COVID-19

The Covid-19 pandemic and the social distancing that followed have affected all walks of society, also education. In order to keep education running, educational institutions have had to quickly adapt to the situation. This has resulted in an unprecedented push to online learning. Many, including commercial digital learning platform providers, have rushed to provide their support and ‘solutions’, sometimes for free. The Covid-19 pandemic has therefore also created a sellers’ market in ed-tech. This paper employs a critical lens to reflect on the possible problems arising from hasty adoption of commercial digital learning solutions whose design might not always be driven by best pedagogical practices but their business model that leverages user data for profit-making. Moreover, already before Covid-19, there has been increasing critique of how ed-tech is redefining and reducing concepts of teaching and learning. The paper also challenges the narrative that claims, ‘education is broken, and it should and can be fixed with technology’. Such technologization, often seen as neutral, is closely related to educationalization, i.e. imposing growing societal problems for education to resolve. Therefore, this is a critical moment to reflect how the current choices educational institutions are making might affect with Covid-19 education and online learning: Will they reinforce capitalist instrumental view of education or promote holistic human growth? This paper urges educational leaders to think carefully about the decisions they are currently making and if they indeed pave the way to a desirable future of education.

When the global pandemic spread in early 2020, we, as many others, wondered what was happening and what it all meant. Almost all cultural activity moved online and the electronic platforms took even stronger hold of our lives. We started gathering material about the impact of the Covid 19 on e-literature and digital creativity for a round table presented at the ELOrlando 2020, the first completely online ELO conference ever. This work led to the project Electronic Literature and Covid 19 (supported by DARIAH EU), which includes an exhibition at this year’s conference, a research collection at the ELMCIP Knowledge Base, other presentations and further research. 

Life under the pandemic is like living under a largely invisible threat that emerges as catastrophic and tragic when death rates go up. At other times the threat of the virus is barely visible and can mainly be traced as deserted streets. Sometimes the way it invades our shared, common imagination gets quickly normalized as yet another persuasive data visualization, digital map demonstrating a sudden upsurge in viral spread or simply another infographic with increasing numbers. It might be compared to how Svetlana Alexievich describes the Chernobyl disaster (in Chernobyl Prayer, (1997), Penguin 2016), as an unknown catastrophe that was and is difficult to understand for the many Belarusians and Ukrainians living in the disaster zone since it did not look like war or natural disaster. Chernobyl’s invisible radioactive cloud that in 1986 spread across Europe, functioned at the time much like invisible viral danger today, as a post-human, ecological crisis requiring a new understanding and politics. And, like Chernobyl, the pandemic has demonstrated the fractures in many societies’ foundations such as economic inequality, racism, inadequately equipped institutions and health services, and incompetent leaders (see also Latour, Hayles Taussig, Mbembe, Chun et al. in Critical Enquiry, vol. 47, number S2, Winther 2021). Luckily, the pandemic has also shown caring communities and societies, newfound interests in the domestic, the local, and the environmental, including the climate crisis (see e.g. Markham AN, Harris A, Luka ME. Massive and Microscopic Sensemaking During COVID-19 Times. Qualitative Inquiry. October 2020.). 

Besides its importance for health, society and the economy, the pandemic might be seen as a paradigmatic cultural change happening in a time with locked down cultural life, which can be seen from behind the global screens of platforms. Electronic literature plays an important role in exploring how people gets through daily life during the pandemic, how we see our homes, communities, cities, environments, institutions, how people become part of both progressive (BLM, Metoo, etc) and reactionary (QAnon, etc) movements. Digital platforms have played a large part in this, e.g. through the various #, through their ways of promoting extremism through profiling algorithms, through their transforming of institutions, etc. 

This panel will present early outcomes of the project, present a framework for the exhibition, and an analysis of the themes of the submitted works. We will also invite feedback from the ELO community of researchers, practitioners and artists.

“Modernism is a history of infections: by political movements; by mass culture and consumerism; and now by the Internet, information technology, and interactivity. The openness to exteriority and its infections is an essential characteristic of the modernist inheritance, and that inheritance is the will to reveal the Other within oneself, to become Other, to become infected by Otherness.”Boris Groys, "In the Flow"The “Art in Quarantine” (AiQ) project [https://wreading-digits.com/art-in-quarantine/] is an online gallery launched after an international Open Call for (e-)mail art and art via email by cyberliterature collective wr3ad1ng d1g1t5 [wreading-digits.com], in the first 40 days that followed the Covid-19 pandemic status. Currently hosting more than 900 artworks, the AiQ project aimed to facilitate a safe place for artistic expression in the aftermath of one of the most restrictive and impactful periods of the COVID-19 pandemic so far.Reminiscent of the viral-like behaviour intrinsic to mail art culture and community(ies), AiQ adopts several principles of mail art to the digital sphere, namely networking and collaborative practices as a form of disrupting conventional art channels. Functioning as a net art installation, it includes an interactive digital map in which visitors can track the arrival of artworks by day and location. Symbolically subverting a logic of infection, contamination, and contagion (from Latin contagionem, "a touching, contact"), this virtual interface reveals, day after day, the transmission chain of another type of virus: that of artistic expression.On the whole, after its period of quarantine, the gallery featured artworks covering multiple formats and genres, by more than 350 authors from 57 different countries, and emulating the behaviour of “good” viruses that establish a symbiotic relationship with their host: in this case, the AiQ online gallery.For the present paper, we will focus on 3 artworks that fall under the spectrum of “electronic literature”1. Working as organisms that are part of a specific ecosystem, or population, this sample has the potential to take even further the idea of language as a virus both as a figure of thought and experimental laboratory.In their self-reflective nature, revealing language as a form of virus in itself, the selected artworks act as distinctive virus strains that make use of different poetic and programming languages in artistic creation: a generative online memorial, a mobile screen capture performance, and a software system/digital art installation.Ultimately, the experience of confinement in pandemic times is the infectious prima materia that paradoxically constricted and impelled their creations and creation processes, leading them to experiment on distinctive media and languages, often away from their usual workspaces and into the online flow, where, to a great extent, life and art have temporarily moved.1 Patient Zer0, by Pedro Alves da Veiga [https://wreading-digits.com/art-in-quarantine/#images-113]; viral#c, by Robert B. Lisek [https://wreading-digits.com/art-in-quarantine/#images-23]; Status Offline (from Thoughts on Screen series), by Clara Abi Nader [https://wreading-digits.com/art-in-quarantine/#images-51].

(Source: Authors' own abstract)

As we approach the one-year anniversary of the first confinement measures in most countries, COVID-19 has been a defining factor of our lives through 2020 into 2021. Due to the pandemic, all our lives were drastically changed; not simply by the losses and inevitable pain that comes with the disease, but also by the way in which it completely shifted the way in which our lives were organized. Where activities were once separated between the “inside” and the “outside” there is now only the “offline” and the “online,” both confined within our own household. Work and education are done remotely when possible, and socializing has abruptly become a virtual experience. Even attempts at socializing “in real life” must always be monitored by strict rules of social distancing and the wearing of a mask, which are marked by an absence of physicality. As a way to cope with such a situation, people have found ways to transfer their social lives online. How many Americans have celebrated Thanksgiving or the Winter Holidays on Zoom with their families in 2020? As we moved into an online social space, I found it interesting to look around me and see the reaction of my fellow students, teachers, or friends. Some of them could hardly adapt to the sudden need for technology, which they had never been comfortable using. Others lamented the lack of genuine human interaction that came with meeting people by pure chance; in the Zoom era, all is scheduled, after all. These reactions struck me in different ways, as all I could see was my acquaintances suddenly walking into a lifestyle that I recognized as my own and describing it as a living hell.

In this paper I want to engage with the ways in which online interactions can provide an alternative to social contact, especially in terms of physicality. Specifically, I want to focus on how video games offer ways to circumvent the frustration of distance and virtuality in order to offer new approaches to thinking about physical interactions. This paper will be based in great part on my own experiences as an online gamer, interacting with friends living across the world, and having to find ways through gaming in which one could find intimacy, physical contact, and at times eroticism. My argument is that while all media can offer some form of erotic or intimate interaction with its content, gaming, and especially online gaming, can push those boundaries further through a process of incarnation and transposition of the self into an avatar. This paper starts with the ways in which a player can interact with non-player characters and find solace in the virtual intimacy provided by said characters. This paper will address how an online interface allows for a different physicality through the control of an avatar. Finally, I want to discuss the specificities of VR socializing when it comes to experiences of virtual physical interactions.

The 2020 COVID-19 pandemic has had a considerable impact on the way cultural heritage organisations engage with their audiences. At a time when public exhibitions and events have to be postponed indefinitely or cancelled, many GLAM institutions have chosen to increase their online presence instead, looking at virtual platforms as a means to deliver content, showcase their collections and drive engagement. The British Library Simulator (https://giuliac.itch.io/the-british-library-simulator) is a brief video game created and released in June 2020, as a way to engage with our audience while the physical library buildings were closed. The game, created using the free online game engine Bitsy, allows players to explore a pixelated rendition of some popular areas of the British Library; by moving their avatar and interacting with other characters in the game, players can learn facts about the history of the building and discover some of the projects the library staff have been working on during the pandemic. One of the main projects we wanted to raise awareness about is the Emerging Formats project: the British Library, with the other five UK Legal Deposit Libraries, have been researching, collecting, archiving and preserving complex digital publications produced in the UK for the past four years. We curate a growing collection of web-based interactive narratives hosted in the UK Web Archive (https://www.webarchive.org.uk/en/ukwa/collection/1836), which includes a variety of format types and interaction patterns, and have just recently launched a collection of all winning and shortlisted entries for the New Media Writing Prize (https://www.webarchive.org.uk/en/ukwa/collection/2912). While most of the collected entries are only available on Library premises for legal reasons, a few can be accessed remotely, allowing for part of the collection to be accessible even during lockdown. Another aim of the game was to highlight the British Library’s effort to collect and archive around COVID-19: the Library has been collecting radio stations recordings, interviews, websites and testimonies to capture the experience of lockdown and living through the pandemic. These also include examples of e-lit produced in the UK, as well as extensive dedicated collections in the UK Web Archive (https://www.webarchive.org.uk/en/ukwa/collection/2975) and the British Library Sounds (https://sounds.bl.uk/). Both are mentioned in the game, in an effort to direct audiences to our digital resources and bring our steady online services into the spotlight. The British Library Simulator offered us a chance to present libraries not just as keepers of knowledge, but as active and engaging content creators; it allowed us to reach new audiences, outside of the usual academic circle; by being an interactive narrative itself, it helped us stress the importance of collecting and preserving contemporary born-digital publications, as well as provide and example of the electronic literature the Library is interested in collecting; and lastly, it highlighted our ongoing effort to keep offering our services online even while the physical Library remains closed.

The forced confinement due to the Covid-19 pandemic has been framed as a condition from which to reassess modern life's habits and values, and build upon such reassessment in order to reimagine a more sustainable and equitable future. A ubiquitous feature of such confinement has been the transition from physical/presential modes of expression and interaction to virtual ones, typically supported through electronic platforms. In the current conditions of physical distancing and confinement, electronic-platform culture presents a tension between two opposite but coexisting aspects – isolation and connectedness – both of which it seems to amplify: the former through its implication of physical distance, the latter through its global reach. My poster will offer a reflection on today's recourse to electronic platforms under conditions of physical confinement in light of physiological evidence and philosophical ideas, in particular the work of ancient Chinese thinker Zhuang Zhou's (369-286 BC) emphasis on contemplation as vehicle for the achievement of virtue and wisdom.