Portuguese

Retextualization to HTML + CSS + XML + JS of poems originally created in Flash / ActionScript in 2008 and published on CD-ROM in 2012

Generative textual philosophy based on four fundamental propositions by René Descartes

RE\VERSE: an elegiac e-poem (2020-21) results from the collaboration between cyberliterary artist collective wr3ad1ng d1g1t5 and visual artist Daniela Reis during the first 40 days after the Covid-19 pandemic status (March – April 2020). Following a random plus (pre-)combinatorial logic, 40 textual verses and 40 pictorial fragments intertwine in order to provoke a self-reflective reading of the verse(s) and reverse(s) characterizing the first quarantine period of pandemic confinement by COVID-19. On one side, a painter making use of the sparse materials she had at home, locked up in a small apartment and without access to her studio, dividing her attention between two children, a husband and a dog; on the other side a poet ekphrastically writing a verse per day as suspended portraits of a collective experience of fear, uncertainty, and emptiness that assaulted the whole world. Combined, in the sum of their verses and reverses, image and text (un)veil a dialogic path that, although necessarily entropic, is made of continuous renewal.

(Source: Author's abstract)

Hiperpopeia consists in a effort to transform in verses (with a epic intention, but in a free format) posts found in social media. Now almost with 10.000 verses, writting in a spand of a year, the acumulative, daily atualizations, aim to the same number of verses of the Iliad (15.693). With internal restrictions to the composicional method: names as the subjetc of the sentence; the verbs in the past perfect (the narrative and action-descretive conjugation); the vague, or overdescribed yet intencionally ambiguous, objects; and the intend to ignore the mediation of cellphones or cameras and even the social media as the medium - making the action be described as concret action. In that way, an effort to produce a machinal writing, to be reproduce in some form by algorithimic writing.

The coronavirus has created a new lexicon, which shaped, modulated and mediated a global confinement experience. Due to the negationism of the pandemic by President Bolsonaro, in Brazil it gains particular features, while maintaining a dialogue with the global scope.

Words, terms, and places, like alcohol gel, mask, chloroquine, and Wuhan, have entered the everyday vocabulary. Neologisms in Portuguese, such as testing positive, and communavirus, and expressions such as lockdown, hand washing, and social isolation11 have taken on new meanings. Home Office, Zoom, Emergency Aid, YouTube Lives, and PPEs are other keywords of the moment.

Together, they indicate that the pandemic (another word which became recurrent) has created a whole spectrum of new languages and representations. Will they be quickly forgotten, deleted, and erased from memory, or will they remain?

It is too early to anticipate what will happen in the post-pandemic context. However, it is not premature to state that it has already dictated a few rules of the neoliberal grammar as social foundations like: naturalization of surveillance through cell phone monitoring, the brutality of the remote work regime, the condemnation of the elderly to a dysfunctional position, which consolidate the guidelines that “late capitalism of the ends of sleep,” a 24/7 world, has enunciated some time ago.

In this project, we gather the most striking words of the coronavirus cultural experience tracked by Google data, during the months of March and April, period that coincides with the beginning of the “quarantine” in Brazil. The most searched-for words by the audience of the Coronary website respond dynamically, changing color, according to a heat map that reflects the attention given.

Popularized by the thermosensors, widely used in Asia, heat maps are one of the aesthetics of surveillance that are embedded in COVID-19.

In this context, the Coronary functions not only as a glossary of the pandemic cultural and social experience, but it is also a “surveillance performance" exercise done in public. The colors of the words reveals the economy of attention and the politics of gaze that the Internet puts into play, translating the most visited words into warm colors, and the less visited, into cool colors.

(Source: Author's description on project site)

Objects is a series of digital literary art (using Processing code, video and gif animation). The different pieces have the common theme of addressing issues concerning domestic violence and constitutional rights, prejudice and behaviour towards women, questions of sexual identity and social roles.