Entering ‘Topia
Entering ‘topia is a work of interactive web-art developed around the need for social distancing during the COVID-19 pandemic in the US. It is the fourth piece in interactive artist Owen Lowery's Mediums series, which explores how unbelievably bad we all are at communication and how unbelievably beautiful our relentless effort to do it better is. Currently, we are all diving into a fully saturated state of digital communication, whether this resolves in a utopia, dystopia, or some 'topia in between, it's fairly unclear. .
This ‘topia is an isolated world of abstractly visualized digital communication, tapped into through many of the communication tools being utilized during pandemic times. You can tweet tumbling messages, scribble emojis, hashtag colors, and alter the ‘topia's physics through an open zoom call. The outcome is live-streamed, a collective bit of garbled communication art, sometimes hideous, always beautiful.