“Shared Escape” has been conceived, written, animated and embroidered in Chicago during the lockdown through first months of the COVID pandemic in 2020, while I have been thinking a lot about eschatological and revolutionary all mixed up with medieval symbolism, bestiaries, the sacred and the damned in the context of survival of the digital. The performance of “Shared Escape” has been cultivated as a survival practice that plunges into exploration of atonal didactics and cultivation of astonishment through live video mixing, while being in a pandemic lockdown.

Starting out as outbursts of spontaneous live video transmissions on my Twitch channel, “Shared Escape” culminated into a live video mix/performance lecture, set to a pre-recorded audio score composed by ValEra. It was performed/presented and recorded on May 29, 2020 at Occupying the In-Between, a virtual conference that explores how to create collaborative generative spaces of care through activating non-conventional research methodologies and dissemination practices. This event was part of the Transmission series organized by the Mountain of Art Research (MARS) located at Goldsmiths’ College, University of London, and was generously funded by the CHASE research consortium.

“Shared Escape” plunges into a liminal space, populated by instances of cyborgs in becoming, grotesque constructions, primordially ancient and futuristic, contaminating each other with longings and diseases, transitioning across media, carrying art historical references and looking into the future. My monsters are coming to live through multiple levels of mediation: being visualized and materialized through digital embroidery, attaining multiple voices, speaking in tongues of handwritten digitized and glitched text instances live mixed into the animation stream, revealing their nature of deliberately mannerist, digitally contaminated, lusciously embracing pixels.

“Shared Escape” is an indulgence, a garden of digital delights, musing with ideas of digital immediacy, conflating the domains of mystical, magical and digital. Pixels erupt, and bodies extend. Media manifests, growing and glowing the new safe space populated by liminal outsiders. The space for Shared escape emerged through the liberating confinement of the pandemic lockdown, it seduces us to look within to reveal and revel in exquisite, delightful, digital contamination. The question remains how stable and sustainable is it?