Feel My City Breaking & Everybody Shaking
Jennifer Dalton
View Project
In a moment of collective altered perception and upheaval, Feel My City Breaking & Everybody Shaking captures time. In March 2020 as NYC transitioned into lockdown and the days blurred, life somehow still proceeded hour by hour, day by day. I quickly realized I had no idea where the time was “going,” and began logging my activity in color-coded half-hour increments on daily time cards. Each day’s card is stamped with the date and inscribed with the morning headline from the New York Times, the local weather, a quote from Governor Cuomo’s latest press conference, and the top trending hashtag on Twitter. If I took a photo that day on my phone, I sketched a simple line drawing from it in heavy ink to illustrate a single moment, no matter how banal. Each time card is hinged to the next in succession, creating a long continuous accordion book upon which fluorescent-color line graphs rise and fall from one day to the next, representing daily pandemic, economic and cultural information and elucidating the relationship between my individual ordinary activity and the news, trends, and metrics of the outside world.
DATASETS
COVID-19 Daily Counts of Cases
Hospitalizations, and Deaths