Insights
This poem provides us with several insights into text technologies and the transmission of knowledge. How did this written poem's social and technological conditions affect its impact and heritage? What is the text culture behind the poem's writing, publication, and its process of "being read?"
It is essential to consider the nature of this poem's publication to respond to those questions. This poem was published online on the poet's official website. It helps him to achieve his primary goals. He writes this poem primarily to console people under the lockdown and ask them to consider our current circumstances, other people living in the challenging time, and the world (Flood 2020). Publishing online allows him to respond to the current crisis in time and reach out to a larger range of audiences because people spent more time using the internet during the lockdown, which also seems the only way we can communicate with each other. People don't need to pay to access this poem, allowing more people to read it regardless of their financial condition.
In today's digital age, we access and process knowledge always in an interactive and integrated way. His audience can access more sources addressing the current pandemic and people's lives. These works resonate together in the audience's mind and help them make sense of the bigger topic those works address, how should we understand our lives with COVID-19. My exhibit also tries to construct this kind of resonation by presenting the display of this poem on my laptop screen and showing different artworks related to the poem's themes. They are artistic expressions of different artists, and all of them address this topic differently. Still, they can resonate together when we focus on the poem Lockdown and use other artworks as inspirations to further our understanding of specific themes this poem presented. In this exhibit, I not only present a set of works about lockdown under COVID-19 but also suggest a way to view online works in such text culture behind this poem.
I will present and analyze three artworks that relate to the themes of Lockdown below.
Victoria Stagni created this painting in 2020 under the context of COVID-19. The COVID-19 pandemic had just started at that time, and most governments called the communities to lockdown to deal with it—people began to stay at home and self-quarantined. In this work, Stagni describes her average day of the quarantine, which shares how she makes sense of their own life during quarantine. The appearance of the book Homo Sapiens and the animals around the room raises our awareness of how our species' future will go and invites us to reconsider our position in the natural world. It resonates with Armitage's poem for its awareness of the whole human being, rather than merely individuals.
Mauro Bergozoli created this painting in 2020. It describes the lockdown during the COVID-19 pandemic in a global scape. The whole artwork is constructed by the metaphor of lockdown, which puts different countries into condo suites. For every country the artist selects, he uses one image to represent the situation or a major social issue during the pandemic of that country. This artwork also includes other major social issues in this period, like 5G and surveillance. This artwork invites us to consider the social issues in other societies and raises the audience's awareness of the global issues during the pandemic. The quarantine lines separated people and nations during the pandemic. However, Bergozoli reminds us that we are still connected and have faced some common issues together, which also resonates with Armitage's poem in how we should be aware of other people and societies during the pandemic.
Georges DUMAS created this painting under the current pandemic. Obviously, this artwork is about "love." There is only a woman wearing a mask embracing herself in this painting. Under COVID-19, human relationships, especially love relationships, are challenged by physical separateness, the impossibility of physically interacting with each other and the lack of communication. Due to these conditions, building and maintaining love relationships become harder for people living under the pandemic. The woman embraces herself because of the lack of a lover, and she can only embrace herself in the suffering and loneliness. It resonates with Armitage's romantic but tragic story in his poem. A couple breaks up because they cannot meet each other in the plague. They discuss "love" in their artworks, which raises our awareness of how relationships could be built and maintained during the pandemic.