Vol. 5 No. 1 (2024)
Loading is an unfinished collection of looping GIFs, each work a meditation (and nostalgic dedication) to the affect of loading in the context of digital computing. The work is an output of a month-long collective exercise of repetitive creative practice: beginning on March 1st, 2020, I and two dozen other interdisciplinary artists committed to developing the same gesture each day for 31 days.
The day before, on February 29th, 2020, the first recorded death from COVID-19 in the United States occurred 22 miles from my home in Seattle, Washington. Soon, my project Loading and its focus on waiting for computers would find itself within a period when the practice of waiting would define each day. The act of waiting quickly became the “new normal” of pandemic living: waiting for the lockdown to end, waiting for the next public safety announcement, waiting for the next bit of research on COVID-19’s effects, waiting to hear of the fallout from a friend’s exposure, waiting for testing availability, waiting for test results, waiting for a 10-day quarantine to end, waiting for vaccines, waiting for vaccine eligibility, waiting for the next viral mutation, waiting to see if work would be there in the morning, waiting for unemployment checks, waiting for eviction protection.
Living in this kind of lagging, perpetual potentiality could be jarring, frustrating, isolating,and the source of real emotional and existential distress. For me, an asymmetrical catharsis arose: having lived the prior 20 years with chronic anxiety and depression, and seeking mental health care in the United States, waiting is the norm. Waiting for insurance approval, waiting for an available appointment, waiting in the waiting room, waiting for the prescription to be filled, waiting for the medication to take up in my bloodstream, and waiting for the side effects to subside. The space after a good day and before the inevitable return of the next bad day.
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