Other venue

In an empty landscape a storm is announced by uprising sand, moving objects, silent people and a traffic jam on a narrow road. 

Installation was presented at the beaches of the island Vlieland.

In our piece we explore themes of intimacy, proximity, disruption and mediation through our audio-only documentation of suspended being(s) in the emerging and familiar spaces, patterns and troubled times of contemporary 2020 COVID existence inside the many rooms of Apt. 3B (wherever that is). We draw creative inspiration from personal historical accounts of plague and disease narratives (Boccaccio’s Decameron, Pepys’ Diary of Samuel Pepys, Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper,” for example), as well as reflections on home and storytelling (from Ursula K. LeGuin and others), combined with original texts, recordings and contemporary (2020) news reporting focused on global destruction, recovery, resistance, and homage. We remix, re-design and (sound) engineer an audio experience deliberately intended to evoke curiosity from eavesdropper-users, drawing them in, while distancing them through confusion and discomfort.

Our interactive audio experience moves between deep materiality and immaterial illusion, and it is captured through spatial dis/orientation, fragmentation, layered affects, embodied response, and confession, all reconstructed by a single eavesdropper-user, also ideally in semi-isolation. Created as a web-based interface (but with downloadable versions for PC and MAC available), and with no identifiable graphics, other than a full-screen black square, the eavesdropper-user wears headphones (and ideally a face mask, blindfold, or plague doctor hood, if available) and may only move a computer mouse blindly across the flat surface of a desk in front of the blackened computer monitor. Hidden sound files, which also move and shift, must be discovered by the eavesdropper-user, who accesses them through a further limited sense of human touch, mediated through the mouse. The sound files shift and are layered to create the manifold and multiplicitous spaces (‘rooms’) of “Apt. 3B,” both a site-specific—and therefore bounded location—but also a conceptual space of endless limitation and resonance. (Left mouse clicks allow users to move from room to room, signaled by opening/closing door creaks, and right clicks allow escape.)

(Source: author's abstract)

The British Library Simulator is a short browser-based game created by Giulia Carla Rossi during the 2020 lockdown using Bitsy, a free game engine developed by Adam Ledoux. It was published online in June 2020, while the Library buildings were closed. The British Library Simulator was created as a fun way to engage with our audience during the pandemic, giving them a chance to visit a different version of the Library, while learning interesting facts about the physical building and the Library as a whole. It was also a way to make the public aware of the services we continued to provide even during lockdown, by highlighting ongoing projects and the digital content that could be accessed from home (such as the Sound Archive and the UK Web Archive). Finally, it provided an example of the digital interactive narratives we are collecting as part of our work on emerging formats and new digital media.

In the game, players wander around the St Pancras building in London, encountering different characters (other visitors and members of staff) on their way to the Reading Room. The game takes less than 10 minutes to complete and the gameplay is deliberately limited (the only obstacle players need to overcome is leaving their belongings at the Cloakroom before entering the Reading Room). This choice was made in an effort to make the game appealing and accessible to a wider audience, including people that don’t necessarily identify as gamers, and to keep the main focus on the information relative to the British Library and its services. Links to the projects and resources mentioned in the game were provided on the game page - including the Emerging Formats Project (https://www.bl.uk/projects/emerging-formats), the UK Web Archive (https://www.webarchive.org.uk) and British Library Sounds (https://sounds.bl.uk). 

The British Library Simulator aimed to present libraries under a different light: not just as keepers of knowledge, but also as creators of content willing to engage with new technologies, even during a time of crisis. The British Library Simulator won joint first prize at the 2020 British Library Lab Staff Awards.

The British Library Simulator was created by Giulia Carla Rossi, the British Library’s Curator for Digital Publications. She is responsible for supporting the Library in developing capacity to manage collections of complex digital objects as part of the Emerging Formats Project. Currently, the project is focusing on publications produced for mobile devices (apps) and interactive narratives, covering requirements across the collection management lifecycle. She’s in the process of curating an online collection of all shortlisted and winning entries to the New Media Writing Prize, to be hosted on the UK Web Archive. She is interested in interactive storytelling, net art and how new technologies and forms of creating and consuming content are challenging existing practices in collecting institutions.

(Source: Author's abstract)

In the United States in 2020, face masks became a political symbol: first welcomed as part of assisting emergency workers, and later condemned as a threat to individual liberty, the face mask is an inescapable site of conflict. However, it is also a thing of labor, entwined with the domestic sphere of sewing. 

At the start of the pandemic in March 2020, several news stories emerged about essential objects in the pandemic, as well as various responses to these objects. Included in these stories were so-called “hobbyists,” mainly women, who used sewing machines and even needle and thread to make Personal Protective Equipment, including gowns, hair nets, and especially face masks. Indeed, hundreds of thousands face masks have been crafted by collectives of home sewers, frequently led by and including mainly women donating their time and resources. Their example of collective labor prompts the need to think of the usually invisible forms of making that occur in socially “private” and feminized spaces of labor—such as sewing rooms, kitchens, and offices—as active forms of contribution to safe social practices, altruism, and community-based maker cultures. 

In this exhibition, we center this labor, using generative graphics and texts to imagine those masks: in an endlessly cycling generator, we capture both the imagined making and brief fragments of text centering the imagined, forgotten, and invisible makers who power this collective effort. 

Built using Tracery, HTML5, and Javascript, this endless interactive imagetext generates imaginary masks that represent the lives and thoughts of the fictional people who made them. The fictional crafters in this piece reflect public examples of the crafters during COVID-19 --such as collected news items, social media images, and personal reflections--that are gathered to represent the wealth of diversity, age groups, and communities that participate in collective mask making. Sharing these publicly available resources will more faithfully represent and thus uncover the faces, hands, and labor of mask making during COVID-19. This exhibition invites the viewer to contemplate not only the mask itself, but also the erasure of primarily women, whose collective labor has been ignored, mocked, and diminished even as the US faces a horrifying setback in gender labor equity. By using a format in which content is constantly being generated, Masked Making centers both the crafted object and its crafter as ephemeral and disposable. In doing so, we hope to capture the marginalization of craft at a time when such domestic labor (and indeed, the confinement to the domestic) is literally life-saving. 

Masked Making is a work that keeps its origins in mind: the interactive work will be available online for participants to engage with as a form of knowledge mobilization outreach, communicating the significance of women’s contributions to public audiences as well.

(Source: Authors' abstract)

Earlier this year, I started corporate poetry as an exploration into how corporate language related to that other corpora that is our body. Through a series of interactive “rooms,” this work aimed to repurpose the language of a variety of familiar online forms and platforms (Google Forms, Survey Monkey, Zoom and Qualtrics, among others) in order to domesticate the neoliberal intent of these data gathering technologies.

(Source: http://thenewriver.us/room-1-and-room-2/)

Traveling While Black is a cinematic VR experience that immerses the viewer in the long history of restriction of movement for black Americans and the creation of safe spaces in our communities. Visit historic Ben's Chili Bowl and join patrons as they share and reflect on their experiences. Confronting the way we understand and talk about race in America, Traveling While Black highlights the urgent need to facilitate a dialogue about the challenges minority travelers still face today. (from Felix & Paul Studios' website)

This project used QR codes as a medium for sharing video poetry. Counter to the popular function of QR codes, this work did not aim to promote or sell any products or to gather or share information. In fact, several of the videos intentionally chose organic materials and/or analog technology to specifically counter the ‘hands off’ quality of electronic media and the intended functionality of the codes.

This project included stickers with QR codes. The stickers were posted in public places.

Each sticker had the same phrase:  “I [QR code] U”

Though they looked almost identical, the stickers revealed different symbols when scanned. Each sticker connected with a video, and the video design was inspired by QR code technology.

Created at the School for Poetic Computation, Book-Book is one of Sarah's first projects. Each instance compares two books and lists the words unique to each.