Whether in a carefully curated room that is a fictional construct, in a natural habitat, or in a 2020 hybrid that’s ambiguous: successful zoomscapes often feature artwork and handicrafts that reflect the tastes of their owners and/or makers. The whole room itself is, similarly, a creative œuvre.

In the previous post, we saw a variety of rooms. The serious and sincere, the deeply personal, the honest and raw. The messy and lived-in. The overly-tidied, too smooth, glib, superficial; guessing what a viewer expected to see and manipulating an environment to fulfil or exceed expectations. The clean and flat. Rooms that looked like they had been interior-designed by someone else, or “staged” by a “real” “estate” person. Rooms that were too clean, as though cleaned professionally after an unfortunate gruesome incident. Rooms that showed no signs of humanity. And rooms that suggested they’d undergone serious work to humanise them, to try to look like a human being spent time there doing human things, that a human hand had cared for them, and that the hand and being were those of the person pictured there.

A common way to look human is to look like you have tastes, and perhaps even Taste. (This returns us to an earlier post where we talked about choices and decisions.) This is where Art might make an appearance in your zoomscape: be it actual works behind and around you in your zoomroom, or images used as zoom backgrounds. “Art” could include all manner of arts and crafts. You might have an embroidered cushion or a framed sampler bearing an inspirational message: a motto, a quotation, a slogan; something that is a source of comfort to you, that is close to your heart, that is a part of who you are that you would happily willingly share with others to bring that special human touch—that no money can buy or fake—to your online video work. Such messages may be all the more important during pandemic times; sharing them with others, to support them in turn, can be a noble act of generosity.