Artist, Chanhee Choi, Builds an Interactive Game Illustrating The Fear and Racism of The Pandemic in The United States

Pandemic 2020, Chanhee Choi

Figure 1, Pandemic 2020, Courtesy of the Artist, Chanhee Choi

Pandemic 2020, Chanhee Choi

Chanhee Choi is a multidisciplinary interactive digital artist working out of the University of Washington’s DXARTS PhD program as a PhD candidate. Choi’s newest work, Pandemic 2020 is a virtual construct which mirrors the anxiety, distress, loneliness, and overwhelming experience of the coronavirus pandemic. Choi weaves politics and mental health into her visuals as she presents a chaotic world which feels as vast as it does lonely for the viewer.

Pandemic 2020 is currently in progress, but Choi has presented the work on the University of Washington’s YouTube channel in the form of a preview or commercial and discussed the work in a panel for the virtual Seattle Art Fair series this past summer. Pandemic 2020 is a web-based art game which, once complete, will be accessible for free through Choi’s website. You can watch the aforementioned preview for the game here: Chanhee Choi, Pandemic 2020

In Pandemic 2020, the viewer assumes the role of the Covid-19 virus, moving through seven distinct levels of a virtual environment. Floating in front of the screen, you are a small spikey ball and can click through and interact with your surroundings. The environments are loosely knitted together with fencing, differentiating walls, and various flooring models. In some instances, the public is reflected as a writhing mass covering the ground or the ceiling, such as in the grocery store, where hanging above you are shoppers pushing carts through aisles you cannot access. There are references peppered throughout the entire game to tie us back to our lived experience of the pandemic, some are memes, YouTube videos, or slogans. Many of these references have anywhere from subtle to obvious to violent racist undertones. Does anyone remember the scene from Kill Bill where Donald Trump’s face is superimposed on Uma Thurman’s as she fights the man with nun chucks whose head has been replaced by a floating coronavirus? Yeah, like that.

Pandemic 2020 is from the point of view of Choi and her experience as a South Korean woman who, she shares, has been the target of verbal racist attacks related to the virus and the perpetuation of anti-Asian sentiments. On the University of Washington’s DXARTS Creative Project page for Pandemic 2020, it states: “The artist has collected videos of insults that strangers have uploaded to the internet, interviews with victims of COVID-19 fueled racist attacks, as well as playful mentions of the “Chinese Virus” on TikTok and other live video apps.” (University of Washington, 2020) Choi’s environments offer up a clarified experience of anxiety, frustration, fear, and disconnect by incorporating images and text from the experiences of herself and others. In this way, Choi takes real experience, converts it into emotion, and then digitizes it into an interactive model.

The references to racism, the widening socio-economic gap, and state sanctioned indifference to those most vulnerable, get more intense and violent as you progress. This mimics the relationship between levels and difficulty common in traditional game development; and, it appears, 2020 itself. At the end, you are amid a firestorm of news and death while world leaders loom over you clapping, blue sky and clouds drape behind them, but not within your reach. Eventually, you cross a boundary into a dark space where blue glowing text reads “the fear, the uncertainty, we are together in this strangeness” and a couple wearing masks embraces.

The ending is still as bleak as ever could be. After seven levels of increased violence and degradation, all of which references lived experience, there does not exist any message of hope that can act as an adequate pallet cleanser (there is no doubt in my mind that we have each tried).

The power of the piece is in the unabashed presentation of the anxiety and fear that swirls around us, not the hopeful cap placed gently on the end. The game could have ended in the firestorm, leaving us filled with dread, but something feels awkwardly authentic in how it does not leave us there. We are conditioned to press that ‘hope’ button when distraught or noticing injustice and it manifests itself in many different and mostly useless ways: thoughts and prayers, tomorrow will be better, you still have your health… I would argue that although it is not additive to the experience of the game (this hope button), it is not reductive either. In a sense, it is exactly how I have tried to end each of my days since March began.

I do think that it is okay to skip the ‘hope’ button sometimes and allow ourselves to stay on level 7, coincidentally, I see this stay of hand in Choi’s newest work, Darkness, which can be found on YouTube here. Being able to experience work digitally in this way, I am reminded how versatile and limber the arts sector (when it needs to be) still is. From YouTube ‘art walks’ to digital art game release dates and virtual panels or lectures, I am still being exposed to as much exploration of medium, emotion, and personal narrative as I ever was before. The rise of technological interactions has created a lot of the apathy and lack of empathy we see reverberated in work such as Pandemic 2020, but it also allows for the creation of work such as Pandemic 2020 and it is in this space, between destruction and creation, that I choose to hit my own ‘hope’ button. I am very much looking forward to seeing how the final version of the Pandemic 2020 art-game develops as each day that passes now offers the opportunity for a new level.

University of Washington. 2020. “Creative Work: Pandemic”. Accessed September 18th 2020. https://dxarts.washington.edu/research/creative-work/pandemic.

YouTube. 2020. University of Washington, “Art Video Game Recreates Pandemic Experience”. Accessed September 18 2020.

YouTube. 2020. Chanee C. “DARKNESS”. Accessed September 17th 2020.