Digital and quarantine

The epidemic we are facing denies our contemporary liquid world, freezing and expanding its physical distances again. The global city, distributed beyond its geographical borders, interconnected and shared, is now being questioned, as the role of our houses, previous part of a city-ecosystem, now isolated refuges. It is not the first time we face an epidemic, but it is the first time a pandemic hits a global digital world. Digital has offered us a novel way to face the epidemic, transforming IT possibilities in an obligation. This aspect showed us the limits of the digital paradigm, and we are all hit regardless our level of computer literacy: not just some parents who must now deal with e-learning for the first time, even digital champions as Facebook, which, given less human control over machine learning activities, because of remote work, classified reliable information as fake news. I tried to describe the influence of the digital paradigm during this collective quarantine in a series of images ideally starting from the Yin-Yang Symbol, which indicates a dynamic balance, overcoming dualism in polarity between opposites. A circular icon, now limited within the four sides of a square, in an apparent balance that forces us to find a difficult adaptation to the enclosure. In a second phase, the apparent balance breaks, and even if the digital paradigm guarantees us its possibilities of communication, its non-neutrality distorts our vision of the world, flattening it to the medium and limiting our perspectives. With the third moment, the digital artifice dominates our daily lives, homologating it to seemingly logical, but not natural rules and structures, which escape our control and confuse our identities in ones and zeros.