Postcards from the Pandemic is a collection of posts, tweets, texts, and captions circulating on the World Wide Web since February 2020. These forty-seven items were culled from over 2000 pieces through the first week of November. Each of the ten exhibit sections addresses major themes of the global crisis: masks, economy, working from home, animals, schools, quarantine, hand washing, the virus itself, and the inherent ironies presented by of all of the above. When every segment of society struggled to respond, memes gained greater gravity and resonance. The original post symbolized a shared experience – a shared place of knowing when all else was unknowable. The collective experience of fear, frustration, and uncertainty was distilled into keyboard characters, digital ones and zeroes by unlikely spokespeople: social media comment heroes.
Credits
A. Paprika