Coronário is a net art project in the form of a hypertextual essay on the cultural experience of coronavirus, commissioned by Instituto Moreira Salles (IMS). President Bolsonaro’s denial of the pandemic gave this experience particular characteristics in Brazil, while it remained connected to the global context. The phenomenon is read here through three perspectives: language, Google’s mediation of everyday life and the aesthetics of surveillance.
The starting point of Coronário is a set of 25 words popularized in the context of COVID-19, such as hand sanitizer, working from home and pandemic, for which it offers a short glossary. A heat map dynamically tracks the public’s attention to the words we list as components of the coronavirus lexicon. The most-accessed words change color on a scale from blue (cooler) to red (hotter and therefore more frequently accessed).
Coronavirus culture
Heat maps became recurring images in the context of COVID-19 and can be interpreted as one of the key images of the pandemic. Coronário appropriates the visual vocabulary of coronavirus to carry out a critical exercise in “live surveillance.” This gives the public an opportunity to see a routine procedure for monitoring their internet access habits, generally invisible and overlooked. At the same time, the project discusses the symbolic capital of attention and its structuring role in the economy of the gaze that governs the digital world.
Finally, by interpreting coronavirus within culture, starting from its lexicon, Coronário assumes that we are facing not only one of history’s gravest public health problems. We are also at a moment of profound local and global social and economic transformations, catalyzed by the pandemic.