The rest is silence

For many people this period of isolation has involved an attempt to continue with business as usual, which usually involves frequent meetings on digital platforms. For most of us, it has also involved the absence of friends and family, an absence we attempt to mitigate by meeting each other on Zoom. Social media posts are replete with screenshots of such gatherings, showing the now-so-familiar blocks of faces or avatars stacked like bricks across a screen. In this work we review the lived experience of isolation via zoom, with its glitches, flickering visuals, the diffusion of social connection, drifting of thought, interruption of the (digital) empire by the (analogue) quotidian. We adopt Hamlet’s last words for the title of the work, because it encapsulates the denotations of rest (what remains; a cessation), and the noisy silence of isolation.