Published on the Web (individual site)

A poetic project about the global mass extinction of bird populations in 2011.

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.

Coronation is a webcomic created by the Marino family using digital tools and platforms to document our experience of the COVID-19 Pandemic. Since the beginning of the lockdown and the various homestay orders in Los Angeles, we have been creating and publishing one comic per day, five days a week, using a combination of digital tools, specifically filters and graphics applications. Images include photographs from our family albums, screenshots and downloads from Internet-based news sources, as well as original hand-drawn images created using digital tools. As the pandemic continues to sweep the globe, Coronation documents one family’s experience of the ups and downs of the Corona virus and the surrounding times, including the 2020 US Election and its ensuing drama and the Black Lives Matter protests. The comics are profoundly domestic and yet reflective of a global crisis, focusing on intimate family moments, transformed through digital tools into a visual expression of the ongoing homestay during a time of turmoil. As we craft these together, the webcomic has been a way for our family to take this time of chaos and to respond creatively and collaboratively by reflecting on the life in one household. We try to frame our experience with humor, sensitivity, and a medicine that is in quite short supply, hope.Unlike previous pandemics, such as polio, HIV, and the Spanish flu, COVID-19 has emerged at a moment of tremendous digital connectivity. However, the news and social media feeds have created so-called doom scrolling. We have used the digital tools and platforms available to us to rapidly document events, to transform them into comics, and to share them online with a broader world, inviting them into our homestay as we share our climbs and falls, confusion and epiphanies, all born of some unexpected family time.Although our main platforms for distribution are electronic, we have also been producing individual hand-made print versions as well.

(Source: Author's abstract)

a webcomic born during the Coronavirus outbreakand subsequent social isolation of 2020,written by me with my family.

(Author's description)

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)

“Doomscrolling” refers to the ways in which people find themselves regularly—and in some cases, almost involuntarily—scrolling bad news headlines on their phone, often for hours each night in bed when they had meant to be sleeping. Certainly the realities of the pandemic necessitate a level of vigilance for the purposes of personal safety. But doomscrolling isn’t just a natural reaction to the news of the day—it’s the result of a perfect yet evil marriage between a populace stuck online, social media interfaces designed to game and hold our attention, and the realities of an existential global crisis. Yes, it may be hard to look away from bad news in any format, but it’s nearly impossible to avert our eyes when that news is endlessly presented via designed-to-be-addictive social media interfaces that know just what to show us next in order to keep us “engaged.” As an alternative interface, The Endless Doomscroller acts as a lens on our software-enabled collective descent into despair. By distilling the news and social media sites down to their barest most generalized messages and interface conventions, The Endless Doomscroller shows us the mechanism that’s behind our scroll-induced anxiety: interfaces—and corporations—that always want more. More doom (bad news headlines) compels more engagement (via continued liking/sharing/posting) which produces more personal data, thus making possible ever more profit. By stripping away the specifics wrapped up in each headline and minimizing the mechanics behind most interface patterns, The Endless Doomscroller offers up an opportunity for mindfulness about how we’re spending our time online and about who most benefits from our late night scroll sessions. And, if one scrolls as endlessly as the work makes possible, The Endless Doomscroller might even enable a sort of exposure or substitution therapy, a way to escape or replace what these interfaces want from and do to us. In other words, perhaps the only way out of too much doomscrolling is endless doomscrolling.

(Source: Author's description)

The criminal punishment system in the United States confines over two million people in overcrowded, unsanitary, and unsafe environments where they cannot practice social distancing or use hand sanitizer and are regularly subjected to medical malpractice and neglect. EXPOSED documents the spread of COVID-19, over time, inside these prisons, jails, and detention centers, from the perspective of prisoners, detainees, and their families. Quotes, audio clips, and statistics collected from a comprehensive array of online publications and broadcasts, are assembled into an interactive timeline that, on each day, offers abundant testimony to the risk and trauma that prisoners experience under coronavirus quarantine. On July 8th alone, there are over 100 statements included in the interface — statements made by prisoners afflicted with the virus or enduring anxiety, distress, and severe hardship. Unfortunately, their words are all we have. Since the first reported coronavirus infection in the US, incarcerated people have been subjected to extreme forms of isolation — visits have been suspended, phone privileges restricted, and the use of solitary confinement expanded exponentially. Prisoners are stranded in quarantine without adequate food or medication — abandoned and unseen. EXPOSED reveals the overwhelming scope and scale of this humanitarian crisis. The monochrome, image-less, headline-styled interface, which allows viewers to step through thousands of prisoners’ statements, is designed to visualize their collective suffering, and signal that the injustices they endure are structural.

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The quotes, audio clips and statistics included in EXPOSED are excerpts from a wide array of online publications and broadcasts. All excerpts are linked in the interface to the original source.

(Author's description on project site)

Keith Obadike's Blackness for Sale was an eBay page advertising the sale of his blackness. The general format of eBay includes only the basic information about the product necessary to make it desirable for purchase. An item for sale typically includes a title or name of the product, a description of its uses, a starting price, and a photograph. In the case of Blackness for Sale, Obadike abided by this same format but replaces the description with a litany of pros and cons of blackness. Obadike focused on the selling points of blackness but then juxtaposed it with “warnings” of the drawbacks of owning a black identity. Although Obadike’s warnings were legitimate aspects of blackness, they were only issues of concern when inhabiting black flesh. Blackness for Sale Blackness for Sale furthered the notion that black people have been homogenized to the point where their experiences have become indistinguishable; to the outside world and the buyer, there is one black experience. Part of a person is advertised and valued much higher while systematically omitting the other elements that define their personhood. The most profitable aspect of black people is no longer their physical body but rather everything that encompasses their existence. Black culture becomes a new form of capital and the internet is where it is exchanged. Black culture can be taken from the internet without having to interact with or acknowledge the black body, thus erasing black people. Whereas before black people were only valued in capitalist societies for their physical abilities, they are now more so valued for their cultural capital.

(Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mendi_%26_Keith_Obadike)

+ What is a V[R]erse?

A V[R]erse is a microstory. Each story consists of a storybox that can be experienced in 3D via a WebXR enabled mobile device, desktop PC and in Virtual Reality.

+ Who’s Behind the V[R]erse Curtain?

Each V[R]erse is created by different digital literature authors [text] and Mez Breeze [development + design, model + concept creation, audio].

+ Halp! I Need V[R]erse Navigation Tips:

Press the white arrow in the middle of each storybox below to begin. After clicking on the white arrow, you can then click on the “Select an annotation” bar at the bottom of each storybox screen, or on either of the smaller arrows on each side of the storybox if viewing vertically on a mobile [and also make sure to click the “+ more info” option for a full readthrough too], or navigate through the annotations manually. If you need help with the controls, please click the “?” located in the bottom righthand side – you’ll find other controls here like too “View in VR”, “Theatre Mode”, “FullScreen”, “Volume” etc.

If interactivity isn’t your thing, you also have the option of a static playthrough of each V[R]erse by clicking on the annotation bar and selecting “Start Autopilot”, or if you’d prefer just to experience the work without the text, “Hide Annotations”.

+ How Many V[R]erses Are There?

How long is a piece of digital string? [In other words, we don’t know just yet, so stay tuned.]

+ Feedback About the Project:

“This work represents a novel association between the text and the image, as the three-dimensional space gives a new perception of the text and its possible sequences. Breeze assembles then a new type of digital literature reading environment, with an intriguing composition of form and texts.” – From this review at Neutral Magazine: Critical Digital Culture and Media Arts.

“V[R]erses, as a broader work, is an XR (extended reality) story series…a V[R]erse is a microstory. What is intriguing in this case is that text in electronic literature is not necessarily central or authoritative. In fact, in this work…the text is supplementary to either code or other media.” – From “Collaboration and Authority in Electronic Literature” by David Thomas Henry Wright, TEXT Special Issue 59: Creating Communities: Collaboration in Creative Writing and Research.

"This poem from the Wordtoys allows any user to rewrite Don Quixote through its interface. As the famous Borges's Pierrre Menard would do, here, regardless of what a user enters into the word processor that is offered to us as the poem's interface, the program returns Cervantes's text. The keystrokes that one carries out on the keyboard stop corresponding to the output shown on the screen, this being totally out of the control of the now writer-creator."

-Alex Saum-Pascual