Ami Clarke. Pandemonium
Pandemonium considers the interdependencies that ripple through biomedia and the online mediasphere, as boundaries blur across the zoonotic spillover of the pandemic and epidemiologists advise economic strategies, as existing inequalities come to the fore fast. An online dashboard informs the VR work that draws out the contradictions within data practice today, that come to light between the unprecedented, but potentially vital ‘surveillance’ of track and trace, designed to manage risk, via modulating the flow of bodies within a viral environment, amid concerns regarding how the accompanying data analysis informs the state and other players, as well as the markets.
A website following the flow of power associated with government strategies of managing crises. The work links poverty and political choices made about increasing financialisation of front line services, to increased vulnerability to disease and pollution, firstly in the current pandemic, and ongoing, with regards environmental concerns. The long term effects of government under-funding and financialisation of public health services that make Covid19 a ‘syndemic’ – “a concept that describes how COVID-19 clusters with pre-existing conditions, interacts with them, and is driven by larger political, economic, and social factors.”
Ami Clarke is an artist and writer working across multimedia such as video, data analytics and VR, within the emergent behaviors that come of human engagement with technology. She is interested in acknowledging and thinking through a subjectivity that emerges in synthesis with its environment, and hence prioritizes a complex intersectionality that includes the multi-temporalities and scales, as well as cognitive states, that coalesce around some new, and some very old power relations, in everyday assemblages such as track and trace.
