A&D ANNUAL 2020

Khoa Sloane

The ‘COVID Perspectives Project’ explores attitudes toward online distribution of information about urban environments during a pandemic. With the lockdown, it has become difficult to find coherent information due to the media taking advantage of COVID-19. DeBord’s 1967 ‘Diffuse Spectacle’ argues that prominent media structures distribute censored information to thrive on influence and attention. The project critiques this theory by using personal technologies to create and curate crowdsourced, lockdown-themed images that pushes coherence and opposes censorship, while showing that not doing so generates more lucrative curation. The outcome is an Instagram gallery that combats information suppression with genuine perspectives. Users contribute by following the project’s Instagram page, which highlights locations and themes weekly. They then take photos using an auto-sharing app, which is collected into a public google drive and curated on Instagram.