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Seminar: Between Images (2020)
Home Office
Adelia Imobersteg

A documentary about everyday life in this extraordinary time. Forced to change our routine into something new, something different. Many of us experience similar feelings about how we are living right now. Days are passing by, time is loosing its value. The world is almost standing still. Loosing rotation. Productivity, creativity and inspiration do not work as they used to. The home office blues - an on going struggle to keep you motivated and focused. The short shows the blurry, homogenous and misty spirit of the quarantine we are experiencing. Persevering till ordinary life comes back. Day by day, hour by hour.

Home Office deals with the unusual situation and working climate in spring 2020. Due to the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic, many students and employees were forced to remain in their homes in quarantine. This dissolution of our daily routine and structure led to a kind of collective experience for many. Hours and days became blurred. Productivity and creativity had to find new ways of inspiration and focus. Communication was limited to the digital world of chat rooms.

This digital communication is the guiding line of the short film. Through sound recordings and voice messages that accompany us through the film, the very feeling of physical distance is made clear. In order to visualize this special atmosphere of our spring semester, the visual level uses various animations generated with the deep learning.

Its blurred aesthetics underlines the mood that prevails in everyday quarantine. Keywords like blurred, flowing, unstructured were taken up here. Simple daily routines are shown in the form of landscapes or symbols that stand for day times, up to more abstract pictures that are supposed to reflect emotions or feelings. In order to emphasize the monotony and repetition of the days, the picture level uses the element of a clock. On the sound level this is produced by a guitar that I recorded myself. Since the situation was a global affair, the english subtitles also allow a broader audience to follow our conversations. Home Office is a reminiscence of the spirit of the times of the extraordinary spring semester of 2020.