NOTES ON THE CREATION OF THE SERIES “MESSAGES FROM A SOCIAL DISTANCE”

The series began as a way in which to express both my personal frustration with the need to isolate myself during the covid-19 pandemic and my feelings about how such isolation impacts our view concerning life before the pandemic arrived and after it is over.

I have always been someone who believes in the importance of acting concretely on one’s thoughts and feelings and the fact of having to remain at home caused a certain level of frustration, implying as it does almost 100% reliance on virtual, as opposed to, concrete, real human interaction. As someone who has always embraced technological advances in the online world, I was surprised at the level of exasperation I felt by being condemned to use SkypeTM, WhatsAppTM, MessengerTM and ZoomTM to communicate, when in fact, I regularly used such services on a daily basis. I realized very early on that my irritation was psychological. It was the fact that I no longer had the choice. Suddenly, online communication seemed far shallower than it had in the past, far more superficial, less apt at satisfying basic human needs.

These thoughts, in turn, led to the consideration of more philosophical social themes related to how life might unfold if we were forced to accept such constraints on a more permanent basis, either because of other pandemics or because of permanent irreparable damage to the Earth’s environment. It may be a cliché to say that we do not appreciate what we have until we have lost it, but it is absolutely irrefutable. My thoughts drifted to studies that suggest that in the next thirty to forty years, up to 30% of the current work force will be redundant and replaced by robots and other forms of artificial intelligence, signaling the emergence of a new form of polarization and isolation – those whose presence society deems as relevant and those who serve no useful purpose. How will we ever be able to make the jump from our current mindset to such an alien reality. It is easy to say that we can restructure education to ensure that persons made redundant will find useful work in a new AI-dominated society, but we have not even begun to re-structure education systems to prepare for this eventuality. In most countries, it is already too late to avoid the majority of problems it will create. How will those whose presence is deemed useless from a productive societal point of view face the challenge of existence? Will they be like us in isolation today, cut off from the real world? What will communication be like between those deemed productive and those deemed unproductive? Will the two groups even speak the same language even when using the same idiom? Isolation, regardless of the reason, changes a person and isolation on a societal level engenders societal change of a sort we have never had to confront. But is it so different from the polarization of the poor and disposed that characterizes the social structure of so many nations? In some very real sense, isn’t that how they already feel?

And so, this series was the result of an amalgam of these thoughts and the confusion and latent distress they inevitably provoke and reveal. The decision to use video as the foundation for the project was based on my feeling that a passage of time was required to create the tension I was seeking. The choice of video triptychs was born of my desire to juxtapose related and apparently unrelated elements. I also felt it was important that I did not have too much time to reflect on what I was going to film and how I was going to film it and so I formulated the following set of simple rules to frame the creation of the video elements to ensure spontaneity and lack of reasoned clarity:

  • Every day for six consecutive days I would make 3 videos that would form a triptych

  • The three videos would be made within a maximum of 15 to 20 minutes.

  • I must use a handheld cellphone for filming

  • I must appear in at least one of the videos of the triptych.

  • Post-filming production of the images would involve the use of various techniques to render the images more primitive, less sharp and precise to achieve a feeling of uncontrolled interference.

  • A photographic triptych would be extracted from each of the six video triptychs. The treatment of these still images would involve the use of a wide coloured border and enhanced colour contrast to help create a “presence of stillness” and compensate for the absence of a temporal parameter.

  • Each image would possess a QR code to link the photograph to the original video triptych.

                                                                                                                              Florianópolis / SC, Brasil, May 29th, 2020 

R. Scott MacLeay