Image from Exposed

Exposed

Exposed

by Sharon Daniel

Design & Programming by Erik Loyer

Featured in the documentary “COVID E-lit: Digital Art During the Pandemic”

EXPOSED documents the spread of COVID-19 over time through prisons, jails, and detention centers, from the perspective of prisoners, detainees, and their families. 

Incarcerated people in the United States are confined in a system that houses over two million individuals in overcrowded, unsanitary, and unsafe environments where they cannot practice social distancing or use hand sanitizer, and where they are regularly subjected to medical malpractice and neglect. In EXPOSED, quotes, audio clips, and statistics collected from a comprehensive array of online publications and broadcasts, are assembled into an interactive timeline that, on each day, offers abundant testimony to the risk and trauma that prisoners experience under coronavirus quarantine.

This project, developed using a customized version of Stepworks Studio, aims to make this important recent history available in a format which can be easily tapped or clicked through, while preserving links to the original reporting that spawned it. It builds upon Daniel and Loyer’s earlier collaborations Public Secrets and Blood Sugar, which also feature the verbatim words of interviewees experiencing extreme social precarity with the goal of inspiring action.