zoom

Nothing captures the experience of 2020's pandemic like making a video conference call. Be it for work or personal reasons, most of us opened our domestic life to the online world via these platforms; Zoom probably rising to the top of the list. Personal space became public in our desire or requirement to connect, and these platforms became a new room in most of our homes. This piece, Room #3, engages these ideas by presenting a peculiar Zoom call by me and a set of copies of myself to question these kinds of connections: always alone in the physical space, but always connected in unexpected ways to a multitude of known interlocutors and unknown human and non-human agents.

Room #3 is a cross-over piece between two projects, The Offline Website Project (TWOP) and Corporate Poetry. Originally an HTML website meant to never leave my home computer, it now circulates as a video documenting the experience of one of my interactions with my own website. Thematically, as part of the larger Corporate Poetry, it explores how corporate language relates to that other corpora that is our bodies. The piece includes a short 40-second introduction to TOWP and then it moves to a Zoom conversation between 4 replicas of me who experience traditional Zoom issues such as audio problems, turned off cameras and so on. This goes on loop for a bit, until the supposedly private conversation with myself expands onto the realization that this conversation, like millions of others (also depicted into new screens with violent and uncensored content), is being recorded, and all their information analyzed to serve Zoom’s unselective data gathering purposes.

(Source: Author's description)

A poem told through photographs of posters pasted on street corners and lamp posts, with the sound of a night time crowd as accompanying soundtrack.

This collaborative poem randomly arranges lines of verse by Lluís Calvo over an image in a page space designed to explore its signal-to-noise ratio. There are three types of noise designed into this space: randomized line placement, a window size too small to read all the lines simultaneously, and an image at a zoom level too close to be apprehended. This requires readers to use its awkward interface to navigate the page space on a two dimensional plane, and to zoom in and out to find a workable signal to noise ration in which one can both view the image and read the text. The work is designed to frustrate the desire for a perfect setting, and so the reader must flutter about like a moth drawn to a flame. Calvo’s lines of verse engage the image thematically and are compelling in the images they evoke, all adding up to a surprisingly coherent experience and meaningful interaction. (Source: Leonardo Flores, I ♥ E-Poetry)

Sydney's Siberia is a zoomable poem.

It is not technology making our wires, nodes and swimming data streams, our ever growing networks, beautiful. Instead it is the stories/poetics, the forever coalescing narratives that form the inter/intranet into a vitally compelling mosaic To explore, simply mouse-over/navigate to an appealing square, click and click, read, contemplate connections and repeat. Sydney’s Siberia recreates how networks build exploratory story-scapes through an interactive zooming, clicking interface. Using 121 poetic/story image tiles, the artwork dynamically generates mosaics, infinitely recombining to build new connections/collections based on the users movements.