The criminal punishment system in the United States confines over two million people in overcrowded, unsanitary, and unsafe environments where they cannot practice social distancing or use hand sanitizer and are regularly subjected to medical malpractice and neglect. EXPOSED documents the spread of COVID-19, over time, inside these prisons, jails, and detention centers, from the perspective of prisoners, detainees, and their families. 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.
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EXPOSED applies dynamically generated typographic treatments and performative interaction design to the words of prisoners, detainees, and their families, in order to make the effects of the catastrophic spread of COVID-19 in prisons more accessible to the general public.
This approach is accomplished using an updated version of Slabtype, the algorithm originally developed for Daniel and Loyer’s Public Secrets, and is delivered using Stepworks, Loyer’s emerging platform for creating “story instruments”.
The project includes statistics on the spread of the pandemic from a variety of news sources, all attributed with outbound links.
Audio material allows users to hear from prisoners and their advocates in their own words. Dynamic sound design integrates both musical and non-musical sounds, and is especially effective when the piece is run in auto-play mode.