Click the video above to load the second part of Covariation
Covariation
Because of COVID-19, many people's work and study have shifted online. As a result of that, people are exposed to longer screen time, which makes conversations and interactions less realistic, and deepen the sense of distance between people. When I have video calls to others, I even have a kind of illusion that the person I talk with is trapped in a rectangular cage shown on the screen.
Inspired by this experience, I coded two browser-based interactive sketches. The first sketch is meant to record people's routines during the quarantine: the grid pattern overlay with the video is a metaphor for a cage; the grids in this code are always asymmetric and create a mirror image of the viewer, which symbolizes the inner conversations people have when they stay with themselves. I sent the link to my friends and asked them to record a routine they repeat every day. Since everyone's "cage" can be different, the pattern can be changed each time you refresh the webpage. When I received the recorded videos from my friends, I got videos of them with 20 different patterns.
The second sketch displays the collected videos from the first program, as well as a live recording of the viewer. You can see a small window of yourself floating with others. It seems like everyone is an isolated planet or island wandering in the darkness, where every rectangle seemed lost, and everything is uncertain since everything is in the air.