Digital Quarantine

In the decades and probably for centuries to come, humanity will remember the Twenties as the year the world stopped. This is the first time an event of this magnitude has affected a digitally and economically connected world. The advent of quarantine has challenged the model of the contemporary city, every shared space, from the office to the airport, has suddenly become abandoned, useless or unusable, aligning the boundaries of our daily lives with those of our homes: elements of a shared urban ecosystem, starting points for the exploration of contemporary society, which have suddenly become not only our refuges, but also and above all our prisons.

I have tried to describe the influence of the digital paradigm during this collective quarantine in a series of images that ideally start from the yin-yang symbol, which stands for dynamic balance and overcomes dualism in the polarity between opposites. A circular symbol now confined to the four sides of a square, in an apparent equilibrium that forces us to adapt to enclosure. In a second phase, distortion, the apparent equilibrium is disturbed, and although the digital paradigm guarantees us its communication possibilities, its non-neutrality distorts our view of the world, flattening it to the medium and limiting our perspectives. In the third moment, collapse, the digital artifice dominates our everyday life, equating it with seemingly logical but non-natural rules and structures that are beyond our control and turn our identities into ones and zeros.