Stream it: Inattention

The lost sense of time. The constant sense of repetition. Bad habits. Fresh fitness resolutions (and maybe some guilt or envy from watching others do better). The doom scrolling and the anxiety-related medicating, self and otherwise. They're all part of the common coronavirus experience. Spanish animator Raquel Meyers reflects these pandemic realities and more with her short Inattention. The artist used teletext, an outmoded system from the 1970s for sending messages and simple graphics, to create a cyclical world of screens, eating, workouts, and other distractions, as well as a sense of the uncertainty and fatalism that has fallen like a shroud over this time of individual isolation and over-reliance on tech to connect.

As Meyers describes it, "The future doesn’t need us, reason and life submit to the ferocity of financial mathematics, algorithms and technology. What awaits us is a techno-medieval version where all stored knowledge will be reduced to premium access or simply disappear leaving the cloud in ruins for us. The Internet is destined to collapse but its legacy will become an aestheticized version for contemplation, a full-blown ruinenwert. Humans will be reduced, rather than to relics, to techno-rubble. It will cost us a lot not to end up as the Anthropocene’s debris, but we can still resist."

Watch Raquel Meyers's Inattention on Vimeo.