Hazmat

The work Hazmat was created over the course of 2020. It humorously engages with the chaos of the pandemic at the time, particularly the panic-buying of toilet paper. In the performance, the artist — dressed in a hazmat suit — takes a walk through the neighborhood on all fours, moving atop toilet paper rolls to avoid direct contact with the ground.

Hazmat was first photographed and then edited into a stop-motion film. Subsequently, it was datamoshed, a video editing technique that causes the cuts to appear as visual distortions, melting into one another. This effect was achieved by corrupting the pixel information of the video frames—a formal reflection of the concept of a virus.

Camera by Holly Allan Editing by Wassili Widmer Music by Finn O‘hare