lexicon

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)

Glide is a dynamic visual language that originated in the context of Slattery's novel, The Maze Game. The materials available on the website use a strategy of multimodal means of self-presentation: narration, animation, translation, divination, game design, and appropriation of theoretical ideas that suit its purposes. Glide, at play on mutable media, modestly conceals the extravagance of its evolutionary intentions behind thin veils of noetic license.

There are several interactive sections of the website:1) a full lexicon;2) The Glide oracle, called The Wine of the Lilies, contains a suite of auxiliary Glide language tools: two libraries of interpretations of combinations of glyphs, one static and one dynamic, (over 2000 entries); and a rich library of graphics and music compositions;3) the Collabyrinth, a full Glide language glyph editor. The Collabyrinth invites the user to experiment with the language by arranging glyphs, seeing how they can be linked and nested, changing their properties such as size, color, orientation, and creating animated glyphs by morphing between one glyph and another.

(Source: 2002 State of the Arts gallery)

JABBER produces nonsense words that sound like English words, in the way that the portmanteau words from Lewis Carroll's Jabberwocky sound like English words.When a letter comes into contact with another letter or group of letters, a calculation occurs to determine whether they bond according to the likelihood that they would appear contiguously in the English lexicon. Clusters of letters accumulate to form words, which results in a dynamic nonsense word sound poem floating around on the screen with each iteration of the generator.JABBER realises a linguistic chemistry with letters as atoms and words as molecules.

(Source: Author's description at Poems That Go)

"Stravinsky's Muse" is a flash-based hypertext that offers a lexical sphere as a set of dials for accessing the narrative via the semantic constructs in the mind of its protagonist, Stravinsky Jones.  Each segment of narrative is complemented by a definition of one of the chosen terms in the form it takes in Jones' lexicon.