Remediation and Dis-memory in (Post-)Pandemic Times

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic and resulting confinement gave rise to an existential reassessment transferred into multiple cultural and artistic formats. My multimodal project Mar y virus/Virus and the Sea was part of this reconsideration from the perspective of poetry in its intersection with technology, technology that became an essential ally in a period of deep anguish and isolation. In this article, I will primarily address two contrasting variants of this project based on the notion of memory in relation to the COVID-19 pandemic and the ongoing post-pandemic: the Virtual Reality version of the project, and the series Entre bastidores. Both variants explore the ongoing process of disremembering the pandemic and how memory's persistence and technological impermanence affect how we perceive and experience reality in our post-digital era. The tension between hypermedia and immediacy, in their "remediation" variants, constitutes one of the main conflicts addressed by this vast extended reality project in its ultimate goal of reflecting on the crisis of representation caused by the pandemic.