In a matter of days the looming take-over of digital communication was fully realized as quarantines set in. Many of the ways in which our world has forever been changed by the pandemic have yet to materialize but one thing is for certain: Virtual conferences are the new arena of thought thanks to Zoom. Zoom quickly became a colloquialism during the first days of quarantine as everything from happy hours to office meetings to lectures evolved quickly to the format.
The AWC editorial team now starts their days every morning on a video call, and this has changed remote communication and in many ways streamline our processes. In our online format ‘Notes on Cities’ we now discover the screen as a densely populated cyber territory, where the codes of politeness and faux-passes of social encounters are still being written. As we commute to this place, we take notice of the way socializing will adapt or conform to this new format, and wonder what it will be like when we meet again face to face.
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So, how do you facilitate a conversation so that people feel welcome, respected, confident enough to speak out and sure to be listened to? Is it specific to Zoom to know how to have a good conversation? And what is ‘good’, really? We’ve had different experiences in the online meetings we attended over the course of the COVID-19 outbreak, and the increase of screen-together-time due to it. Some meetings started with check-ins.
Some meetings did neither acknowledge the individual participants, nor their current state of being, or, in fact, their thoughts on the themes of the discussion. I reckon what counts for tete-a-tete meetings, counts for online ones too (no matter if Zoom or another “location”). Acknowledging the others, being respectful and empathetic, helps the conversation immensely as everyone’s in a better mood when feeling appreciated for their time and ideas. You can of course do as you please, but white supremacy, mansplaining and shouting over others in an online meeting is as shitty as it is offline.
My most valuable conversation on this platform so far was with friends who had left their tiny rent spaces to be with motherly warmth and sat in their respective parental homes in London, Paris and Athens. The focus group my friend Laurie initiated on WhatsApp as he found that “I am craving a sympathetic yet critical forum to get some intellectual purchase on the events and how they might transform our lives in the long run, or indeed to discuss unrelated matters entirely” became a sort of virtual coffee house in the time-honoured Viennese tradition. He changed the subject to “Apocaleidoscope” and invited several of his friends. Almost everyone was “in” for the first discussion around a bottle of wine (BYOB obviously). We started circulating some reading beforehand to focus the discussion. The <<stimulus>> of this conversation boiled down to climate change:
“Authoritarian measures are widely accepted in the name of saving lives to combat the pandemic, why have similarly far reaching measures not (yet) been endorsed to combat the climate crisis which equally puts lives at risk? Instead, governments have relied on market mechanisms to address climate change: a bit of carbon pricing, some investment subsidies, but basically leaving it up to companies and individual lifestyle choices. Is the lesson from Corona that we need a more authoritarian climate politics?” Discuss!
It became a heated debate around governamental measures and political (re-)actions, East vs. West, for several hours and several glasses each window. Something I hadn’t had in the last two years, living apart from precisely these participants and friends, who had once lived in the same city, and never took the time to share their political stances at length when they weren’t forced into self-isolation.
- Alina Kolar
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Now we know why we called the Anti-Baby-Boomers "Zoomers"
It’s a term coined in the winter of 2019's generational wars over income and class. The younger folks attending schools, colleges and universities have now been assigned to accept Zoom meetings online as a substitute for the loss of school time. And it's not just young people attending schools. Zoom has become the primary tool for all sorts of people to meet and create sociality and feel alive again. Talking about Zoom has been surpassing the coronavirus trend on my Facebook feed which has a big share of university professors, lecturers and adjuncts, mostly from the art world and the humanities academia. Meanwhile, at The New Centre for Research & Practice, we have been using Zoom and prior to that Google Hangouts for all of our Seminars and most of our events. In fact, we have seen a surge in people becoming members of our platform and signing up for seminars. To double down on what we have been really good at doing; hosting online conversations, we began a series of casual talks amongst leading thinkers of our time, our on instructors, artists and other professionals who might be able to help us understand the rapid transformations of the world since the start of the pandemic.
As those involved in the production of knowledge, social interaction, from small talk at parties to heated discussions after lectures and conferences, is something that we all are avoiding at the moment, in our hope to stop the spread of this disease. With Sheltering Places, we intend to find a way to make up for the loss of casual exchange of ideas with the online spaces that would allow for a great variety of conversation forms and topics. As an online institution that has experimented with many different ways of knowledge production and communication across the globe since 2014, we can put our experience in the service of public good in this regard. The New Centre confronts the COVID-19 pandemic with Sheltering Places, a true online public place compatible with real physical meetings. Sheltering Places is our zoom-based casual public forum, open to all, in which free conversations among the attendees will be punctuated by the lightning talks from invited participants and scheduled guests comprised of our instructors, students, and members.
- Mohammad Salemy
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I can’t concentrate.
Echoes, chips crunching in the mouth of someone in the webcam crowd. Mohammad Salemy (Mo) was trying to moderate the conversation „Sheltering Places“ between 20 guests of the New Centre for Research: „It’s part of the problem, we are dealing with an emergency here“. Are we? Sophie Lazar, an epidemiologist in Boston, joins the conversation after a few minutes of connection difficulties. She reports from the tenth largest city in the US, about the efforts, complications, and the inability of finding safe spaces for the poorest in society, and the homeless population ‘in quarantine’. Tents are being placed around the city to keep people in, isolating them as patients, interviewing them for case tracking. Who is exposed to the virus? Who is a victim of the pandemic and at the same time of the opioid crisis? As of last week, there are a few cases, some of them recuperating from private spaces. The equipment shortage is the most complicated discussion.
I can’t concentrate, so I leave my camera off and my microphone muted, and write a message to my father: “What can I do to help?”. “Pray”, he answers. Bad news have not ceased since Guayaquil, my hometown and the city in which he lives, has turned into the centre of the Pandemic in Ecuador. Horror scenarios are being discussed in a preventive manner in Germany, where the worst won’t happen as the country has more than it will ever need, but where I was born and raised there are no signs of humanitarian aid coming from nowhere. The government, poor as hell, promises supplies that are ‘on their way’, while corpses accumulate on the streets, and in homes of relatives, because no one is there to pick them up.
"The urge to reproduce is bigger than anything of what we are talking about here”, said Francis Gruyter on the same Zoom call. "Everybody is at home, doing recipes, I mean, what is this?! It’s absurd to me“. „Yeah“, Mo replies, „if you watch all these late night shows doing it from home, no makeup or team or whatsoever, you have to ask yourself: Why? Please stop doing this! It’s bad for people!". I wonder if Mo’s critique applies to this kind of gatherings online. For most of the people on this Zoom call, live streamed on Youtube, daily life is pretty much exactly the same. Prospects may have changed, but honestly, there is no place like home. A home. I stand up and rush to the balcony. The biggest window I have looks straight into the Tiergarten, Berlin’s biggest park. I take a deep breath of the spring breeze dancing on the trees, and wish for this speculative way of living to be over soon. If that would take a year of recession, so be it.
- María Inés Plaza Lazo
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A couple of Zoom birthdays left me utterly depressed.
It was nice to see you, but the distance felt greater than ever. The mechanics of Zoom make me feel like I’m at a work meeting – sitting at the desk about to deliver a presentation. It was a lucky stroke of fate that led me to erect the metaphorical fourth wall. On a call with Dietrich Meyer, as my lunch continued cooking on the stovetop, I left the call ongoing to my side. Without the screen, the disembodied voice suddenly felt like a presence in the room, like we were really hanging out. These days, the mechanics of our everyday and the importance of physical gesture are lacking – and we miss the essence of hanging out without a purpose or goal. Sit on Zoom, or Skype, or the platform of your choice, and let there be silence, move out of the frame, focus on something else. What I found was that it was the possibility of the presence of other bodies and the lack of pressure to say and do was what I missed. This is the beginning of a theory on attention, or lack of, and the pure letting go of productivity in favour of a being-with.
- Àngels Miralda Tena
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Strangely Familiar
I’ve been working from home the past six years on various long-distance projects. The transition to some sort of a routine of Zoom meetings and Skype calls during the Covid-19 Pandemic in its third week of lockdown resembles elements that have been part of my life for a while now: time differences, information and feeling siphoned through the low-pixel count. What’s new to me and still hard to fully grasp is the gradual and truly global spread of this omnipresent catastrophe. You call in and catch, through your screen, a glimpse of an interior, someone else’s quarantine—familiar, innocuous—knowing that outside, beyond the frame, the walls, the virus spreadeth, and that, though it prays on rich and poor, north and south alike, its consequences, how deadly it will eventually turn out to be, will be determined by years of policy; not only by crude resources, but by how these were distributed and put to work, and for whom.
- Boaz Levin
As a musician, our new reality has highlighted for me, once again, how much music-making––whether it is performing, rehearsing, jamming, or teaching––is very much about coming together, connecting, and communicating. There’s something very strange about trying to rehearse through zoom, in a way it works, everybody’s there to be seen and heard. Though the web’s mysterious signals don't carry the sound of musical instruments very well, making it next to impossible to actually play together. The meetings turned out to be valuable for a different reason, which is keeping our community close and maintaining some sort of routine that potentially resembles our pre-quarantine lives.
- Maya Shenfeld
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Say something new: Left feminist perspectives to see beyond 21st century racial capitalism
We are at the very beginning of a new cycle that we neither cannot yet situate ourselves in, nor find words to theorize either. Among all this uncertainty, what is clear now, is that we arrived at the end of the West oriented, mostly white, mostly male continental philosophy.
The first responses to the crisis that came from these philosophers, also well known voices, were disappointing, far from embracing their failures towards understanding the current global situation. Beyond this decadent canon, the US based grassroots group Rising Majority moderated a conversation between Angela Davis and Naomi Klein open to worldwide online publics. We were among the 10 thousand people watching at 1:30 a.m. (CET). I was all ears, in pajamas, soaking in the words of soothing reflection before sleep. Davis started by addressing the invisibility of Palestine and South Kurdistan in the news and the importance of strengthening the strategies for decarceration, before moving to discuss with Klein the dysfunctions in society the virus reveals: How people are being treated like garbage by the system we live in, racial capitalism.
The invisible workers holding the world together, those who don’t have the luxury to stay home enable the privileged rest to do so, and we need to listen to what they say. The network of care that is there thanks to them should be protected and supported. They also addressed how the carceral understanding of the racial capitalist state may tend to go for ‘Gazaization’ as used by Angela Davis to imply the serious consequences of protection strategies that would create protection for certain groups in the society and isolating others from them aggressively. And home becomes the site for hope and struggle in the face of all. The crisis blows open what is possible, kicking the door of radical possibility. Klein referred to a similar time we were facing a similar breakdown: the Financial Crisis of 2008 and the Occupy movements that failed to come up with straight forward demands.
The status quo is not the normal to go back to now, but to solve the actual state of emergency, immediately. People should be bailed out instead of companies, the cooperative structures and strategies that have been used in different parts of the world in crisis should be put in use. There is a very strong need to understand leadership again. What kind of leaders we want to take the world through this critical time of opening. “A new global solidarity” Davis elaborated towards the end: It is important to talk these matters together with people right now with Brazil, South Africa, India and others as the structure of nation state collapses. To speak within the limited intellectual circles is not enough anymore. Cindy Wiesner, one of the members of Rising Majority movement, reminded us that feminism is a method for equality, growth and care and we should think in the perspective of a feminist economy to undo racial capitalist structures. I can close my eyes now, yet I am also fully energized following refreshing voices of care, strength, fear and hope at the same time. Maybe this collective voice has never been so clear before: “Let’s build an economy that will care for each other and nature. Let’s build structures to meet so that we don’t need the permit of for profit communication companies. Let’s move beyond racial capitalism. The time is now!”
- Övül Ö. Durmusoglu
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Faulty Product
The only thing I would place my bet on in the terrifying future that spreads before us is that I will have to spend many more hours online. I don’t mind being released from the time constraints of my commute or traveling to social engagements. I’ve actually ended up communicating far more with friends far away and colleagues nearby since we have concentrated on this one medium. I even think the slight delay in voice transmission may lead to a conversation culture that is far more polite and without interruption. Here is the thing though, I think I look alright in real life but not on Zoom.
While this may be a shallow request, this is how people will view and remember me for the foreseeable future and may (depending on the virulity of COVID-19) be the medium through which I meet new people in the future. I can learn some new angles, but unless I plan to implement a studio light set-up by my desk it’s hopeless because I’m so pale that the Zoom camera completely washes me out when I’m within four meters of a source of natural light. Before you say, “Just go outside!” like my mother did, please consider the times we are living in. I thought about writing a product review saying: I would prefer to appear as a flesh and blood human rather than the ghost sent to haunt the Zoom call with hot takes. But then I found out that Zoom also lied about whether our data was encrypted “end-to-end” and thought my review was better spent complaining about that while applying some blush.
- Hallie Frost
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Club Quarantine - No Screenshots in the Club
Berlin’s club scene was no exception to the worldwide shutdowns caused by COVID-19. In fact, it was one of the first things to go… you never know what you might catch on a ‘normal’ night out. It’s safe to say COVID-19 has forced nightlife around the world to an abrupt halt.
A friend and I made a bet on when everything will be back to normal again: “What’s normal?”, I asked. “You know, when Berghain and all the other clubs are open again,” she replied. I lol’d but, I mean yeah, I guess that makes sense… Definitely a weird measure for normalcy, but then again raves and nightlife aren't exactly known for being ordinary.
In the same adaptable and resilient fashion that rave culture is known for, people have been quick to find new ways to come together and fill the void. Online apps like Zoom, Skype, and Houseparty have been appropriated by projects like Club Quarantine, an online queer party that’s been bumping tunes every night since the global shutdowns began.
The move to an online platform creates a new space, a virtual “temporary autonomous zone”, a space that doesn’t sit in wait for a revolutionary moment but simply refuses not to exist in the immediate present - an impossible time and space. Similar to the culture surrounding online role playing games or RPGs, the online club as a platform creates space for the free expression of identities, unrestrained by the limits of our physical bodies. It’s a space to experiment and explore new ways of becoming human (cyborg) together. The same party people who three weeks ago were too anxious to call their friends FaceTime are now dancing in front of their webcams sporting their hottest looks to an audience of hundreds. Though the liberating potential of these spaces is promising, the reality is that like ’temporary autonomous zones’, the promise of the online club space is just as precarious as we are in these new COVID-19 conditions. Maybe through all this, we’ll have found new ways of (be)coming together. Can things really go "back to normal”? Do we even want them to?
Club Quarantine party tip: LIP Queer Party Series, April 10th, Club Quarantine Takeover with @hot.crip, @nadineartois, @hcpxo_, @kendallgender and @frankieteardropbaby
- Chris Paxton
