Linked Objects 2020 (The Pandemic Lockdown)

by Nine Dragon Heads

Linked Objects a contiplation by Park Byoung-Uk

As we know from science bats generally live in groups as colonies, however, the disease that allegedly came from them sent almost all mankind into lockdown at the beginning of 2020 for 6 weeks!

At first it was only self-isolation for those who may have had contact with the Corona Virus or those travelling across different borders. Even then to most the guidelines in the beginning seemed harsh for those who had never even encountered an epidemic. So for the majority of the global population a Pandemic seemed ‘impossible’. This is even though Infectious Disease Scientists all over the globe had been warning the World Wide Health for over 20 years ago, especially after SARS, that it was when, not if, that a pandemic would eventually come!

On the backdrop of numerous blind spots concerning a miracle vaccine for the first strain of the coronavirus (COVID-19), self-isolation was seen as one of the proven measures in fighting the pandemic that had already claimed the lives of more than 80 000 people worldwide.

We say that digital communication made the world smaller meaning that we are interconnected through our avatars in the virtual world. What the outbreak of the COVID-19 clearly showed is that we are not only connected through our corpreal bodies we are just as connected in our digital ones too.

This bond turned out to be no less solid or mutually influential than any ‘going viral’ or ‘gone viral’ World Wide Web experience.

Today, in the lockdown, linked to each other not only through social networks, messengers and emails but also the shared fears and the hopes for the medical treatment that will bring us rapid change back to normality.

We did our best to understand and assess the situation we found ourselves in, however in that first long tiresome year, for most it seemed evasive…In our bizarre life-saving encapsulation, on the background of numerous questions and expectations, we attempted to cope with separation, staying and being still and our non-interaction with the outside world which seemed through portholes to be on one very long continuous ‘still frame’. In this world that felt as though it was on pause it felt especially challenging for most creative communities and especially for NDH artist and other artists working in similar conceptual manner to Nine Dragon Heads Artist, we all felt with a very different tone, isolated!