BEFORE WE MEET

This work is a study on pre-zoom gestures and the familiar mundane.

In earlier (pre-covid) iterations, I had planned to reflect on the way people respond when given a microphone: some tap, others let it flop awkwardly or hold it far from their mouth. In 2020, as Melbourne’s restrictions set in and the presentation of this work was delayed, my interest extended to the way people respond and behaved on zoom. Our collective familiarity with this new way of interacting changed and grew in confidence over the course of the lockdown and into 2021.

I noted my own rituals before clicking ‘join this meeting’ and began to collect pre-zoom moments from June 2020. Documentation continued to January 2021, resulting in a simple anthropological study and facetiously amusing artwork.