Убежище / Suoja / Shelter

Choose Your Own Quarantine

Dasha Ilina is a Russian digital artist based in Paris, France. Her work explores the relationship we develop with the digital devices we use on a daily basis, specifically in regards to the human body. Ilina's work centers around the notions of care and technology, DIY practices and low-tech solutions to examine various issues such as phone addiction, tech-related health problems and privacy in the digital age. She is the founder of the Center for Technological Pain, a center that proposes DIY solutions to health problems caused by digital technologies. This project was developed together with Sofia Haines, an American screenwriter, playwright, and poet based in Paris, France.

In his most recent Mute article, Benedict Seymour argues that the COVID-19 virus is a time machine, using the way the UK government has handled the pandemic as an example. However, while most imagine a time machine serving as a transport to a future utopia, Seymour says this particular time machine is regressive, not progressive: "they [time machines] effect a rapid leap backward – even if this retrogression is absolutely novel." If COVID-19 is a regressive time machine, then the game Choose Your Own Quarantine is a doorway in it, offering a glance at the multitudinous timelines this time machine proposes as destinations. Choose Your Own Quarantine is a web-based game that reflects the uncertainty of the current situation at large by showing the ways in which we attempt to reconcile our unexpected present with our unknown future. The user is presented with a scenario that initially follows the real timeline of COVID-19 development, but as the game goes on, users will notice that the options become increasingly speculative and fictitious. The various outcomes of the game are intended to raise questions as to which values, practices, and cultures will ultimately be enduring, and which may become outdated remnants of the pre-pandemic world. The online game can be perceived as a final product; however, the research and thinking that went into imagining the various post-quarantine scenarios is no less important than the game itself.

*For the Zoom meeting, please, keep your audio/ video mute. Use the applicable pronoun and a real/ nick name in the Zoom profile (e.g. Newton's Binomial/ they). If you want to ask a question - let us know in the Zoom chat, we will switch your cam and mike.
Meeting ID: 837 7222 2927 Password: 437806

Lecture
June 13, 16:00 (CEST)

Workshop
June 14, 14:30 (CEST)

*For the Zoom meeting, please, keep your audio/ video mute. Use the applicable pronoun and a real/ nick name in the Zoom profile (e.g. Newton's Binomial/ they). If you want to ask a question - let us know in the Zoom chat, we will switch your cam and mike.
Meeting ID: 886 1450 2220 Password: 740313
The admission will be closed 10 min after the start.