Items
Identifier is exactly
HUM404
-
2020-05-09
Window
I am including this selection of two photos of my bedroom window, as this has been the dominant view and my sole saving grace throughout lockdown. The photo on the left was taken in my first week of lockdown on the twenty third of March, which was the first week that I began to stay at home as I am asthmatic and was very concerned about my own health making me more vulnerable. The second photo was taken on the first of June, and marks ten weeks since my own ‘lockdown’ began, I have somewhat lost track of the various stages of lightening of restrictions as I was still mostly avoiding going out up until the point when the second photo was taken. In many ways my asthma and anxiety made this experience pretty traumatising, I stopped walking my dog because I people kept patting her and I had too much anxiety about the conflict of constantly asking people not too, and I was worried about the contact risk to myself from people touching my dog. After the rate of community transmission stabilised, I felt safer going out to places, but then I found the secondary anxiety of people behaving in rude and hostile ways towards me in public due to my obvious coughing or wheezing from asthma after I had an obvious asthma attack in Officeworks. My isolation has thus been pretty intense and long lasting compared to some others and combined with anxiety has induced an intense sensation of feeling trapped in my bedroom. The access to sunlight and fresh air through this window, as well as my beautiful view has been a literal visual lifeline, I found myself taking lots of photos of the window and my view. In many ways I feel like this has made me far more attentive than I have ever had the opportunity to be to the changes between night and day, and the slow seasonal change into winter. -
2020-04-17
Second Adolescence
This photo is of my little brother, who is sixteen this year, as we were spending time together on the balcony of our house. This was out of sheer desperation in terms of getting out of the house, even though it is freezing outside at this time of year in the afternoons. For two months during lockdown my brother and I spent more time together than we probably have in the last three years combined, given that I am ten years older than him and have lived out of home up until last year our relationship was always a bit like ships passing in the night. In addition to that our relationship has always been vaguely parental due to the age difference (and possibly my own gendered conditioning to adopt a caregiver role), yet in this period I have had such a strange feeling of emotionally revisiting my adolescence due to the amount of time I am spending with my brother and cousin who is eighteen, which has been such a strange and disorienting experience. I feel like this has been such a pointed sensation for me as someone who doesn’t drive, and with public transport it is just bearable as I have some access to independent travel. But when I could no longer go anywhere at all without my mother driving me, I felt like my identity as a capable adult essentially crumbled overnight. There are elements to this that are positive, I feel like my brother understands me much better now and my relationship with my cousin borders more on the side of best friends than cousins in a way that would probably not have happened if I hadn’t been forced to put aside the cloak of adulthood which made me essentially relate to my cousin from a caregiver perspective. -
2020-04-22
Jan Fran- Text From Facebook Post
I have included Jan Fran’s name in this only because the facebook post was public and she is an established political commentator, but I was somewhat anxious about publishing her words in this way. When I first saw this facebook post it honestly probably took me about a week to get over my sheer rage at the amount of money Jeff Bezos has personally made profiting from the pandemic, which wouldn’t be so bad if it weren’t for that fact that his personal wealth is so staggeringly incomprehensible already. I read the other day that he has pledged a billion dollars to charities in the wake of coronavirus, which is just under a third of his personal wealth. How is it that one man can accept brownie points for donating a billion dollars in a context when he can justify keeping nearly two billion dollars in personal wealth while income inequality is a driving force in the deaths of over a hundred thousand people in his own country alone. How can anyone can claim to have ‘earned’ or ‘deserve’ such a staggering amount of money in a world rocked by a global pandemic is just so incomprehensible. Jan’s point about this false trade-off between the health of the economy and safety, which is made on so many levels above and beyond public health in a pandemic (because funding free education is bad for the economy rather than billionaires) is so striking, and I can only hope there are enough people who are more disgusted with the two billion dollars Jeff Bezos decided to keep than there are wanting to pat him on the back for donating the one billion. -
2020-04-06
Hopper Life Filter
I have included this photo as it reminded me so strongly, on the night I took that photo, of Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks (1942). For some reason I have always found the colour palette and story of that particular painting to be really soothing and calming, and it has always been one of my favourite painting for that reason even though by genre and artist it falls well outside my usual area of interest. I remember reading something years ago which described the scenes depicted in Hopper’s artworks in this period as depicting liminal social spaces, characterised by public spaces designed for crowds (cafes, hotels lobbies, restaurants etc.) which are nearly empty and in between phases of activity, and this whole year has felt like one giant Hopper painting that I can’t escape from. I looked at a bunch of his paintings again whilst deciding what to say about this moment, and the painting Automat (1927) is one I have always identified with in a really positive way being both rather introverted and a ritual tea drinker. When I was looking at his paintings again and saw it however, I felt such a strange rush of both sadness and anxiety and I can’t help but feel like my enjoyment of Hopper’s paintings in this period has been ruined forever, though hopefully my feelings about the paintings will swing in the opposite direction again as I age and change myself, as great art is wont to do. -
2020-04-17T19:30
Isolation and Illumination
I included this video because in my own time practicing social distancing and social isolation, I noticed that my days and nights became dominated by two distinctive scenes, which is a rather harsh contrast to the variety of settings available to me normally. The first being the windows to freedom I had driving in the car to and from the grocery store, or occasionally to go through the drive through. The second is my home, or more specifically the bedroom from within which I have to sleep, study, eat and entertain myself. Whilst I had access to several peripheral liminal zones between these two, such as the balcony outside my bedroom and my local walking track when walking my dog. The neon lights and empty spaces of the outside world through the car window, or through the layer of social distancing in the grocery store exemplify so much of the feeling I have experienced in isolation. I can’t quite pin down this feeling with a pithy phrase yet, but I found that the physical confinement to settings which became routine was so much more traumatising than the lack of social connection which was for me almost an over surplus rather than a lack as I am constantly surrounded by family with both my mother, brother and occasionally cousin being confined to a small cottage house. I feel like the whole world became this strange liminal space in which daily communal expectations were suspended without being overturned with new expectations, I never really got the sense of ‘the new normal’ that others have mentioned. -
2020-05-25
Delayed Shipping Email
An email which states that due to international shipping issue related to COVID-19 they anticipate the order will be shipped late April/early May. At the time of contributing to the archive (late May) the item had still not arrived. It's frustrating that the delay has been this long. HUM402 -
2020-06-24
Problems with government policy concerning schools
[Curatorial Note]: Description and thoughts on new policies for sanitation and safety within early education classrooms. -
04/19/2020
Loeb Classical Library - Harvard University Press International
In light of the Pandemic the Harvard University Press decided to allow Schools and Institutions access to the Loeb Classical Library for free, Yay! This is very useful for people whose institutions apply; people studying classics who cannot access libraries are able to instead use E-Books. Yet there are some interesting elements regarding this. Firstly it is restricted to Schools and Institutions who contact the Harvard university, which means that people doing independent research during this time cannot do it, while I can understand the reasoning behind it, I also feel as though there is a certain elitism; students and members of institutions are able to access these resources while people who may want to while they are in quarantine and isolation are unable; now is the time when have the least money to spend and the most time to fill, yet unless they are part of an institution given by permission they cannot read these classical texts. The second more interesting part of this is disconnect between the quote by Horace that they led the tweet with "May I have a goodly supply of books and food to last the year" and the limitations that they set on the free-period. The Harvard University Press decided to have it last 2 months; while I do not think that should be criticized for opening their library for free, I also find amusement in the 10 month gap between Horace and the policy - they could have found a better quote. -
2020-03-25
Australian Government formal COVID-19 mass text alert
The Australian Government sent out a very curt mass text on the 25th of March to warn Australian citizens to follow COVID-19 guidelines. I chose this item because the timing and brevity was viewed by many as 'too little, too late'. It's a reflection of the fact that it took our government a week or two to absorb and act on the seriousness of the situation - not long before this message came out, the Prime Minister had still been encouraging people to attend football matches in high-capacity stadiums. Though the government eventually recognised the risk, and acted more decisively than some other countries, a large chunk of credit must go to Australians with the foresight to begin acting in advance of government instruction. By the time I received this message, my workplace had already been shut down to a work-from-home situation for a full two weeks, and the University of Tasmania's campuses had been shut down for five days. (HUM404) -
2020-03-25
How quickly things change
This is two announcements concerning the status of the Utas Libraries; the one on the left is an announcement by a teacher which says that said the Morris Miller library was still open for picking up books, actually going into the library had been suspended by that point. Later that same day the University published an official statement that announced the total closure of the library. This was in keeping with government restrictions and guidelines, many libraries had been closed. This article also helps display the difficulty that some students have been experiencing in acquiring sources for their study have been made more difficult, especially since browsing is impossible, as a student can't go into the library and search the section of the library for relevant resources. This source also shows a way that educational institutions attempt to help students by scanning resources so that students can access high-use materials. -
2020-04-12
The Teddy Bear Hunt of Hobart
Over the last month people in my street started placing teddy bears and toys in their windows and attaching them to fences. It only took a few houses to do it before they started popping up everywhere in the suburb, and this image shows the bears in the window of my house. -HUM404