As the coronavirus epidemic has introduced teleconferencing to more and more people around the world, never before have so many had their homes on display to mere acquaintances and colleagues. Tips abound on how to achieve the most flattering lighting and camera angles. Perhaps most importantly, a tidy, uncluttered background will make a better impression during a virtual meeting than a tower of empty pizza boxes and baskets of laundry lurking behind you.
Our friends at Open Culture note that teleconferencing, in addition to getting people to clean up their home workspaces, is also sparking a renaissance of creativity as people are using their hand-picked “virtual backgrounds” as a form of self-expression:
Instead of their bedrooms or offices, students and office workers have started appearing in settings like a 1970s disco, the Taj Mahal, and the starship Enterprise.
The teleconferencing software Zoom has an instrucitional
that explains how to switch your meeting background from the inside of your bedroom to any image you can download.Open Culture helpfully provides links to 30 “world-class museums” that have made over 2 million works of art available for download.Since it’s Holy Week, we’ve included a selection of sacred art, all of which is available to freely download, to help you share the beauty of your faith to friends, family, fellow students, and colleagues.
To create a virtual background, follow the directions in this video from Zoom:
And consider sharing one of these works of art as your virtual background this Holy Week:
And today we celebrate...