During the various pandemic lockdowns, my daily experience of the world became mediated through transparent SQUARES – laptop, phone, windoW, perspex safety screen…

Null Island is a visual poem reflecting on my disjointed sense of spatial and temporal orientation during this period. Regardless of where friends and colleagues were in the world – our multitude of contexts became flattened into a homogenous 2D plane by Zoom’s digital eye. We each seemed to be facing the same direction, share the same space, but in reality our latitudes, longitudes and compass bearings, even our sense of time, were all different. Together but isolated. Experiencing the same event, but individually alone.

The Null Island referred to in the title is a fictional, non-existent landmass situated at 0˚00'00" N, 0˚00'00"W – it's a cartographers' in-joke. In reality, there is no island at these coordinates. Only open sea and a marker buoy witness the convergence of the Equator and Prime Meridian. “Null” is also a comment on the isolated status of the UK post-Brexit, especially during the height of our infection rate, when the world shut its borders to us and we became a literal "plague island".

Null Island was produced during the UK’s first lockdown and was premiered in 2021 at Ars Electronica, Linz, Austria as part of The View from Somewhere, a program of desktop cinema produced by MA Interaction Design, London College of Communication.

Duration: 1:25
#desktopcinema #poem