PANDEMIC CONTENT by Jeppe Ugelvig.
“COVID19 offers a surprising forced return to the question of digital distribution in a time when the art world has largely turned away from it, preoccupied, as it is, with the politics of more traditional notions of social, political, and institutional presence in physical space. But as media theorist Gene Youngblood once argued, space, too, must be understood as a relation – “as producing a transfer, a connection, a set of interrelationships among often conflicting elements; it is closer, one might say, to the postal in the sense of a permanent, distributive production of social structures than to a closed box”.
“Still, such consequences, which may eventually prove more devastating than the virus itself, should not let us shy away from digital relational technologies in and of themselves; or, from the belief in a more equally distributed, more media accessible art world. Technological infrastructures are also social, economic, and political infrastructures, and it’s our responsibility to think them as one, to use them, and to occupy them. For really, what is the relevance of virtuality without solidarity?”