What I Tok About When I Tok About C0V1D is a meditation on the last two years of the COVID-19 pandemic, performed through TikTok videos. Like many Millennials, I joined TikTok in 2020, shortly after the COVID-19 pandemic
forced us into our homes and rendered “socializing” an entirely virtual, online, screen-based activity. While at first I joined as a way to escape from the doom-scroll that had taken over my other social media outlets –
Twitter and Facebook especially – I soon found that TiKTok’s particular brand of procedural, videographic memes provided an interesting space for self-expression. I began making memetic videos as a way to communicate, cope
with, and respond to the myriad challenges of existing as a woman, a mom, a partner, a caretaker, a Millennial, and an early-career academic during COVID. Leaning into the relative anonymity afforded by TikTok’s FYP algorithm,
at times these videos offered a vehicle to express my frustration and anger at institutional policies that made it extremely difficult to protect myself and my family during the pandemic. More often, though, I made TikTok
videos in the same spirit through which I joined the platform – as moments of escapist fun.
This piece is a curated selection of TikTok videos that I made over the last two years, all reacting, in some way, to challenges of life during COVID. Collected here, they offer an account of the pandemic period that is necessarily
personal, and almost autobiographical. Rather than organize the videos into a chronological account of the period, however, I’ve set them to randomly generate when the player selects the “New Video” button. In this way,
they offer glimpses of this period unbound by time, a reflection of the experiences of timelessness within both the pandemic, and the TikTok platform. Despite this apparent timelessness, we are not outside of time, and
the videos feature markers of temporality in my own embodied transformations – hair growth and cuts, weight gain and loss, and a pregnancy. The interface is designed in a way to visually reference the proliferation of screens
through which we operated during the pandemic, with the top-level “menu,” in particular, recalling the black boxes of a Zoom call. With each video I've included a textual reflection that offers some background on the video
itself, as well as an option to read more about the specific TikTok trend that the video uses. Finally, as a semi-autobiographical account of the pandemic, I pull from traditions of poetic life writing under constraint,
and have included 33 total videos and reflections, one for each year that I had been alive as of 2020, when the pandemic began.
