[Mauricio Carrasco:]

I too, have found myself strongly drawn to observing my neighbours, wondering about their lives behind those windows based on the discrete fragments my eyes catch from my desk. Just weeks earlier, we were preparing a concert in full knowledge that it would be the last, for who knows how long. Our circumstances were plagued by constant rumours about the concert having to be cancelled because of the advancing pandemic. On March 12^th, we performed. On March 13^th, the country went into confinement. Legally defined as “any form of isolation that is structured in a way that diminishes or undermines an open-ended relation to the world and other living beings,” the lockdown measures stopped radically all live culture.

Now, as museums and exhibitions are slowly reopening to limited audiences, live cultural events remain indefinitely suspended. The open-ended relationship we have to the world has been profoundly undermined: the pinnacle social ritual of the live concert has been placed beyond our reach, with no precise promise to return.

Emerging from another plague, the fourteenth century Black Death, Boccaccio’s Decameron presents the reader with examples of pre, mid and post-plague societal perceptions and norms. Through pluralistic accounts and perspectives, the frame story form of the work serves to show how radical cultural shifts occurred. Similar to the Black Death, the current pandemic is generating discursive forms of life as pre, mid and post Covid-19. This correspondence inspired Ensemble Vortex to propose a newly commissioned series of contemporary narrative works — Vortex Decameron — a project that begins within the confinement period, touching on the recent past memories and reflections on modalities of life, and then as imagined perpetual project, transcending the period(s) of confinement to grow and map the emergence of new ritual norms as they manifest. That which has been the essential undisputed goal of a music ensemble until now — the experience of a live concert — will be radically captured, reimagined and become a dynamically expanding archive.

The Vortex Decameron project will see the creation of a website platform where both digital and analogue outputs merge. It will seek new and blended ways of presenting live concerts where strong restrictions and rules must be adhered to.

Each reconceived concert will exist like chapters of a story frame tale, broadly shaped by narratologies that will be articulated in 1) the production of audiovisual works, 2) the production of technical, artistical and philosophical outcomes that relate to the original work and 3) the development of sharing strategies to disseminate the work pedagogically and commercially.

The Vortex Decameron tales will nourish from improvised, composed and every step in between contributions, and will start with three tales, the first being a staged version of James Rushford’s monodrama for guitarist Egyptian Love Poem in Nihilist Cipher. The metaphoric solitude of this work takes a queer fifteenth-century Egyptian love poem and codifies it using a Russian cipher. Following this will be a hybrid performance that explores embodiment and communication through touchless interfaces. The Love Letters? by Daniel Zea, paints a dystopian portrait of a society where human relationships are utterly mediated by mechanical algorithms.

To close the first stage of Vortex Decameron, Princess Coma HiCry NY II is a video virus project by Arturo Corrales based on the myriad permutations of interactions between three contrasting musical characters linked by subliminal threads.

If you live with a mental illness, then the concept of social distancing and self isolation is nothing new to you. For many, however, it is. The global arts community is responding to this time of distancing by shifting online via social media and the internet for digital connectivity and gathering.

In 1999 I launched a web-specific artwork titled Distance. In this work I explored the use of web cams to meet the desire for connectivity. These screen-based connections preceedded our current mobile means of communication. The internet was still an emerging medium impacting our culture.

Internet based communication continued to be the focus of my works Remote_corp@REALities, dystopia mix, distance in real-time: eye to the ear remix and no access!. “cu-see me” was the popular web cam application during Y2K, which included text-based real-time chat. These works incorporated images and text taken from cu-see me as well as sound made from face-to-face interviews with artists and students working with these emerging technologies. Forms inviting remote user interaction were also incorporated into the work asking questions such as “What does distance mean to you?” and “Does technology bring us closer or further apart?”

In 2001, I wrote in an artist statement that these works have the “combined effect of functioning like an extended online conversation taking place in both real and delayed time, amongst geographically dispersed participants mediated by the surface of their computer screens.”

The idea of “liveness” on the internet was the primary focus of voyeur_web. Placing webcams in the home, using technology to reach out to the world, became a phenomenon within the emerging web cam subculture. Staging exhibitionism and inviting voyeurism was the guiding tendency that called “attention to the interplay between the public and private spheres.”

My work with digital media preceeded internet art. In 1993 I began working with three dimensional software and in 1994 exhibited an immersive installation, Translate {} Expression. In this work I created an avatar built by technology, constructed by computer code. Later, once the World Wide Web was developed and the the first web browser, Mosaic, was released, I made this work and distributed it online.

The works that followed, future_body, net.works + avatars and several remixed versions of the original Translate { } Expression, continued to explore the relationship between technology, the body and subjectivity — asking, “What does it mean to be embodied in a high-tech world?”

While this body of work spans from 1994 to 2005, during this time twenty web-based works were launched. Most of them are not available on the internet at this time. Many web hosts have long expired and most of the plug-ins are now obsolete. Preserving and archiving the work from this period is a current concern. How to re-make the work for today’s platforms and present the work in physical space are the challenges that I and many artists making work during this time face.

And now, during this time of self-isolation, I see so many arts organizations and individual artists turning to the internet, once again, to reach out to world, engage in dialogue, and distribute their work to a remote, geographically dispersed audience.

[Voiceover, with simultaneous captioning:]

Fundación Épica is a space for knowledge transfer and mutual learning that promotes a horizontal interaction between Arts, Humanities, Science and Technology. Épica is born out of the knowledge developed throughout more than 40 years of experience by the theatre company La Fura dels Baus. Thanks to its application, the Foundation aims to project a center that reunites the generation of new disruptive ideas through creative projects that allows knowledge transfer to society.

Due to the activities and workshops developed at the Foundation, Epica has implemented a methodology that is based on work in action: beyond the theories and reflections, the knowledge created is based on practice, team work, consolidation and mutual comprehension.

In our workshops, we rely heavily on interacting with specific objects that are free available to the students and participants and help them to constraint possibilities in order to create more interesting and relevant outcomes. What Hutchins calls “material anchors” for thinking.

During our last workshop called “La Maldición de la Corona,” we wanted to explore how to address creativity in lockdown. In order to accomplish so, we got together 30 creatives and 3 research groups to explore the possibilities of pure online creative processes while each participant was at their own place, without any chances of physical interaction. This fact posed several problems, and here we want to tackle one: how can we substitute material anchors with virtual ones?

[…. Alexandro…It’s the turn of Alexandro….]

Of course, first of all, we must name the common difficulties everybody experience when performing a videoconference.

[….Can you hear me?….Yes… Yes]

Problems such as people trying to speak while the mic is muted, feedback loops when an open mic, the delay in the signal and so on and so forth.

[Pep Gatell:]

Escogimos Macbeth por varias razones. Una de las cuales igual es que está libre de derechos, esta es la primera. Segunda, que tiene una estructura dramática muy concreta. Por lo tanto, partimos de una estructura que ayuda a la creación, porque si hubiéramos partido de cero seguramente en dos semanas no nos hubiéramos puesto de acuerdo en qué historia íbamos a contar. En cambio, una historia que ya está explicada lo que sí le podemos dar es una forma especial de cómo explicarla, de cómo contarla.

Después también elegimos Macbeth porque tenía cierto paralelismo con el hecho de estar encerrados y que nos ha cambiado la vida. A Macbeth le pasa algo parecido. Se encuentra en un hecho mágico, no sabemos muy bien si se lo imagina o son unas brujas que le explican un porvenir. De alguna manera había un paralelismo en lo que estábamos viviendo. Llegó un coronavirus y nos cambió absolutamente nuestras relaciones y nuestra manera de existir y nuestra manera de crear.

[Voiceover:]

The difficulty of understanding a voice or where voices were coming from was solved in a spontaneous way using visual cues instead, like putting an ear close to the camera to indicate that one cannot hear what the other person is saying, or making a specific greeting in order to be identified. This is something our group has studied in detail while analyzing creative processes in choreographies and it was interesting to see similar patterns here.

[… Can you hear me? Lluis? … ohhh … Yes. Pedro, we can hear you … I think Lluis has jumped off]

Another relevant solution was turning abstract concepts into spatial metaphors, as we see analyzed in George Lakoff studies of embodied linguistics. In this video fragment we see first how the concept of disconnection is turned into “jumping” a character, and how YouTube channels become “rooms” for performance rehearsal. In a similar vein, windows that normally represent participants, are labelled as G1, G2, etc. indicating “rooms” in which the different groups present their parts of the performances in specific group videoconferences.

We have shown how digital media can be reconceptualized by means of cognitive metaphors to turn the eerie conditions of digital media while working in groups to turn what can be named such as a panoptic object like a teleconference meeting into a “pathologic” one (in Dunne and Raby’s sense) that is adapted to the need to reconvert abstract digital elements into virtual equivalents of material anchors.

Five minutes to reflect on this time of social distancing

You/ Black/ as a foreigner mothering// feeling close to Ellen Handler Spitz – suddenly jumping back in time in 2009, I read: “An artist’s product, moreover, even a mother-artist’s, is destined, one fine day, to move out of the studio and into the wider world, where it must live, in spite of and because of what has been given it, a life of its own. All children do grow up, to an extent. Some of them even become artists in their turn.”

In the middle of COVID-19 crisis, 16 months old Eole, and I started a home-based residency supported by Talking Birds in Coventry. I ended up spending time, fictional time with Charles Esche back in 2011. Taking some inspiration from the Deviant Art Institution I started to reflect on the kind of politics I/my research stand(s) behind.

Second wave feminism thought us that the personal political. Third wave feminism in which my research is inscribed made us feel that the personal is constructed by multiple intersections for which in my research, race, gender, ethnicity, and class are being juxtaposed and superposed to give volume to an in-betweenness that is both informed by postcolonial thinkers such as Homi Bhabha and the concept of lieu, space to finally bloom, by Patrick Chamoiseau; but also in-betweenness as being the renegotiation of being in academic spaces, in artistic spaces, and in mothering as a practice.

Taking another detour to Fleur Summers and Angela Clark back in 2015, articulating challenges of being mother, academic, and artist/Inspired by the labour of performance artists like Mierle Laderman Ukeles, early afternoon with Eole or late at night with my partner Jb, we collected the remains (flour, hair, food items, play dough among others) of our everyday performances at home. Gathered them into a ritualistic balayage/sweeping followed by a literal jarring process. We used a broom and a stainless dustpan and emptied the remains into emptied jars that were part of our home

Our everyday performances at home suggested how hegemonic dominant scripts may be disrupted, challenged, and transformed through intimate interventions within traditional spaces, collectively reorienting and reconfiguring conversations on how to know/make/nurture differently. That – needed to carefully pay attention, re-evaluates what making means for me in the context of Covid-19 – inspired by Jenny Odell 2019.

In April 2020, Rinaldo Walcott warns us that during the Covid-19 crisis academics have found themselves in a crisis of their work, acutely noticing that they were far from the reality on the ground. Humbly and collectively attempting to challenge and articulate counter-hegemonic ways of holding conversations, in Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s term, bringing us back to 2012. We find, we collect, we observe, we jar, I get prepared for when it is safe to meet again and to share embodied knowledge.

My partner Jb, Eole a toddler, as well as the spaces we traverse – all of them participate in the co-making of everyday performances and thus co-produce my PhD research.

We are in an assemblage of kin after Donna Haraway, collectively stocking and freezing archives of a time of social distancing/saving them for later.

My body has never been more covered by touch. In doing so, this research study is revaluing the labour it takes to breath, be, perform together, as I reconsider my environment – co-maker of my research.

Covid-19 made me deviate from what I thought it was to be a researcher. Being a researcher might be to take 15 minutes out of my caring responsibilities to articulate an initial step towards you. For us to have a discussion about power inequalities in white institutions of knowledge – to some extent reproducing itself behind closed doors, through endless Zoom meetings interrupted by a little one.