To ‘mark ones territory’ has never been simultaneously so rigidly enforced and religiously abandoned. Boundaries are blurred, materiality is obfuscated, time is displaced. But the cables and cords do not disappear altogether. Rather, they are firmly rooted in societies forbidden peripheries, in exploited Third-Worlds, in deep seas, on desolate privately owned islands, where its monstrous materiality is kept securely out of sight in places rendered as a series of indistinguishable pixels – human-exclusion zones. But as the world turns inside, cities become human-exclusion zones too. “The city today is a vast array of disconnected bedrooms, microcosms that come together in an abstract digital space, physically enabled by vital and essential data farms”, writes Lydia Kallipoliti.
What the Covid-19 pandemic has made concrete is not only how dependent we are on these so called vital and essential data farms for our isolated socialisation, but also how the globalised world has indeed been modelled in the image of computer network topologies, which of course, are susceptible and facilitate the spread of viruses.
And to escape social death, we rely overwhelmingly on social media that pretends to be the solution or fix for (a mainly middle-class) socialisation, on which (mainly empty) solidarity and empathy as well as resentment and disgust are expressed towards those who are less privileged and cannot afford to bunker down in paranoid paradise.
The video that unfolds as a Zoom meeting continues from the idea that in this time of global pandemic, Zoom acts as windows into the most inward and intimate spaces of our lives, as well as windows looking outwards, transcending local and national boundaries. The digital network that has long been at the core of our globalised world, previously as an invisible layer, has been made visible and tangible as we now literally live in the network, through a series of links and servers that facilitate our isolated connectedness. Buffer, glitches and lag characterise our isolated social interactions, along with the stuttering and blurring of time as our homes are invaded by work, whilst we upload our lives online – ironically to avoid virus contagion.