Pandemic Rooms

Interactive Art/Fiction/Poetry Hybrid

The modern world is consumed with fears, with paranoid coverage of both real and hypothetical disaster and pandemic. Businesses flourish preparing companies for the day when half their workforce dies, and millions of chickens are burned in viral destroying blazes. With photograhs of abandoned industrial and institutional buildings as backgrounds, this artwork uses interactive spaces to explore our obsessions with microscopic species killers.

From GanterCourses.net: “Pandemic Rooms is an interactive piece of net/web artwork created by Jason Nelson that plays off of societal fears and paranoia around contracting a pandemic disease in the form of a flu virus and the ways in which society navigates those fears; both real and imagined. As the viewer interacts with Nelson’s piece, they have the option of viewing the pandemic outbreak from four different vantage points – The Affected, The Emotions, The Pathogen, and The Cleansing. Each of the four viewing platforms contains an additional four options in which the viewer can navigate through the pandemic. Each of the sub-platforms are highly interactive and generative and allow the viewer to click and drag icons to add and subtract to and from the scene, which helps to create music and movement; while other sub-platforms are more passive in the sense that the viewer is simply meant to watch the scene unfold. Even in the passive scenes, where the viewer does not have an interactive role in creating the scene, the viewers are still able to interact with the scene by listening to and watching the pandemic unfold; through story, image and music.”

Awards/Publications: Reviewed extensively (for example in “The Plague of Language” a review by the Dispatx Art Collective) and featured in the Iowa Review Web Edition.