of the pandemic, except slightly, it mainly highlights the states/stages, metaphysically and emotionally speaking, which we as individuals tend to undergo due to the circumstances COVID has provided us. These stages, such as hopelessness, concern, distraction, connection, fantasy, reflection, and questioning, are expressed in the journal through images, text, drawings, audio, and video accumulated during the period itself. While it is mainly told through a perspective that is personal and from a character who is largely based on my person, or explicitly "me", the author, I believe the musings of this work are largely prolific and universal in the emotions and viewpoints they present. The journal is prone to updates and additions, as the theme is based on COVID, therefore as long as the virus persists, the digital journal will as well.

(Source: Author's abstract)

I Got Up 2020, Pandemic Edition started as an Instagram series inspired by On Kawara’s 1968-79 daily postcard ritual. This version of I Got Up 2020, Pandemic Edition showcases moving images made during the summer of 2020. 

From 1968-1979 On Kawara sent picture postcards to two friends, stamped with the time he “got up.” 

His series, I Got Up, is collected by the Metropolitan Museum of Art. 

This riff on I Got Up is a visible record of getting up while confined to the house and simultaneously enacting the roles of mother, artist, housekeeper, and teacher. 

The Met website suggests, “With tremendous economy of means and a surprising visual elegance, Kawara creates a complex meditation on time, existence, and the relationship between art and life.” 

Made during the pandemic, these daily vignettes interpret “getting up” as unusually labor intensive—creative on the best days and merely possible on the worst. 

As a result of my the quarantine, and the collapse of professional and domestic spaces, this series of getting up is a creative family adventure. 

(Source: Author's abstract)

In the United States in 2020, face masks became a political symbol: first welcomed as part of assisting emergency workers, and later condemned as a threat to individual liberty, the face mask is an inescapable site of conflict. However, it is also a thing of labor, entwined with the domestic sphere of sewing. 

At the start of the pandemic in March 2020, several news stories emerged about essential objects in the pandemic, as well as various responses to these objects. Included in these stories were so-called “hobbyists,” mainly women, who used sewing machines and even needle and thread to make Personal Protective Equipment, including gowns, hair nets, and especially face masks. Indeed, hundreds of thousands face masks have been crafted by collectives of home sewers, frequently led by and including mainly women donating their time and resources. Their example of collective labor prompts the need to think of the usually invisible forms of making that occur in socially “private” and feminized spaces of labor—such as sewing rooms, kitchens, and offices—as active forms of contribution to safe social practices, altruism, and community-based maker cultures. 

In this exhibition, we center this labor, using generative graphics and texts to imagine those masks: in an endlessly cycling generator, we capture both the imagined making and brief fragments of text centering the imagined, forgotten, and invisible makers who power this collective effort. 

Built using Tracery, HTML5, and Javascript, this endless interactive imagetext generates imaginary masks that represent the lives and thoughts of the fictional people who made them. The fictional crafters in this piece reflect public examples of the crafters during COVID-19 --such as collected news items, social media images, and personal reflections--that are gathered to represent the wealth of diversity, age groups, and communities that participate in collective mask making. Sharing these publicly available resources will more faithfully represent and thus uncover the faces, hands, and labor of mask making during COVID-19. This exhibition invites the viewer to contemplate not only the mask itself, but also the erasure of primarily women, whose collective labor has been ignored, mocked, and diminished even as the US faces a horrifying setback in gender labor equity. By using a format in which content is constantly being generated, Masked Making centers both the crafted object and its crafter as ephemeral and disposable. In doing so, we hope to capture the marginalization of craft at a time when such domestic labor (and indeed, the confinement to the domestic) is literally life-saving. 

Masked Making is a work that keeps its origins in mind: the interactive work will be available online for participants to engage with as a form of knowledge mobilization outreach, communicating the significance of women’s contributions to public audiences as well.

(Source: Authors' abstract)

Ear For The Surge is designed to be heard. A work about rage, inspired by Homeric hexameter and coronavirus. Spoken word, stitched together, woven into layers of pain, inequality and sadness. 

Text from internet search terms developed after hearing constant news, constant cries for help, and raging people. 

Found text became the basis for an ongoing hexameter, sound, and video. 

(Source: Author's description)

When Los Angeles shut down in March 2020 due to the pandemic, and most cities became ghost towns, I returned to making art for the screen, developing what has become a dynamic and multi- layered artwork that is readily disseminated. One of the things that thrilled me about making art for the internet (net art) was that it could exist beyond the traditional gallery space. I saw it as a new form of public art, easily accessible to all and a viable platform where unconventional narratives could be created by combining photographic images, drawings, short poetic texts, and animations through a succession of linked pages. The viewer actively “clicked” on images and words to engage with the work and move through the site. 

Since the beginning of the Pandemic, (March 2020) I have been creating a net art project that in many ways is a pandemic journal with reflections about what I see around me as I walk in my neighborhood (Santa Monica, CA) as well as react to events world-wide. I have created images, roll-overs, texts and animations. The site has about 200 pages (or more). It lives within an earlier net art project called Ghost City (www.ghostcity.com) and because it stems from the "S" square on the Ghost City website, I have called it Avenue S (www.ghostcity.com/avenue-s). To navigate one clicks on the red squares at the bottom of each page ( … ). Avenue S is a visual record of these disconcerting times as it includes imagery related to the pandemic and interpretations of this fraught national and global political moment. The project has become a document of this extraordinary moment in time that unveils regularly like a serialized novel. 

Returning to net art recently has been both a challenging and rewarding experience: challenging as I have had to relearn a lot of the HTML code used to create interactive webpages and rewarding because I love using this medium to create work. It is a pleasure every day to be inspired by what I see and to imagine an interactive scenario while I walk and then come home and create it. This immediacy engenders a feeling of freedom and is why I gravitated to net art originally. It is a dynamic and interactive form of art that can be experienced by anyone, anywhere, anytime. 

(Source: Author's description)