Re: <nettime> Covid amnesia

I agree! The pandemic and the lockdown was not a moment that we want to get back to. However, it was (among all its dread, mourning and other terrible things) a moment of reflection for the life and world we are living in. It was a moment where some of the larger issues like climate crisis, racism, inequality, etc. where discussed and there was – at least momentarily – a hope that we could actually deal with them. Perhaps because we were dealing with a huge crisis that was difficult to understand and overview – not always successfully but still. Now we’re back to normal or worse, with carbon emissions rising, heatwave, Ukraine war, mental crisis, growth capitalism, etc. What happened and why did we lose the ability to change – if we ever had it? The current amnesia almost seems like Freudian repression.

During the pandemic, I and colleagues Anna Nacher, Scott Rettberg and Ashleigh Steele made an exhibition of digital artists (net art and electronic literature) that were reflecting on the pandemic from an open call and interviewed 16 of the artists. This led to a documentary (available at https://retts.net/covid_elit/), some articles, and we’re currently making a combinatory video installation, Pandemic Reflection Machine, which will be shown mid-July at the Electronic Literature Org’s conference in Coimbra, Portugal and hopefully other places later + online.

Apart from insisting on remembering this crisis, if we don’t remember we will not be able to imagine the next, we believe there is value in understanding the pandemic as a complex crisis that relates to and reflects on other contemporary complex crises, that cannot be dealt with without stepping out of our normal everyday life and traditions. To understand a hyper-object crisis, we need to not forget our experiences – including the experience of a potential change.

Søren Pold

From: Nettime-tmp <[email protected]> on behalf of David Garcia via Nettime-tmp <[email protected]>
Date: Tuesday, 13 June 2023 at 12.42
To: [email protected] <[email protected]>
Subject: <nettime> Covid amnesia

Something we should stop doing is pretending we have moved on from
Covid. Too many of us have been too quick to draw a veil of
forgetfulness over the enormity what Covid has done to us. Where to
begin... when we haven't begun to process the impact and what we need to
learn.

Today the UK's Covid Inquiry started taking oral evidence from witnesses
today, and there is one important piece of news that may make all the
difference. The judge Heather Hallett, confirms she will be publishing
interim reports as it goes along. This is a welcome change from the
usual process of years of waiting followed by a mighty data dump,
hurried reading/scanning, confected scandal followed by instant amnesia.
Whats happening in terms of lesson learning in other lands?
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