This is Part 1 of a two-part article. Read Part 2 here.

One year ago, in the beginning of March 2020 and for one hundred days, Chus Martinez posted one story a night on her Instagram account accompanying many of us during the UK’s first lockdown. These stories started with two key accounts of her great grandparents in the Spanish Northwest coast. Two of them died in the 1918 flu pandemic, leaving an orphan boy. Another great grandparent got wealthy with his transport and trade businesses, leaving six proud boys and a girl ashamed of the riches the family amassed whilst the neighbours starved. These pandemic inequalities resonate with our present situation through the health and trading businesses thriving while others are pushed into poverty. It was thus surprising that —framed under the title ‘CORONA TALES’— each of these humane histories was headed by computerized images of coronaviruses that populated news outlets and social media and that I here refer to as Corona Shapes. In these images SARS-CoV-2 is fictionalized as a fixed entity composed of a spheric body covered in regular spikes. Beyond the factuality and usefulness of these images, they were surprisingly simplified by the didactic intentions of a concoction of media, biologists and illustrators.^[1] The skin of the virus —ever present in its capacity to attach to our cells and its weakness against soap— is presented as a hybrid but thick space.

Meanwhile, the media reports stories of ‘skin hunger’: a desire for human touch that is being explained as a biological need.^[2] Haptic communication has been reported to affect infants’ wellbeing, adolescents’ behaviour,^[3] stress, and even immunity, pain and attention.^[4] A year of the coronavirus pandemic has been enough for researchers to publish papers assessing the current situation of touch-deprived peoples.^[5] Touch deprivation lives with class and professional difference: on the one hand the key worker, especially the cleaner, rider and nurse, exposed to touch human and non-human viral surfaces more than ever; and, on the other hand, the elder forced to isolate in the home/care home where what history will call senicide has taken place.

This either hunger for or indigestion of human touch will probably have its endurance not only in human relational habits developed but for the imagery presented in the media that, I argue in this essay, has been little by little ingrained into, or ‘digested’ by, our Gestalt perception. Or in other words, corona shapes have universally penetrated our capacity to differentiate familiar shapes in three different forms. First, corona shapes have blended with the environment either acquiring textural qualities of surrounding objects or forming patterned structures in the form of an environment —see for example contemporary Ghanaian textiles.^[6] Second, my suggested category of corona shapes —a spheric core, preferably rough, from where elongated spikes come out with a heightened protuberance at the tip of each of them —brings together objects that were previously aesthetically disconnected such as a pin cushion, pomander balls, a dog’s spiky ball or a pilea peperomiodes [money plant]. Third and finally, I argue below that the entanglement of a ‘don’t Touch’ general policy and a ‘Look closely’ media environment has produced one latest stage of these images’ digestion: the human embodiment of the corona shape and the animacy and fleshing out of the skin; two conclusions that sit uncomfortably with the viral identities that have accompanied racist, sexist, classist, and ageist media representations.