English

A poetic project about the global mass extinction of bird populations in 2011.

These variable couplets are composed of language collected from multiple ship’s logs recording a storm in the North Atlantic 6 February 1870. The logs were consulted at the National Meteorological Library and Archive at the Met Office in Exeter, UK.

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)

The coronavirus has created a new lexicon, which shaped, modulated and mediated a global confinement experience. Due to the negationism of the pandemic by President Bolsonaro, in Brazil it gains particular features, while maintaining a dialogue with the global scope.

Words, terms, and places, like alcohol gel, mask, chloroquine, and Wuhan, have entered the everyday vocabulary. Neologisms in Portuguese, such as testing positive, and communavirus, and expressions such as lockdown, hand washing, and social isolation11 have taken on new meanings. Home Office, Zoom, Emergency Aid, YouTube Lives, and PPEs are other keywords of the moment.

Together, they indicate that the pandemic (another word which became recurrent) has created a whole spectrum of new languages and representations. Will they be quickly forgotten, deleted, and erased from memory, or will they remain?

It is too early to anticipate what will happen in the post-pandemic context. However, it is not premature to state that it has already dictated a few rules of the neoliberal grammar as social foundations like: naturalization of surveillance through cell phone monitoring, the brutality of the remote work regime, the condemnation of the elderly to a dysfunctional position, which consolidate the guidelines that “late capitalism of the ends of sleep,” a 24/7 world, has enunciated some time ago.

In this project, we gather the most striking words of the coronavirus cultural experience tracked by Google data, during the months of March and April, period that coincides with the beginning of the “quarantine” in Brazil. The most searched-for words by the audience of the Coronary website respond dynamically, changing color, according to a heat map that reflects the attention given.

Popularized by the thermosensors, widely used in Asia, heat maps are one of the aesthetics of surveillance that are embedded in COVID-19.

In this context, the Coronary functions not only as a glossary of the pandemic cultural and social experience, but it is also a “surveillance performance" exercise done in public. The colors of the words reveals the economy of attention and the politics of gaze that the Internet puts into play, translating the most visited words into warm colors, and the less visited, into cool colors.

(Source: Author's description on project site)

“Doomscrolling” refers to the ways in which people find themselves regularly—and in some cases, almost involuntarily—scrolling bad news headlines on their phone, often for hours each night in bed when they had meant to be sleeping. Certainly the realities of the pandemic necessitate a level of vigilance for the purposes of personal safety. But doomscrolling isn’t just a natural reaction to the news of the day—it’s the result of a perfect yet evil marriage between a populace stuck online, social media interfaces designed to game and hold our attention, and the realities of an existential global crisis. Yes, it may be hard to look away from bad news in any format, but it’s nearly impossible to avert our eyes when that news is endlessly presented via designed-to-be-addictive social media interfaces that know just what to show us next in order to keep us “engaged.” As an alternative interface, The Endless Doomscroller acts as a lens on our software-enabled collective descent into despair. By distilling the news and social media sites down to their barest most generalized messages and interface conventions, The Endless Doomscroller shows us the mechanism that’s behind our scroll-induced anxiety: interfaces—and corporations—that always want more. More doom (bad news headlines) compels more engagement (via continued liking/sharing/posting) which produces more personal data, thus making possible ever more profit. By stripping away the specifics wrapped up in each headline and minimizing the mechanics behind most interface patterns, The Endless Doomscroller offers up an opportunity for mindfulness about how we’re spending our time online and about who most benefits from our late night scroll sessions. And, if one scrolls as endlessly as the work makes possible, The Endless Doomscroller might even enable a sort of exposure or substitution therapy, a way to escape or replace what these interfaces want from and do to us. In other words, perhaps the only way out of too much doomscrolling is endless doomscrolling.

(Source: Author's description)