COVIDITY

As governments around the world instituted lockdowns in 2020, people everywhere had to confront isolation, uncertainty and a new kind of collective trauma. The COVID-19 pandemic had us asking: What are we supposed to feel? What should we remember? What might this all mean later? We sought a creative response to that tension of the pandemic. The result was Covidity, the manifestation of a desire to process and document the invisible toll of a visible crisis.

Working remotely, we gathered fragments of feeling that emerged from a ruptured social fabric: headlines, conversation snippets, journal entries and Slack messages. These artifacts were internal logs of anxiety, rage, isolation and hope. We filtered this material through the lens of typography, motion and abstraction, creating an immersive video projection broken into six surreal worlds that represented the pandemic’s psychological effects. The name “Covidity” reframed the COVID-19 pandemic as a condition of being, a contradicting convergence of angst, stillness, overload and rare moments of clarity. We screened an accompanying animated short film in iconic locations in Manhattan and Brooklyn: in the shadow of the Brooklyn Bridge in DUMBO, on the corner of East Houston Street and Broadway and in Nolita and Williamsburg. These communal screenings created fleeting but powerful public monuments.

The project struck a chord. Audiences felt seen and relieved, their pandemic emotions visualized and validated. We encouraged communal reflection in the absence of public mourning. Covidity demonstrated the power of creative exploration and imagination as a tool for cultural documentation and laid the groundwork for future explorations of collective memory.