Remote Intervention
Los Angeles Review of Books
Co-Edited by Mashinka Firunts Hakopian and Medaya Ocher
Contributors
Nancy Baker Cahill
Gabrielle Civil
Mashinka Firunts Hakopian
Gelare Khoshgozaran
Lauren Lee McCarthy
Jennifer Moon
Tobias Rees
Rob Reynolds
Tui Shaub
Anuradha Vikram
Mandy Harris Williams
Meldia Yesayan
This symposium was convened in the immediate aftermath of the global pandemic, and invited Los Angeles-based artists, curators, and cultural workers to reflect on these questions:
How can we imagine the role of artists and cultural workers amid conditions of pervasive crisis, as we transition indefinitely toward remote, mediatized forms of production and reception?
Would it be possible to assemble a toolkit of speculative, technologically-enabled practices; digital networks of mutual aid; and virtual para-institutions that could represent a meaningful contribution at the present conjuncture?
What new communicative forms could artists and cultural workers devise to stage generative interventions as many are living life onscreen?
From the Editorial Introduction
For some, the early days of the pandemic are now remembered as a period of rapid digitization: an abrupt rerendering of daily life as data.
For those with the privilege of access to consoles and remote work, quarantine measures meant that labor, leisure, and learning were all relocated online. Each of these was facilitated by media infrastructures that offered remote connection even as they extracted massive datasets and algorithmically parsed user activity. Forms of sociality were indefinitely suspended onscreen. Encounters that once involved the copresence of human agents were now mediated through virtual interfaces. In the wake of social distancing guidelines, over half a million people began regularly talking to chatbots. And yet, for communities without affordable high-speed broadband, digital access to foundational human rights like healthcare and education became ever more uncertain.
As life was suspended onscreen for some, for others, the material conditions necessary for survival were held in indefinite suspension. The pandemic proceeded along a trajectory calibrated by systemic inequality, disproportionately impacting Black and Latinx communities in the US and exacerbating economic inequality across regions in the Global South. From its earliest appearance, the radiating effects of COVID-19 were inextricably tied to the ongoing public health crisis of institutionalized racism. After the police murder of George Floyd, the groundswell around the Black Lives Matter movement directed public discourse toward the ubiquity of racialized violence, the manifold failures of capitalist economies; and the asymmetrical distribution of economic resources and access.
The contributions assembled here were generated at different moments in the pandemic; some preceded the uprising and some followed it. They range among essays, artist statements, videos, pedagogical artworks, and performance scores. Each one points toward how the present might offer a space for imagining futures beyond the systems that once defined “the human.”
Image: Nancy Baker Cahill, Hollow Point 102, animated VR drawing still, 2017
