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.