Writing the Virus

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Background: The onset of the global pandemic in 2020 saw radical changes to daily life. Social distancing and the use of screen-mediated technologies for almost all human interaction triggered an emerging ontology characterised by “liminality or [a] state of uncertainty about identity, relations, and ‘being with’” (Lewis, Markham & Holcomb-James 2021). Creative writing research is "in the box seat” to explore such complex realities (Watkins and Krauth 2016) and here collective essaying emerges as a compositional mode where “multiple authorial voices of testimony” (Carlin 2020) might speak at once to these entanglements. Contribution: ‘Writing the Virus’ is a code-animated multi-authored text, participatory zoom performance, and spoken-word score that repurposes teleconferencing and collaborative word processing technologies to articulate the communal affective experience of the Covid-19 pandemic. This work foregrounds our intersubjective entanglement: with each other, with machine actors, and with the non-human ecosystems made real by the spread of the virus. From March 2020 to March 2021 a collective of writers of various age, professional experience and disciplinary background wrote over 50,000 words into a Google doc. Using ‘composting’ (Haraway 2015) as a creative methodology, this folio of works animates and performs the text decomposed by code and collectively recomposed through digital publication and live performance. Significance: This work of interdisciplinary experimental writing brings together acclaimed writers, artists and scholars to explore collective digital creative practice. This work was selected through peer review to be published in Runway Journal 445: Asemic. Runway has been a leading platform for experimental digital practice for over 20 years. It commissions and publishes critical artistic works and new forms of writing that engage with current threads of Australian and international contemporary art.