COVID - 19

About the Works

THEO TW’AWKI: Chapter One : Dispatches From The Interior, Sean Capone. THEO TW’AWKI was conceived, written and produced this year while in lockdown, as a healing exercise in direct response to the coronavirus crisis. It also marks my first attempt to create an episodic, character-driven animated series, featuring a talking cartoon virus delivering philosophic/motivational monologues while floating through an abstract microbiological underworld. In the early months of quarantine, I became interested in the more mythic or allegorical contours of the crisis. As a queer artist who came of age during the AIDS crisis, I noted both the similarities and profound differences in the societal response to yet another ‘viral plague’, in terms of the inequalities it exposed. My approach — similar to that of my ongoing Avatar Poetics series — uses absurdity to speculatively imagine the point of view of a non-human intelligence, expressing itself from within its own native virtual environment. Language and wordplay, especially of the nonsense variety, are key to my work. The character's name, “Theo Tw’awki”, is a pun on the anagram “TEOTWAWKI”, which is doomsday-prepper online shorthand for “The End Of The World As We Know It”

Quarantine Youtube Archive, Molly Soda. The .gif is a compilation of 75 YouTube videos that have been uploaded to the website within the last 6 months and are related to Covid in some way, specifically in the title. It flickers between quarantine vlogs, "what I eat in a day in quarantine" videos, "quarantine glow-up" videos and story-time videos from people who have had Covid themselves. I've been collecting these videos since the beginning of quarantine as I thought it would be important to document what was going on over on YouTube, a platform that has so much cultural relevance but is not often paid attention to from an archival standpoint as these daily diaries and videos are often seen as frivolous. This archive may just look like familiar imagery to most right now but is important to keep as a time capsule for the future.

Letter to a Young Virus: Covid 19, Alicia Escott. This piece was written in April of 2020 and draws from a series begun in 2011 consisting of letters written to extinct species in which the animal is addressed as a long lost lover, and where try to catch them up on what has happened since they left me— like the internet, rock & roll and the stock market. While the focus is on the mass extinctions of the anthropocene, extinction is looked at very broadly and the series includes letters to Neandertal, Small Pox, the LUCA, and letters that deal with the future and past in nonlinear ways.

I reject any glorification of the virus and the subsequent current situation as the “earth healing” itself or passing judgement on us, but this work seeks to also highlight the interconnectedness that has been both alienated and amplified by globalization and the possibilities that the pandemic opens for radical change.

Earthquake Weather, Jenifer Wofford. Earthquake Weather is an ongoing archive of people’s personal accounts of the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake that dramatically reshaped the Bay Area: its first and ongoing incarnation is as a community web project (illustrated by Wofford), but it has also been adapted for video and installation. It is one of a series of projects that artist Jenifer K Wofford has undertaken that explore the significance of this disaster as part of a chain of global events in 1989. (“Earthquake Weather” is a nonsensical local phrase: the belief that weather might foreshadow seismic activity is a notion that has been around for centuries, but the '89 quake is largely what popularized its use in Northern California.)

One, Lynn Marie Kirby and James Kirby Rogers. A collaboration between mother and son, dance and film, an abandoned pier and summer weather, filmed in Aquatic Park, San Francisco, June 6 to August 8, 2020.

Zoom Meetings (with myself), Darrin Martin. Shot entirely on Zoom, the work results from attempts to make the latest application of personal/professional communications a site for improvisational performance and process. Feedback loops, anti-facial recognition make-up, and snapchat disguises flicker across the screen accompanied by rambling soliloquies and song in an attempt to know oneself better in times of unending transmissions.

COVID-2020, James X Patterson. There is no statement for the work other than the title

Colors of Remembrance, Mary Flanagan. In this series, I create drawings that act as memorials to those who have tragically lost their lives in the 2020 Coronavirus pandemic. Whether through disorganization or a cavalier attitude towards life, local and national US responses to the virus have cost real people their lives. I take the formal language of minimalism and reintroduce narrative by seeing these daily drawings as visualizations, with each line representing a person lost to the pandemic. By creating drawings that act as visualizations to the coronavirus pandemic, I hope to engage us to remember each person lost with a subtly unique color. This drawing represents the national data from the date September 11, 2020. In 2001, 2,996 people were killed in the terrorist attack. In the 2020 pandemic, on the same day 1,018 Americans died from the virus.

Unraveling (Pandemic Panorama), Laura Splan. Unraveling (Pandemic Panorama) is part of a series of animations created with molecular visualization software and SARS-CoV-2 structures. Using the specialized features of the software in unconventional ways, Laura Splan unravels and distorts the folded structure of the coronavirus spike protein. She playfully manipulates the folded protein forms, known as “conformations”, which determine biological function including infectivity. After morphing the unraveled proteins with their original conformations, she then further processes the animations using other video editing tools. The animations were developed in remote collaboration with biotech company Integral Molecular for Splan’s uCity Science Center Bioart Residency while “sheltering in place” for COVID-19. The Unraveling series is currently in view in her solo exhibition at BioBAT Art Space at the Brooklyn Army Terminal as large-scale projections in the gallery’s 15,000 square foot “Dark Space” on view through October 2020. Selected digital editions of the series are available on Sedition.

Suspended Spring, Tamiko Thiel. The coronavirus lockdown in spring 2020 sent underpaid "essential workers" to the front lines to face possible illness and death, and locked people in "high risk groups" - if they were lucky - into isolation at home. The spring, usually a time of joyful resurgence of life, rushed by at a snail's pace, an agonized wait for the curves to flatten or the virus to run its course. In "Suspended Spring," the swirling augmented reality cherry blossoms, in Japanese culture a sign of the beauty and the impermanence of life, follow you around wherever you go, inside or outside, as the traditional song "Sakura" is slowed and stretched beyond recognition. A memento mori for life in the time of Coronavirus, 2020.