COVID-era isolation

Confinement Spaces is an existential visual narrative of living in the United Arab Emirates under lockdown from March-August 2020. The initial days of the lockdown, when work turned to Zoom-time and simple actions like grocery shopping became an exercise in epidemiology, created a mix of anxiety and ennui that led to scanning the environment with an iPhone and 3D scanning software, creating beautiful, glitched dreamlike landscapes. As time passed and restrictions eased, other spaces, like the Cultural Foundation and Louvre Abu Dhabi opened again, and the artist went out to progressively scan the pandemic landscape. Eventually restrictions eased to allow travel to the other Emirates, and sites in Dubai, Sharjah, and the legendary airplane from the movie Lord of War (in Umm al Quwain) were captured as an allegory for the universality of the isolation being experienced in the UAE and around the globe.

The result is a visual narrative of the glitched landscape of the pandemic UAE, six months collapsed into a single experience (following the author's work in Spatial Form), as a series of twelve interactive spaces rendered as pastiches of the 82 scanned spaces made during this time. The project proposed is an initial version created for The Foundry in Dubai, and the ELO version will incproporate deeper narratological structures in text, spoken word and video.

Source: exhibition documentation

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)