rsvdforsocialdistancing - Tumblr blog

[rsvdforsocialdistancing]

“A desire to become this thing—in this case an image—is the upshot of the struggle over representation. Senses and things, abstraction and excitement, speculation and power, desire and matter actually converge within images.”  ----------------------------------------- “In fact, it is a misunderstanding that cameras are tools of representation; they are at present tools of disappearance. The more people are represented the less is left of them in reality.” ~ Hito Steyerl

The Invisible ...?

gif source

I'm the invisible man I'm the invisible man Incredible how you can See right through me

gif source

When you hear a sound That you just can't place Feel somethin' move That you just can't trace When something sits On the end of your bed Don't turn around When you hear me tread

I'm in your room And I'm in your bed And I'm in your life And I'm in your head Like the CIA Or the FBI You'll never get close Never take me alive

gif source

Now I'm on your track And I'm in your mind And I'm on your back But don't look behind I'm your meanest thought I'm your darkest fear But I'll never get caught You can't shake me, shake me dear

gif source

I'm the invisible man It's criminal how I can See right through you

Look at me, look at me

[rsvdforsocialdistancing]

mood

The Beatles - I'm So Tired - White Album - 1968

[rsvdforsocialdistancing]

feelings

[rsvdforsocialdistancing]

just in the case you were wondering the comment section below this video is also what one should have a look at. really. 

Nobody:

Really nobody:

Not even a single soul: 

Feeling down in the lockdown? We have a remedy for you! This is what you should watch while self-isolated. Trust us, this is really what you should watch. Like, really. 

[rsvdforsocialdistancing]

the (not so) new normal

This legitimately needs to be in future literature textbooks to capture the Covid-19 Pandemic.

[rsvdforsocialdistancing]

how environment impacts one’s mood [affect] 

[rsvdforsocialdistancing]

feelings, feelings 

[rsvdforsocialdistancing]

Nobody:

Really nobody:

Not even a single soul: 

Feeling down in the lockdown? We have a remedy for you! This is what you should watch while self-isolated. Trust us, this is really what you should watch. Like, really. 

[rsvdforsocialdistancing]

black mirror in black&white color scheme. 

[rsvdforsocialdistancing]

undefined

update: success! Edvard Munch is indeed an artist! 

[rsvdforsocialdistancing]

undefined

apparently Tumblr doesn’t consider Edvard Munch as art. 

[rsvdforsocialdistancing]

Ah, Instagram filters can make one look so much better so easily. Right? #vibes 

[rsvdforsocialdistancing]

ads online will never stop surprising me. 

#fashionintimesofcovid

[rsvdforsocialdistancing]

In his “The Losers Conspiracy,”  Paul B. Preciado writes about the life and love after COVID-19. 

One sentence that made me particularly ‘stop’ was 

“No one can be philosophical with an exploding head.”

 In this quarantined days, we are isolated within our own egoistic, short-sighted minds. It seems so easy to get distracted by little inconveniences that the virus caused in our lives. 

People out there are really dying, but numbers become life-less so quickly that we forget that there is a human being behind each one. It seems so easy to miss the bigger picture. Is seems so easy to just reject all of the reality and isolate ourselves in our fake, online-driven islands. 

Maybe the life before covid was not as great as it looks like in our collective consciousness.  

[rsvdforsocialdistancing]

Self-isolating, self-invigilating.

Panic requires time. But are we actually panicking?

For a month now, I have been on exile from everything I could call familiar: my home country, my Rome, my Europe. Amongst the Covid-19 panic, I read a short story about a very similar situation, but amongst the shared state of anti-panic.

J. G. Ballard’s Having a Wonderful Time (1978) is a bizarre story of a happy exile. A group of British people finds themselves in a situation where their holidays, which initially were extended due to unforeseen circumstances and flight cancellations, become a permanent exile. People on the holiday island have everything taken away from them: their jobs, dreams, families. However, as they are given some basic forms of entertainment, a constant distraction, they forget about the tragedy of their situation. They do not think beyond the closest future, which is a set of pleasures. Only Richard, one of several characters, and the husband of the protagonist Diana, is indeed the one who tries to rebel and dies as a consequence. But his attempt and failure and death are meaningless for the community of empty pleasure.

One would like to believe that when people are oppressed, meaning that their freedom is taken away from them, they would rebel. They would fight for a better world, right? Not necessarily. Ballard’s text highlights the most basic mechanisms of social manipulation that might lead to mass control and loss of any individuality, empathy, spirituality, or even what could be said to define humanity. Ballard’s text is, mostly, about distraction and time.

newyorkercartoons A cartoon by @rozchast, from 2010. 

If I were to come to go back home tomorrow, I would become a subject to a self-Selfie-invigilation.

As everyone who comes back from abroad, I would need to stay home for 14 days, and prove my self-isolation/quarantine by taking selfies whenever a special app tells me too. "People in quarantine have a choice: either receive unexpected visits from the police, or download this app," said Karol Manys, Digital Ministry spokesman, as cited in cbsnews (yes, we do have “Digital Ministry.” How fancy isn’t it?). I would need to download an app, and then have 20 minutes to take a selfie each time after I receive an SMS/App notification to do so. Otherwise, police might come to check up if I am not breaking the rules of quarantine.

I wonder, why would they need my selfies if the app already has a geolocation system. Additionally, based on a recent low, all telecommunication companies are required to provide data about users’ as a tool to fight Covid-19 more successfully, like Vadafone in Great Britan and Deutsche Telekom in Germany already do. They do not need to take selfies of the users though. So why I would have to?

The app itself is not groundbreaking. More advanced apps have been already launched in Singapore and South Korea, where they are able to track what people one is physically contacting and from what distance, and also making sure that people on quarantine don’t break the rules. In UAE, one has to fill in a permit to leave a house that is digitally glued to the user’s phone, checking the GPS location and duration of being outside. Why would I have to take selfies?

Because it’s also about fancy-sounding facial recognition technology, and that’s what sounds to me too much like Chinese social security plan.

The app gives the possibility to request medical aid or any kind of assistance, food delivery of psychological consultation etc., which is quite nice. What is not nice is that it is not clear how the app actually works, there is no source code accessible, its company apparently “does not sell the app to track consumer behaviors, as the app is only used to analyze the consumer environment and its basic focus is of interior usage in businesses and institutions.” The app also seems to be far from perfect, as hundreds of users reported errors in its GPS-location technology and the selfie-notifications. The app is active for 14 days, but the collected data (including the questionable amount of my selfies used for facial recognition) are kept for six years by several institutions and the company which created the app. Six years? Really? Like I wasn’t already objectified enough by having my representation scrambled and dismembered by all CCTV cameras, cookies, Facebook and Google and Amazon algorithms. Maybe I am panicking too much, but there is something obnoxious about being ordered to take selfies.

Aren’t we all getting distracted from serious problems by weird apps, weirder news, new Instagram filters, new tik-tok videos, or by providing us with a media spectacle like super bowl (in the ‘past’ meaning before March 2020)?

newyorkercartoons This week’s sketchbook drawing by @lianafinck

The knowledge competition of visualizing more dubious data in a more dubious way (not like I don’t trust a Ministry which is a part of a government that employed hundreds of trolls to disseminate misinformation on social media and repetitively has been breaking the Constitution, which researchers at Oxford recently studied), in delivering more numbers, more graphs, more yoga ads which reprimand me yet again for not doing yoga.

Shouldn’t we all be really panicking?

cassandracalin This feels like the longest episode.

[rsvdforsocialdistancing]

I've been pretty sad recently. 

Headache, sleepiness, sadness, overall lack of strength, or will to act. After sleeping through the afternoon, I stood up with a slightly lesser headache and got to the other room. After a while, I grabbed my phone. I opened Instagram, only to notice - oh, the magic of happy accidents - that a friend of mine is live on Instagram Stories. 

’Perhaps he's been broadcasting his piano skills, ’ I might have though yet the time spawn since I saw it until I cliched it was too short for me to think this sentence through in my mind. I clicked. And he was playing the piano. And I listened. He noticed that I joined, and so he played one of my favorite songs. And I listened. And I was happy. 

But then it just disappeared. My friend came back to his life, and I was back in my room with a headache and a lack of will or power to act. Just as if our meeting a second ago has never existed, just as if it was a dream, something with no actual impact on reality. But after a dream one sometimes wakes up feeling better, feeling happy. I didn't dream, neither I woke up, yet I felt sad. It seems as if our interaction, our sociality, was an innocent delusion, a harmless hallucination. 

It was merely a simulation of sociality, just as social media are. 

[rsvdforsocialdistancing]

Around one week ago, I was scrolling through my Instagram feed as I do each day. I liked posts of my closest friends - which yes, I do believe is a way of showing them that despite the distance that parts us, and this bizarre situation that makes us all even colder, I do remember about them and want to bring them a bit of joy by liking their photos. 

Anyway, I got a message from my friend asking to take part in #finoadomani challenge, since I liked her post. I am a person who has never taken part in a social media challenge, and yet I agreed. Why? Was that an outcome of isolation, exile, and stress that I feel for three weeks now? Was that one of those moments when social media do provide a space for being humane and indeed connecting while feeling the sense of belonging? 

Since I have posted my response to that challenge, I have been coming back to it and questioning myself. Why for goodness sake did I do it? Even the moment I was writing the description for the two photos of me that I shared, I was aware that it was an outcome of self-misunderstanding, I was aware of how strange the situation indeed was. 

It has to feel nice when one indeed feels what resembles happiness or excitement while getting likes. Happiness is just a moment, not a constant state of being, so perhaps it is sort-of happiness? 

But after all, I was happy to see a few of my best friends commenting on this post saying that the description made them laugh. I guess it was worth it after all. I guess...