How is the COVID-19 pandemic, resulting measures, and movement of cultural life online reflected in electronic literature and other digital narrative practices online? With this project we are developpingan analytical research study, an open-access research collection, an online exhibition, a documentary, a combinatory video installation and a critical study of electronic literature and digital art produced during the time of COVID 19.
Based on the insights gained through various aspects of this practice-based and ethnographic approach, our analysis explores the cultural moment of the COVID-19 pandemic through the lens of digital culture as reflected in electronic literature and digital art produced in sites that differ geographically, socially, and culturally. The method allowed us a glimpse into various aspects of the early stage of the pandemic in diverse locations. From a net art visual essay on the cultural experience of pandemic life in Brazil, where President Bolsonaro obfuscated its very existence (Giselle Beiguelman’s Coronario / Coronary), to a Muslim-Oromo artist’s attempt at journaling the elusive yet visceral sense of isolation resulting in deepened relationship with himself and the world at large (Bilal Mohammed’s Lost Inside: A Digital Inquiry), to documentation of overwhelming scope and scale of COVID-19-related humanitarian crisis happening in spaces rarely explored or even brought to the attention of the wider public: the American infamous criminal punishment system, overcrowded and unsanitary even well before the pandemic (Sharon Daniel’s and Erik Loyer’s Exposed). Some of the artworks explicitly emphasize the troubling relationship between affective response to the overwhelming news on the virus transforming all the social sphere within barely a few days and the profit- and data-mining oriented commercial platforms, such as Twitter or Facebook (Ben Grosser’s Doomscrolling, and Mark Sample’s Content Moderator Sim).
Publications:
