Coronary is a net art project, in the form of a hypertextual essay about the cultural experience of the coronavirus, with emphasis on Brazilian daily life. Due to negationism of the pandemic, by President Bolsonaro, in Brazil it gains particular features, while maintaining a dialogue with the globalized world . In this work we approach the phenomenon from three different viewpoints: language, Google mediation, and the aesthetics of surveillance.
A heat map dynamically checks the audience’s attention regarding the words we listed in the coronavirus lexicon. The most accessed by the audience change their color on a scale that varies from blue (cooler) to red (hotter and, therefore, more accessed).
These heat maps have become recurrent images in the context of Covid-19. They are key images in the pandemic context. Meaningful within the scope of surveillance aesthetics, heat maps not only monitor the physiology of the body in space, but also, they are a tool to track user behaviour on a website.
Coronary appropriates the visual vocabulary of the coronavirus to perform a critical “live surveillance” exercise. This appropriation allows the public to watch a standard procedure of monitoring how they access the Internet, which is usually invisible and ignored. At the same time, the Coronary discusses the symbolic capital of attention and its structuring role in the economy of attention and the politics of gaze that rules the digital world.