Pandemic Media’s Fragile Landscapes

Presentation by Isabel Munson

 

Goals of this Project

 

Capture the feeling of living in a time when it feels like many systems are collapsing or being questioned.

Document ways this feeling manifests in culture (memes + beyond.)

Document how this feels to experience online / through media.

Explore how collapse can present opportunities for better, for rethinking of things

 

Crisis/Collapse as Opportunity

 

Naomi Klein's video on "Coronavirus Capitalism” says that crises are fertile grounds for new opportunities. 

"In times of crisis, seemingly impossible ideas suddenly become possible."

“It’s possible for crisis to catalyze a kind of evolutionary leap”

 

Sustainability of Systems

 

During the pandemic, the sustainability of our way of life came into question more than ever before

Our system / social structure aren’t designed in a way that allow people to care for even basic needs if they are disrupted 

Food shortages/supply chain disruptions during pandemic

Online shopping then created additional supply chain issues 

People without enough food due to unemployment caused by the pandemic

Outages of essential services during events like the Texas blackouts

Government bailing out corporations, people left to fend for themselves

Advancement of previously ‘radical’ ideas as the pandemic stressed a fragile system further (i.e. things like universal healthcare etc seem more essential/obvious than ever before)

Pandemic resulting in radicalization

Seeing how other countries reacted underscored how our government failed to support people during the pandemic

Growing realization the government won’t save you

Growth in mutual aid networks

Emphasis on self-sufficiency (or community-sufficiency)  

Victory gardens

Baking your own bread, regrowing onions

Preparing a ‘go bag’/kit for disasters

Some of these worries were the territory of preppers before

 

Dimensions of Fragility in Pandemic-Era America

 

General shock to way of life due to pandemic (isolation, fear)

Impact of imagery upon idea of stability

Social and national narratives

Re-examining American History

Questioning origin story 

Questioning sustainability of our economic system and capitalism

Defining new social narratives about caring for everyone

Decline of social cohesion and shared vocabulary 

Alienation

Environmental issues, growing unsustainability (and climate disasters)

West Coast Fires, Texas blackouts, extreme weather

Economic - Lack of wage growth, ‘good’ jobs

Inequality

Closing of small businesses (especially during the pandemic) outsourcing/capitalistic business practices 

Long supply chains creating vulnerabilities

Inflated housing prices, homelessness

Health 

Covid

Mental health, especially in young people 

General poor health + diet, influenced by lifestyle and economic factors 

Lack of access to healthcare

Social Media contributing to division/decline of shared reality (inability to talk about issues)

 

Fragility and the Future

 

Growing awareness of unsustainability/fragility of system

Americans divided on the reasoning for why things are unsustainable or not working

Awareness of fragility, and desire to replace with a robust system that cares for everyone 

Discussion of desired social structures

How things could be 

Reimagining social systems and values

Growing discussion of alternative possibilities for society is hopeful

Growth in mutual aid organizations and political engagement + social awareness is hopeful

Collapse can be a fertile ground for transformation, change, and reimagination

When a system breaks, people begin to discuss how it should ideally work

 

Future Possibilities for Project

Add more detail, explore systemic causes of collapse more (and what ideology(s) lead to that)

Explore more types of contemporary memes and media

Interview people on their feelings on the present and ideas about the future

Interview experts on alternative systems (and practitioners of alternative practices), experts on social change and collapse

Explore existing alternative systems and practices, ways of doing things

 

Isabel Munson is a multi-media artist producing music, writing, and making videos examining relationships between technology, design, economics and behavior.

To view full presentation please go to: Pandemic Media’s Fragile Landscapes

 

 

Response to Presentation

by Professor Deborah Levitt

 

Well, I want to first say thank you to Sumita, for organizing. And to Isabel for the really wonderful video essay. I had the privilege of seeing it in advance. And I was so struck by it. I mean, first of all, because my first thought, at the beginning of the pandemic, my first big fear was about infrastructural collapse. Somehow in my mind, not only was there not going to be food on grocery store shelves, but the power grid was going to go down, and I'm not sure what it was that sent me in that direction. And so, I was immediately just taken by the images, and by the concept of collapse, which is so rich, and so multiple, I could really spool that out with you. But I won't right now. So, I really thought for a while about the luscious footage of your very first sequence, where there is this magic in our sky that is lighting up the GLONASS canal. And we can see downtown, in downtown Manhattan, with the Freedom Tower, and it's spire kind of sparkling in the distance. And one of the things that that really invoked for me is this thought that the pandemic emerged in a landscape of ongoing crisis collapse, fragility, and precarity. Right, just in that opening image, the Freedom Tower replaces the World Trade Center towers, and this vision of collapsing buildings. And then, the Guan is also with the whole sort of history of industrialization and development, and how, they're very destructive effects on our environments, and ecologies, and, now this is, again, open because of the big cleanup. And, should there be developments on these formerly, or maybe still brown sites, etc. So I was thinking about, what really is different now, In relation to the pandemic, because as you point out, collapse is really unequally distributed, and there's certainly places and peoples for whom the apocalypse has already happened, or an apocalypse has already happened. For us, though, here, and now in a literal sense, at least looking at each other listening in this sort of very intimate, but also distant way. I felt like the difference for me is a shift from an existential condition, a form informed by, potential or imminent climate catastrophe, right? and this like the apocalypse of climate collapse, to this much more intimate condition of existential risk that now shapes the way we live our days.

 

I mean, if anything it has provoked a profound difference in the way we experience collapse. And, of course, in the way, we use media because of the specificities of quarantine and isolation, and social distancing and Sumita brought up in her comments, John Durham Peters work on environmental media and the organization of the simposium. And the consistent re-organization of the sensorium that takes place as we negotiate with media under these very new conditions, like ongoing, but also different. I thought that the examples that you use to think through this, were super interesting. The doomer meme is a narco primitivist, you know, tick-tock, her Instagram posts, the return to monkey and cottage core. And I was thinking, wow, how do we like what is a framework that you might use to go there, like to investigate sort of specifically, what's going on? Right? because there is this irony of it all, being virtual, like all of the back to nature, sort of our teas, country crafts and it made me think about a book by Lauren Berlin, which came out maybe in 2000, or I should know the date, but it's called cruel optimism. And in that book, she's looking at conditions of precarity, and she was diagnosing how they were constituted at that moment, how conditions of precarity led to the development of new genres. But when she's talking about genres, she's not talking about genre in the sense of science fiction or Western, but about the effective ways we have of managing in the present in relation to broader cultural conditions. So when you're bringing up this question of I really wanted to think about how it feels to live in this moment of the pandemic, that's very much the context, I mean, not specifically, of the pandemic, but the context in which Berland is framing this notion of genre as a way of relating to this set of existential conditions. And they know, I have about one minute left, but I'll read a short quote from that work. She writes, if the present is not at first an object but a mediated effect, right, so how is it that we know the present in the present, we don't know it as an image or as a data visualization, but as a sort of, how does it feel to live at this moment, it is also a thing that is sensed and under constant revision, a temporal genre whose conventions emerge from the personal and public filtering of the situations and events that are happening. I'm in an extension now of those very parameters. So, when did the precedent begin, are they always there for debate?

 

So I felt like all of your examples are so interesting in relation to thinking about this definition of genre, as ways of managing one's life, in relation to the cultural condition of precarity, fragility, existential risk, etc. And I think that, everything you bring up about, how can we do things differently? Like, what possibility is opened by collapse? I feel like it's really important to think that both in reference of the pandemic in its specificity, and in reference to this kind of ongoing cycle of crisis, collapse and development, that really is the scandal of capital. And, of course, now the markets are up. And I don't know, we seem to be going back to a status quo, at least in some ways. So I'll end there. And again, thanks so much, Isabel, that was an incredibly provocative and evocative piece. Thank you.