Pandemic Media and Emergent Infrastructures
On April 16, 2021 Professor Sumita Chakravarty, along with graduate students Isabel Munson, Rachel Pincus, Nick Travaglini, and Guillermina Zabala, held a workshop on the topic of Pandemic Media and Emergent Infrastructures as part of The New School’s online events. Each student presented a different aspect of this theme and then a guest professor responded to the students’ presentations.
This newsletter presents the opening remarks of the workshop, and sections of one of the presentations that relates specifically to migration. It focuses on photography and its evocation of mobility and immobility as a way to understand the human toll of the pandemic.
Professor Sumita Chakravarty’s opening remarks introduce the concept behind the presentation and summarize the various perspectives analyzed by the students.
“The time seemed opportune to take an inventory of the ways in which the pandemic has affected our individual and collective lives and routines, and particularly how we might conceptualize a wide array of practices in which media technologies are playing such a fundamental part. How does a pandemic skew or inflect our definitions of media? How are past practices of virtuality being retooled to address social isolation and quarantine? How can theories of infrastructure be extended to include both fragility and resilience, both the material and the immaterial, virtual, and symbolic? Quite coincidentally, the very notion of “infrastructure” is being hotly debated in political circles at this time, following on the heels of media theorists who have been increasingly attentive to it. Will this pandemic expand our notions of infrastructure as well? While we do not pretend to have answers to all these questions, we hope that the primarily empirical approach taken here can serve, as Walter Benjamin hoped, as a means of social and historical reflection. Seeing ‘pandemic media’ as a constellation of such practices calls for new ways to think about our social and symbolic infrastructures.
Speaking personally, I find myself bizarrely alternating between a state of mourning –for the pre-Covid life that I’d come to take for granted– and a feeling of cosmic privilege that I’m being allowed to experience a collective human trauma that is truly global in scope. As the simple pleasures of life have vanished – of freely mingling with our friends and relatives, of making travel plans, of the din and chatter in our office spaces that may have gone for the foreseeable future — replaced by virtual gatherings (such as this one!), remote learning, the zoomification of the world . . . how are we making sense of these shifts? In what ways are some questions of media and cultural studies –of ontology, aesthetics, politics, and technics–being rethought yet again?
Indeed, the proliferation of media, of language as one form of description that seeks to make manageable the complexities of our condition has been startling, if unsurprising. Recently, the British news site, the Guardian, reported that 1200 new German words had been added to the German language since the pandemic. I quote: “It includes feelings many can relate to, such as overzoomed (stressed by too many video calls), Coronaangst (when you have anxiety about the virus) and Impfneid (envy of those who have been vaccinated).” I also learned the word “skinhunger,” the need for human touch denied to us during quarantine, and the list goes on.
I want to briefly mention three conceptual frames that were inspirations for this event:
- The first relates to ideas of movement and travel and how these have been linked to identity in new (and old) ways, with some deadly repercussions. In March of 2020, my students, and students everywhere were asked to “go home” and many flew to their native countries as the only place that they could feel safe and get medical treatment, should the need arise. In the U.S. the former president talked of an alien invasion, a “China virus,” an invisible enemy. It has unleashed a rash of attacks against Asian-Americans that are as horrendous as they are inexplicable. Terms like “vaccine nationalism” and “vaccine passports” serve as infrastructures of policing and border control. What constitutes the migratory politics of a virus? Over 60 years ago, Susan Sontag alerted us to the power of words by tracing historically the ways in which tuberculosis and cancer (and later AIDS) shaped attitudes towards disease. Her analysis is still relevant today.
- The second inspiration is a book called “Cultures of Contagion” by MIT Press that will only be out in October of this year. It is edited by two French historians and contributed to by a huge contingent of European scholars. From the website description, one learns that the book recounts episodes from the history of contagions, from ancient times to the 21st century. It looks at “a wide range of social, cultural, political, or anthropological instances . . . through the prism of contagion—from anti-Semitism to migration, from the nuclear contamination of the planet to the violence of Mao’s Red Guard.” Contagion is at once a process, metaphor and critical tool. I am similarly inspired to think of terms like pandemic and pandemic media as interpretive tools that can help us identify, perhaps, constituents of media that relate to, interact with, comment on, and extend our awareness of the virus.
- The third inspiration for this discussion comes from media studies scholar John Durham Peters and his expansive notion of both media and infrastructures. In his book, The Marvelous Clouds,’ Peters makes the case for not only thinking of the elements (fire, earth, sky, water) as media, bearing out his notion of media as environments rather than simply technologies or means of communication. He calls media agencies of order ; my notion of “pandemic media” can be similarly poised as a kind of ordering principle, in both political and epistemological senses. Around the pandemic have arisen societal strictures of ‘command and control’ but also new ways of ordering the sensorium, the management of the senses, so to speak.
The presenters are addressing today’s topic from various perspectives and in keeping with their ongoing work on projects. Together these constitute a dense web of societal and individual modes of action and experience under conditions of quarantine and isolation, but also of virtual community and contact, of creativity and compassion. Rachel’s examples of parasocial connections, Isabel’s intimations of collapse, Nick’s explanation of resilience engineering, and Guillermina’s reading of Covid-related photographs serve to underscore the critical potential of pandemic media as a lens and a concept.”
Professor Sumita Chakravarty
Pandemic: A Media Maker’s perspective
by Guillermina Zabala Suárez
A Sinha Fellow and a graduate student in Media Studies at The New School, Guillermina Zabala is a media artist, researcher, and educator whose work examines the intersection between the individual and their environment.
This presentation analyzes photographic works from three photographers from South America, looking at how their work infrastructures changed as a result of the pandemic. The presence and absence of human interactions as captured in these photographs help us think about the nature of movement, that is so much a part of a photographer’s professional life.
OVERVIEW
This presentation explores three areas:
- The symbolism behind the visual narratives of the pandemic, as seen through the eyes of photographers from South America.
- How is the propagation of the virus — hidden and silent — revealed in photographs of the global pandemic? Mobility and immobility as a paradoxical equation and as a metaphor of the virus.
- In what ways does the sociopolitical and cultural context of these images inform their stories and expand their discourse beyond the physical territories?
THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK
The field of cultural studies will serve as a theoretical framework for this presentation.
- “What do the images want from us? Where are they leading us? What is that they lack, that they are inviting us to fill?” These questions will be the guiding questions throughout my analysis. Mitchell, W.J.T. What Do Pictures Want? 2005
- “Photographs offered a far more democratic visual map of the world.” in relation to other media. Mirzoeff, Nicholas. An Introduction to Visual Culture. 1999
This is relevant and true in the work of photojournalists who go to the heart of the conflict and capture reality as it unfolds. They often portray a narrative that contradicts the official and government-led narrative. I spoke with some of these photographers in order to find out how the pandemic affects their image-making practice and tests their notions of identity.
ANALYSIS OF REPRESENTATIONAL IMAGES
The visual and thematic exploration of specific images will be divided into three themes, that have been widely representational of the pandemic in its global perspective:
- Isolation: Looking at two photographic series by photographer Martin Zabala.
- Exposure: Contemplating a photo series by photographer Natacha Pisarenko.
- Collecting the Dead: Analyzing a photo series by photographer Rodrigo Abd.
ISOLATION
Phone Screen series by Martín Zabala
This series explores the concept of confinement through the use of multiple framing techniques. The image of a family inside their home, inside the screen of a phone, that is inside somebody else’s house represents an indication of the interconnectedness within confinement. Movement is merely representational as people are not physically moving but yet their digital representations are being transported through digital devices and throughout social media and the Internet.
Window series by Martín Zabala
In his window series, Martin utilizes the physical framing of windows and iron bars in order to emphasize the idea of confinement and stillness. People are inside looking out. Time for reflection and introspection. Feelings of fear and desperation are real and being shared by the whole community. These images are motionless but yet bring a sense of connectedness that go beyond those windows frames.
EXPOSURE
a series by Natacha Pisarenko
This series captures crucial moments of first responders at hospitals and other places in Buenos Aires, Argentina. The imminent risk of being infected builds an imaginary wall reminding us of this new impossibility of movement and lack of “freedom.”
The distance that we’re creating between us is real. But the urgency and the need to assist and cure the sick perseveres to the point of human sacrifice. Infected people are being moved to hospitals where many of them will die alone. They’re being transported to a new and strange place where they would live their bodies without the comfort of their loved ones. First responders move to hotel rooms or spend days and nights at the hospital, away from their families and loved ones. Their day-to-day routine has also been transformed and this “symbolic” migratory system has forced everyone to be stranded.
COLLECTING THE DEAD
a series by Rodrigo Abd
In this series, Rodrigo explores one of the most difficult aspects of the pandemic: the dead bodies. Capturing emotional moments in isolated towns of Perú, Rodrigo brings out the notion of absence and solitude in the midst of fear and desperation. Community members are responsible for discharging the bodies of their loved ones. Some would have proper funerals and a time for mourning while others will be simply covered by a white sheet and placed in a plastic bag. Transporting these bodies throughout towns, mountains, and empty fields, community members seem to be exhausted and fearful of their own deaths. The symbolic sense of the migration process takes place within the act of passing. Death rituals have been truncated by the restrictions imposed by COVID-19. Nevertheless, family members mourn and pray for those who have “migrated” to the other side.
CONCLUSION
Connecting back with Mitchell’s question: What images are inviting us to fill? These sets of images encapsulate, in my opinion, the paradoxical notion of immobility and mobility. Immobility is present in the lockdowns and a sense of isolation and mobility has been represented by the work of these photographers, propagation of the virus itself, the human interactions through digital devices, and death itself as a symbolic representation of movement with the act of passing.
