CONNECTED DISCONNECT
This lockdown period has brought all of us to rely on the digital medium to connect with our colleagues, friends, and social circles. Distances have collapsed and the interactions across the globe have increased. Communication now happens across buildings, neighborhoods, cities, and even countries with a flash of a second over google meet screens, zoom meetings, Microsoft teams, WhatsApp calls, google duo, and many more such platforms. These newer ways of connectedness somehow have created a distinct disconnect. This disconnect is of the warmth, of the pause, of those unspoken conversations which used to take place between two individuals.
This picture is quite allegorical of several aspects that have become central during this period of lockdown during COVID 19. An old USB extension chord I purchased about three years ago was "brought back to life" during COVID since my new laptop has only two USB sockets. The extension - designed to look like a man whose limbs taken on the extra USB extensions, was my rescue for multitasking and connecting more than two devices to my laptop. In the picture, this USB human looks particularly distressed, entangled into the wires.
At the same time, s/he is sitting within the black space (of the speckled table) which almost makes him appear suspended in a starry abysmal hollow space.
The "power" light in red harks a kind of fatality in correspondence to the gently bent neck and leg that gives the overall posture of its body a somber depressed demeanor.
I struggle to have that awkward silence, to have that space to pause to build my thoughts, to have that time and that space to be myself and to open out my thoughts.
The digital medium definitely generated new connections and created new bridges. And will eventually create the new pause, new variables of unspoken conversations, and the new awkwardness in the digital connections. The disconnect with the old times still prevails.
On the other hand, the image suggests the extended limits of electronic and web connectivity that everyone is largely reliant on during these days.
FLATMATES = GOOGLE MEET MATES
Having lived with my two roommates and worked with them late at night in the first year, it was a lonely experience, in the beginning, to work at home at night while everyone else slept. As the hours passed, the noise from the streets and neighboring buildings died down and the lights went off one by one as I could see from my window. I wondered what my building looked like from the outside- with only my study table light giving off this glow in the entirely dark neighborhood. But our class was quick to shake off this feeling of working 'alone'. We made a class meet link especially for this purpose- to talk to each other while working simultaneously, helping each other out with doubts- asking for opinions from whoever’s online, and to just bring about this feeling that someone’s working with you. I seldom joined these late-night meets because, in the beginning, I felt that I was committing a crime by disturbing the silence of the night- on another note I didn't want to disturb my sleeping family members. But on the night before my design jury, I joined a meet with only my two roommates with Bollywood songs playing- and I felt as if I were transported back to our flat in Borivali and we three were working quietly while one of their playlists blasted on the speaker. It was as close to the real experience as it could get.
"WFH" has become a new acronym for everyone (which stands for Work From Home). Social media is saturated with webinars and online talks open to the public. Several people have jokingly called it a pandemic of webinars!
OF MULTIPLE VIRTUALITIES AND REALITIES_OF SPACE-TIME
The virtual space has opened up a variety of courses to a variety of people. Starting from your mother attending your college lectures to an architecture student attending law webinars. The sense of space-time has changed, earlier when being at two different spaces at the same time was difficult, now it is possible to jump from house cleaning to lectures to webinars to concerts to virtual games in short spans of time and all in the same space or with overlaps.
PARALLEL SIGHTS
COVID Times have confined and locked most of us to our chairs in one position and space in the house. Multiple screens are now used to engage and inhabit new virtual spaces of work, social life, cultural events, leisure, and entertainment parallelly. Some of these parallel inhabitations have been through the phone, television, iPad, and laptop, which are needless to say new windows connecting to the outside of the four walls. Anxieties of losing connectivity and missing out are seen to be increasing multi-folds.
Amidst all this, the human body is literally suspended in the e-space while physically immobile. Energized through new channels, such extensions are keeping us afloat, and mentally alive - allowing a new kind of normalcy. The colorful speckles in the dark vacuum together make up for a dual reading. The image brings out poignantly a range of emotions - the corporeal and technological reality of a large section of human lives during these gloomy times of the pandemic. The seeming ascent of the floating body here, suggests the hope of escape from these troubling atmospheres.
Although the attention spans seemed to have decreased, where I am able to experience multiple realities at the same time, how attentive am I really and what goes unnoticed? When once the presence of another body made me behave in a certain way and only the part of the body that the camera captures is the one interacting (like if the camera only shows my face, then it's possible that me eating, talking are assumed as the only things I do, hiding other activities that are off my frame) while the rest stays absolutely disoriented (or maybe numb). When once the gaze of another body meant something, now I don't know if someone’s really looking at me or not (when in a group).
PERFORMING FOR THE FRAME
Danceworx Performing Arts Academy is a dance training institution that teaches multiple forms of dance. A group of 3 dancers from ‘Danceworx’ synchronize themselves using a song and perform through different locations, sometimes even creating illusions of it being the same place.
My father started online photography lectures, the subjects also were modulated to what can be done from our house and with the minimum available equipment. The house was appropriated according to how we worked the space out. All unnecessary items went inside cabinets and minimal objects and furniture that could be easily moved, stay in the open. Sometimes the entire room was occupied by the temporary studio or was divided by the three of us making our own spaces by claiming individual furniture pieces. Although because there are three rooms and three people living, the overlaps are minimum.