1-2, Cover: “U.S. Deaths Near 100,000, An Incalculable Loss”, NY Times (May 24, 2020); man overboard flag, wikipedia.com; Field hospital with 68 beds erected in Central Park NYC, South China Morning Post, photo AP (March 29, 2020); Commes des Garcons, ready-to-wear, Fall 2012, vogue.com; title font: Andale Mono. 

3-4: Simone Forti, Do It Number 22, @hansulrichobrist IG (April 4, 2020), “The masque-culotte is a very simple cotton mask made from a pair of underpants, preferably bikinis. You put your head through the waistband, then the top of your head through a leg hole and pull the mask into place. Tie off the extra material. It takes a bit of experimentation. I call it a masque-culotte or an MC for short. Photos: Alexander Kusenko”; Wuhan, China, Google maps satellite view; Prada, Fall/Winter 2020, Milan fashion week (Jan 13, 2019); Pangolin held between blue surgical gloves, “Most Trafficked Mammal at Risk of Extinction, Record Haul Shows” by Saket Sundria, bloomberg.com (April 13, 2020). 

5-6: Balenciaga, ready-to-wear, Spring 2020; bat symbol,Titans Design, Google images.  

7-8: “A nurse decompressed in a massage chair in the ‘oasis’ room of the Medical Intensive Care Unit at Christiana Hospital in Newark Del,” NY Times (May 17, 2020) ; “A colored scanning electron micrograph of a dying cell infected with the coronavirus”, National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, Reuters and NY Times (May 6, 2020); “A healthcare worker prepares to collect a sample test for COVID-19 at a drive-thru site in Miami”, AP photo/Wilfredo Lee, clickondetriot.com (March 25, 2020); Transmission electron micrograph of SARS-CoV-2 by NIAID, labroots.com (April 20, 2020). 

9-10: “Claudio Trivelli, a coronavirus patient, rests in his bed in Bergamo, Italy” Fabio Bucciarelli for the NY Times (March 28, 2020); plague doctor mask, 17th century European, image source unknown.  

11-12: Workers wearing PPE bury bodies in a trench on Hart Island, “A Photojournalist captured aerial pictures of a mass grave being built in NYC before police confiscated his drone”, AP photo/John Minchillo, businessinsider.com (April 20, 2020); Straw-colored fruit bat, “Why Bats Are Such Good Hosts for Ebola and Other Deadly Diseases”, Steve Gettle/Getty, Wired (October 15, 2014). 

13-14: “Pangolins under pressure: why these unique animals are threatened by extinction”, BBC Wildlife Magazine; U.S. Navy hospital ship named Comfort at Pier 90 in Manhattan, Chang W. Lee/ NY Times (March 30, 2020). 

15-16: Imaging of Coronavirus, gothamist.com; Simone Forti, Do It Number 22, @hansulrichobrist IG (April 4, 2020), “The masque-culotte is a very simple cotton mask made from a pair of underpants, preferably bikinis. You put your head through the waistband, then the top of your head through a leg hole and pull the mask into place. Tie off the extra material. It takes a bit of experimentation. I call it a masque-culotte or an MC for short. Photos: Alexander Kusenko”; Masks from image of bubonic plague doctors, source unknown, screen grab from 1918 Spanish Flu Historical Documentary on Youtube; Balenciaga, ready-to-wear, Fall 2020; South China Morning Post, photo AP (March 29, 2020). 

17-18: Polish-American olympic fencing champion Aleksandra Shelton, NY Times (Feb 24, 2020); Anti-spitting sign on a Philadelphia streetcar during Spanish flu pandemic, October 1918, Historical Medical Library of The College of Physicians of Philadelphia, NY Times (March 8, 2020); Balenciaga, ready-to-wear, Spring 2020. 

19-20: Balenciaga, ready-to-wear, Spring 2020; plague doctor mask, 17th century European, image source unknown.

At first it was a distant reality and a close(d) secret

Then we watched the Italians serenading in sync from their balconies

By March it was our turn for home delivery

 A slow-mo tsunami casting

A shadow over every inkling of our lives

 Individual – social – economic - political

Tents erected in central park

Ships named Comfort docked at pier 90

The woman at the grocery store, the hospital janitor, 

warehouse and delivery workers – heroes without masks

Makers, artists, activists – printing, sewing, collecting gear for medical staff.

Zoom is everyone’s room.

And it’s just gotten started…

Radical                                                                                                        dreaming! 

The 6 ft Zine is a pandemic era collaboration and publication. Zoonotic Masquerade being our debut issue, addresses the surreal unfoldings under lockdown in SOS-style. From mid-March through late May we met virtually while mining our devices for Appropriated Digital Content (ADC), cultivating friendship and crafting an iconography of the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic. Presented here are a selection of these images with an accompanying index listing the ADC.

Vegetarian Tiger Productions is a friendship-based, experimental platform founded in 2015, by artists Milcah Bassel and Patricia Brace.