Brazil

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)

According to its author, Agnus Valente, “Uterus therefore Cosmos” is a kind of work in progress developed during the years 2003 to 2007. In this project, several e-poems created by Valente and his twin brother, Nardo Germano, explores the expressive and conceptual potential of the World Wide Web. “Uterus therefore Cosmos” brings together in one digital environment, works by visual artists, poets and musicians from different eras. Valente proposes a dialogue between his poems authored with his brother and the work of brazilian poets and visual artists. ”Uterus therefore Cosmos” is metaphorically a project of astronomical dimensions. Conceived as a trilogy, the project presents in one website its three stages of creation: “Online Pregnancy” (2003), “Constellations” (2005) and “Expansions” (2007). A keyword to analyze this work is “hybridization”. In this context, the term refers to the ability of mixing signs, senses, media and languages and where all this mixing occurs is undoubtedly the digital medium. Based on the theoretical concepts of “intertextuality” and “Intersemiotic translation” Agnus Valente sets the DNA of his poetics. (Source: Luís Claudio Fajardo, I ♥ E-Poetry)

“Two matchsticks” (2008) is the title of an e-poem by short story writer, Samir Mesquita based on “Two matchsticks,” a popular saying in Brazil. The origins of this Brazilian folk expression are difficult to determine, but its significance indicates the rapid execution of a task. The matchbox is a Brazilian’s old friend. Even with the absence of musical instruments several sambas have been created accompanied only by the cadenced rhythm of these improvised little rattles. Today, in the Internet and microblogging age, the matchboxes inspires new literary genres.

(Source: Luís Claudio Fajardo, I ♥ E-Poetry)

“Memory” is an interactive digital poem composed by kinetic texts and speech sound programmed in Flash by Brazilian researchers and digital poets Alckmar Luiz dos Santos and Gilberto Prado.

The poem’s interface is presented as a grid with nine cells containing nine distorted images of some printed text. When the interactor rolls the mouse over the images, a short animation loop and a voiceover soundtrack are activated playing the verse printed on each image. The verses are set following an initial order, but the interactor may organize new possibilities of reading according to his will.

(Source: Luís Claudio Fajardo, I ♥ E-Poetry)