PANDEMIC REFLECTION MACHINE

PANDEMIC REFLECTION MACHINE (2023),  Ian Hatcher, Anna Nacher, Søren Bro Pold, Scott Rettberg and Ashleigh Steele

The Covid 19 pandemic brought a moment of reflection on the many seemingly unsolvable contemporary crises, including the climate crisis, gender and social inequality, racism, colonialism, as well as social and economic harms inflicted by the platform capitalism. The experience of the hyperobject of the pandemic crisis allowed us to relate to other major crises, thus opening up the space for empathy and a hope for change. This reflective moment was dimmed in 2022, with the war in Ukraine urgently requiring a swift response. However, the new crises did not extinguish the old ones. We believe there is a need to revisit the reflections inspired by the pandemic lockdown to prompt the potential of change, even if filled with loss. Pandemic Reflection Machine is a generative, combinatory video installation that allows for revisiting reflections on relations between art making and everyday reality during Covid lockdown, as expressed by 16 international digital artists. The artists commented on their artworks, the use of platforms, the collaborative nature of digital art, the pandemic situation and all the social issues tied with it in thirteen Zoom interviews. The artists were chosen based on their contribution to the online exhibition Covid E-lit at ELO 21 (https://eliterature.org/elo2021/covid/) with a focus on diversity. From the interviews we have produced the 45-minute documentary COVID E-LIT: Digital Art During the Pandemic, which we hope to present at the conference. However, the documentary used only a small part of the rich material gathered in the interviews, and much reflection on how the pandemic applies to current social crises and other hyperobjects had to be left out. Pandemic Reflection Machine will allow audiences to dive deeper into the interviews through a recombinatory process collecting sentences from all interviews via interactively selected tags. Our project is designed as a Zoom-like reflection machine prompting the audience to virtually ‘meet’, revisit and reflect on their own pandemic experiences, networks of relations and collaborations and the platforms they experienced it through as well as the future imaginaries that were generated in the process.

BIOGRAPHICAL NOTES

Ian Hatcher is an interdisciplinary artist, writer, voice actor, coder, and educator. He currently teaches at MassArt and is a PhD student in Intermedia Art, Writing, and Performance at the University of Colorado Boulder.

Anna Nacher is Associate Professor at the Jagiellonian University, 2020 Fulbright alumna, and a member of the Board of Directors of the Electronic Literature Organization. Her research interests are located mostly in digital aesthetics, including new media art, electronic literature and sound art.

Søren Bro Pold is Associate Professor at Aarhus University, Denmark. Besides research on digital art, interface criticism and electronic literature, he has been part of several artistic projects, including The Poetry Machine, which was chosen for the Electronic Literature Collection anthology, vol. 4.

Scott Rettberg is the author or coauthor of novel-length works of electronic literature, and he is the author and co-producer of a number of films that have been exhibited widely at festivals and in gallery contexts. Rettberg is Professor of digital culture in the department of linguistic, literary, and aesthetic studies at the University of Bergen, Norway.

Ashleigh Steele has worked as a multi-platform journalist and news producer at several international news organizations, including CNN and Al Jazeera. She is currently a Master’s student at the University of Bergen’s Department of Digital Culture.