Coronary is a net art project in the form of a hypertextual essay on the cultural experience of the coronavirus, with an emphasis on everyday life in Brazil. President Bolsonaro’s denial of the pandemic gives it particular features in Brazil, while it maintains a dialogue with the globalized world. In this work we approach the phenomenon from three different viewpoints: language, Google mediation, and the aesthetics of surveillance.
A heat map dynamically checks the audience’s attention regarding the words we listed in the coronavirus lexicon. The most accessed by the audience change their color on a scale that varies from blue (cooler) to red (hotter and, therefore, more accessed).
These heat maps have become recurrent images in the context of Covid-19. They are key images in the pandemic context. Meaningful within the scope of surveillance aesthetics, heat maps not only monitor the physiology of the body in space, but are also a tool to track user behaviour on a website.
Coronary appropriates the visual vocabulary of the coronavirus to perform a critical exercise in “live surveillance.” This appropriation allows the public to observe a standard procedure for monitoring how they access the internet, usually invisible and ignored. At the same time, Coronary discusses the symbolic capital of attention and its structuring role in the attention economy and the politics of the gaze that govern the digital world.