Tim Brook

The Coronavirus pandemic has introduced new ways to retain our connections with each other while we maintain physical distance. Now our social interactions are mediated by the screen. Zoom has become a popular digital platform to keep in touch, to foster our care for one another and maintain our mental health.

My regular Mindfulness meditation group’s practice has been transformed by Zoom this year. Usually we travel to a physical space together at a specific time. Now we Zoom in together from around the country from different time zones. Sometimes it seems absurd that we sit in front of our screens in our separate homes, quietly isolating and logging on to Zoom, so that, as a group, we can close our eyes to meditate mindfully together.

One of our practices is to apply our mindfulness focus on an absorbing activity we enjoy, such as knitting, drawing or sewing. Although we are mostly silent in the presence of others, it seems we are all pleased to see each other, smiling and waving as we arrive and depart. I look forward to Zooming in again next week.

Slow, quirky and very Canberra, Untitled Moments is a digital animation based on embroidery.

Untitled Moments is a collaborative project exploring the visual impact of embroidery and photography in a digital animation. We’ve used digital technologies to combine images and sound to create narrative fragments—imagined incidents drawn from our observations of Canberra’s most unremarkable moments.

The resulting work does not attempt to mimic cartoons or conventional animations. It’s a pastiche, an idiosyncratic mixture of embroidery, drawing, watercolour, photography, scanography, digital animation, field recordings and digitally generated sounds. The final effect is sometimes contemplative, sometimes deliberately cheesy.