COVID-19

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)

toniZ.ch - or forcing the virtual down the throat of the analog. It may even be understood as a design method. 

toniZ.ch is oriented towards a culture of software that has been liberated from legal constraints. Crackers call software that is free from piracy protection mechanisms gamez or warez. toniZ is the attempt to free a (university) building at least a little bit from its legalistic, institutional rules and constraints. In the virtual environment imagination and subjective memories take over and offer other possibilities than reality does. 

It is precisely the virtual that for years would have offered the opportunity to rethink, to reshape our environment, precisely by letting the virtual overwrite the analog.  

In the case of the ToniAreal, toniZ is also the third attempt. Before that, there were constructions and 'occupations' by means of SecondLife (ca. 2007). There was also a demolition of the ToniAreal and a renaissance. All this can be seen in the virtual exhibition in the ToniZ. 

Visually the whole thing comes along as a 80/90s multiplayer point & click adventure. The software was originally developed by Paolo Pedercini, Molleindustria.com (OpenSource) for an event that was no longer possible due to COVID-19 and then further developed with its own inventory or display of Youtube, links directly in the content. The software works with ProcessingJS/5p.js and with NodeJs in the backend. 

ToniZ.ch is the twin of the Toni Areal, the building where the Zurich University of the Arts is housed in. With the lockdown in place in March 2020, the building was shut off completely for several months. The ToniZ.ch is a try to gain back some grounds for students and teachers. ToniZ.ch is a symbolic and ironic confrontation with the university building. Similarities with exsting institutions and people are incidental. ToniZ.ch has been designed under the auspices of GameLab ZHdK. Main Creator is René Bauer. Parts of the content and individual exhibitions have been created by Master students Larissa Wild, Emma McMillin, Leander Schneeberger, Chris Leisi u.a. 

Bachelor and Master graduation celebrations were held in ToniZ.ch with all students and teachers present and able to interact with each other. 

Enter here: http://toniz.ch

(Source: Author's abstract)

Simulating computer-mediated environments that dominated our lives in 2020, in merged with the screen for days, computer-generated stanzas that move across a four-array structure play unpredictably together -- allowing, if the reader generates several versions, multiple views.

The history of generative poetry is referenced in the background by Jonathan Swift's Lagado Engine from Gulliver's Travels. (the drawing probably did not appear until the 1727 third edition). Swift imagined this engine as a satire that predicted where literature, art, and science would go astray centuries later. But for years, I have been haunted by the beauty of his illustration. 

In the first column, backgrounded by the Lagado Engine, some of the texts are taken from The Roar of Destiny, a work I began in 1995, while I was working full time online for Arts Wire. In The Roar of Destiny, I wanted to simulate the merging of real life and online life that occurred when at least half of one's life was spent online. I recall that we thought that many other people would soon be working in this way. But that did not happen until 2020, when it was mandated by an epidemic. 

The other columns were written in response to COVID-isolation. The title, merged with the screen for days, is taken from a line in The Roar of Destiny. 

My work with computer-mediated generative literature began in 1988 with the generative hypertext system that I devised for the third file of Uncle Roger and subsequently used to create its name was Penelope in 1989. In my creative practice, a literary "engine" -- that I design, code, and write -- seeks to fulfill an individual vision that would be difficult to convey in print. 

merged with the screen for days is available at https://www.narrabase.net/merged/merged_cover_index.html 

(Source: Author's abstract)

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)

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)

Curt Curtal Sonnet Corona Based on Sonnet Corona by Nick Montfort December 2020 

Gerard Manley Hopkins invented the curtal sonnet, a 3/4 abbreviation of the Petrarchan sonnet in which each section of the form is proportionately shortened: the octave becomes a sestet, the sestet a quatrain with an extra tail. In March 2020, at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, Nick Montfort published “Sonnet Corona,” a tiny program that can generate a crown of 3^14 or 4,782,969 potential sonnets. Its 14 monometer lines evoke the enclosure and uncertainty of the early lockdown. “Curt Curtal Sonnet Corona” utilizes Montfort’s code to generate 4^11 or 4,194,304 curtal, 11-line sonnets with 4 variables per line. The abbreviated form felt appropriate to my feelings about this moment at the end of a very difficult year, but one illuminated by hope, as my son, due in January 2021, decided he couldn’t wait and joined our family in the final weeks of December. "Curt Curtal Sonnet Corona" is dedicated to Dorothea and Dashiell. The generator is available at amaranthborsuk.com/curtalcorona. 

Sample poems: 

1. we ask in mind one shot a dash deadlines for naught 

so long we sigh fine wrought our hope— starbright . starbrought 

2. we thrash resigned uncaught held fast fault lines drawn taut 

so long entwined one thought keep on— our light . our lot 

3. we thrash still blind a dot at last headlines in knots 

headstrong we sigh unknot our hope— forthright . forethought 

4. we ask resigned a dot a dash deadlines drawn taut 

heartstrung we sigh unknot new song— our light . our lot 

(Source: Author's abstract)

"Lost Inside: A Digital Inquiry" is a COVID-era digital journal inspired by J.R Carpenter's "Entre Ville" that assumes depths of hypertext, intimate entries, and personal and visual perspectives that highlight a state of stasis due to the quietude and uncertainty of the outer world. The purpose of this work is to create an intimate space for rumination on the experience of life under quarantine and a pandemic. While it does not necessarily comment on politics and the status of the pandemic, except slightly, it mainly highlights the states/stages, metaphysically and emotionally speaking, which we as individuals tend to undergo due to the circumstances COVID has provided us. These stages, such as hopelessness, concern, distraction, connection, fantasy, reflection, and questioning, are expressed in the journal through images, text, drawings, audio, and video accumulated during the period itself. While it is mainly told through a perspective that is personal and from a character who is largely based on my person, or explicitly "me", the author, I believe the musings of this work are largely prolific and universal in the emotions and viewpoints they present. The journal is prone to updates and additions, as the theme is based on COVID, therefore as long as the virus persists, the digital journal will as well.

(Source: Author's abstract)

Breathing is a common usually unconsious process shared by all. During COVID times, for some, it became suddenly a source of anxiety. I was one of these. The sound piece Pandemic Encounter is meant to exteriorate the disconfort of this raw and raspy reality in a “song” where personal respirations mix with computer generated distorted heart beats and a, by twenty artists from all over the world recorded, silence. 

In ‘Pandemic Encounter’, Annie Abrahams mixed her respirations with computer generated distorted heart beats and extracts from "Silences" by Frans van Lent. The piece has been used by Abrahams May 23rd 2002 in ‘Pandemic Encounters’, a Networked Performance Installation by Paul Sermon (in collaboration with Randall Packer, Gregory Kuhn, the Third Space Network and Leonardo Laser talks), in the show LOCKDOWN in La Trimouille, France (01/08-01/09 2020) and in Temps Suspendus at Plateforme, Paris, France (10-27/09 2020).

(Source: Author's description)

I Got Up 2020, Pandemic Edition started as an Instagram series inspired by On Kawara’s 1968-79 daily postcard ritual. This version of I Got Up 2020, Pandemic Edition showcases moving images made during the summer of 2020. 

From 1968-1979 On Kawara sent picture postcards to two friends, stamped with the time he “got up.” 

His series, I Got Up, is collected by the Metropolitan Museum of Art. 

This riff on I Got Up is a visible record of getting up while confined to the house and simultaneously enacting the roles of mother, artist, housekeeper, and teacher. 

The Met website suggests, “With tremendous economy of means and a surprising visual elegance, Kawara creates a complex meditation on time, existence, and the relationship between art and life.” 

Made during the pandemic, these daily vignettes interpret “getting up” as unusually labor intensive—creative on the best days and merely possible on the worst. 

As a result of my the quarantine, and the collapse of professional and domestic spaces, this series of getting up is a creative family adventure. 

(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)