The digital artwork ‘World Wide Window’ was created by visual artist Mikki Nordman and commissioned by the Finnish Cultural and Academic Institutes in response to the Covid-19 virus pandemic.
World Wide Window: Agnus Mundi
‘Mors ego sum mortis. Vocor Agnus, sum Leo fortis’
(I am the death of death. I am called a lamb, I am a strong lion)
The ‘World Wide Window’ is an Art archive in the making of the 2020 global Covid-19 pandemic. The project aims to tell a story of the virus’ journey and its effects on society with the use of historical symbolism, numerical data and algorithms.
The artworks are generated by an algorithm that reads global Covid-19 statistics, the statistics outcome are connected to an image bank of symbols. Symbols corresponding to the numerical data will be chosen to generate the artwork. With the help of algorithms a picture of current state of affairs will be painted on a daily basis.
To match the near biblical proportions of the pandemic, a copy of the Spanish Baroque artist Francisco de Zurbarán’s painting ‘Agnus Dei’ from 1640, will be recreated using a wide variety of symbols relating to life, death, victory, luck, disease, health and evil. The historical symbols will be updated to emoji semiotics, as a nod to the digital network society that is keeping humanity connected at this moment. The creation of the painting will follow the trajectory of the virus, and will be recreated using the Poisson distribution. The Poisson distribution is often used in calculating the probability of infection in a population. The alterations will match the numbers generated by official data regarding the outcomes of the virus, in that sense every destiny will be recorded and become a part of the painting. In its finality the painting will be generated by all affected by the virus, it will become ‘Agnus Mundi’.
The progression of the painting will be generated daily throughout the pandemic and the end result will be a large visual archive of the pandemic. Viewers can follow the production of the archive on the Artists website. More infomation about the Together Alone intiative is available on the Finnish Institutes website.
World Wide Window: Contributors
To give the work a more human voice and to fight the imposed isolation caused by the virus in solidarity, the artist has invited collaborators from different parts of the world to contribute with their thoughts, perspectives or artworks. The contributions will form a complementary global diary to the archive. The artists are scattered around the world and will experience the pandemic differently, but all share the same global isolation. Their contributions will be added to the World Wide Window archive as they emerge.
Words are overrated
by Jennifer Elvidge
2020, London, UK
Video
How did we arrive at this point? Using personal footage from moments preceding lock down in London the video shows an increasingly isolated and claustrophobic perspective of the impact the current crisis has imposed on the artist. From excess and irrational exuberance to isolation and silence with all with the wider world framed through the yellow window of Zoom. As we look to return to our pre lock down selves is this not a time to reflect and question our ways of living and an opportunity to move beyond the structures that dominated us before. Link to video here
Jennifer Elvidge lives and works in London and is interested in exploring structures, systems and architectures that shape our behaviour and undervalue emotional labour in a hyper capitalist society. Jennifer primarily works with video , sculpture and installation graduating from Central Saint Martins in 2019 and is currently on the Associate Studio Programme.
The Starlight Archives: Coloring Books
by Nicolas Canal Tinius
2020, Georgia, USA
Photography
Coloring Books forms part of an ongoing project, The Starlight Archives, which is an investigation into my family’s archive as it relates to my grandfather’s increasingly severe dementia, and my grandmother’s attempts to remedy the memory loss by creating memory books full of family photographs, letters, and documents. She has lovingly created dozens over the past decades which have transformed, over time, into my grandfather’s prosthetic memory. I have been working on the project for the past year on their farm in north Georgia, USA. This chapter of The Starlight Archives materialized as a direct result of the global pandemic because of social isolation and the sudden loss of community support, which drastically affected my grandparents’ quality of life. The situation led to spending a lot more time with my grandfather, continually having to find creative ways in which to engage him regardless of his short term memory loss. What follows is one of the most surprising and poignant results of that pursuit: his drawings on photographs from his childhood.
Nicolas Canal Tinius (b. 1994, USA, Spain) is an artist based between Amsterdam (NL) and Atlanta (USA) with a historiographic and archival focus. In 2018 he graduated from Central Saint Martins with a Bachelor’s in fine art. In 2019 he received a Master’s in Philosophy from the University of Cambridge. Most recently, he received a MEAD Fellowship and grant to carry out a long-term project in Atlanta, GA, dealing with Southern identity and the problematics of collective memory.
The Bunny's Tale
by Claudia Contu
2020, London, Prato, Taipei
Art Text
Claudia Contu's work draws upon personal experiences in personal loving relationships to unpack issues related to virtual intimacy, distance, violence and world-making. Contu travels through digital waves connecting London, Prato, and Taipei. The curatorial and writing practices respond to the (mis)understandings produced within those movements.
Claudia is part of the Gasworks Curatorial Residents and Co-Founder of Slant Projects (Upcoming September 2020). Previous projects include Paradise is Here at Tension Fine Art Gallery and
Re: Over everything which exists under the sky at Gasworks, London. Selected writings are available on Claudia's website.
I'm Fine
by Lorenz Tröbinger
2020, Vienna, Austria
Instagram profile & three videos, 18min
How we experience and handle crisis is largely determined by class and privilege. The luxury of compensating for existential dread by focusing on the mundane, the domestic and the self is one awarded to those who can afford to shut themselves off from the outside world. But the fear doesn’t go away. It mutates and begins to permeate the domestic and the familiar.
Lorenz Tröbinger is a filmmaker and performer living in Vienna, Austria. He studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna and Central Saint Martins in London. He is currently working on two feature film scripts funded by the Austrian Film Institute and the Austrian Ministry of Culture. His focus is the development of new positive strategies for encountering the Other in genre and fantastic cinema.
Pandemic Chronotope / The Firebird Fairytale
by Mariia Fedorova
2020, Moscow, Russia
Website
Pandemic chronotope / The firebird seeks to identify specificities of the COVID-19 isolation
experience in Russia through a collective writing of a fairy tale. The old folk tales of different
nations have a lot of similarities in images, plots and characters, though all countries have their
own features in narratives. Fairy tales originally functioned as representation of the idea of world’s
structure, encoding the particular culture. Such stories were the way to make a theory about life
operation — an essential component to define a human.
The COVID-19 situation produces a lot of uncertainties, myths and suppositions: from the virus
origin to the forecasts about new order of public space arrangement and the rules of social
behaviour. Current ambiguity begets the need of a theoretical description of the new world
structure in order to define such an undefined world.
In core of most Russian fairy-tales there is a strict devision of the world on ‘mine’ — the safe one,
and ‘foreign’ laying at the threshold of the house and foreboding a danger and adventures. The
‘foreign’ one is a place where the story hero has a mission to get and deliver special substance.
Today COVID-19 impacts formed similar perception of the «my» «safe» home and potentially
dangerous «outside», where from time to time we need to go with special tasks.
Based on the Russian fairy tale «the Firebird» and the plot scheme of «challenges beyond the
threshold of the house», the project sets an experiment that invites everyone who had an
experience living within COVID-19 isolation in Russia to participate by sending a short story of the
“situation” one faced once left the home. The submissions become adventures confronted by the
tale heroes. The beginning was written by the project author Maria Fedorova and she also
processes, edits and binds the sent stories in one storyline, acting in some way as a folk chronicler who puts events into images.
The fairy-tale is formed during 3 month (27.05.20-27.08.20) and within the period the story is
updated every Sunday based on received submissions, the amount of which is shown on website.