Presentation by ISABEL MUNSON.
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.