I have data fatigue. Statistics, graphs and charts have disassociated me from any human understanding of the crisis. I check the figures each day and see the abstracted numbers of 934 more dead: 934 more intricately connected lives, interweaved with exponentially more other lives who in turn…..who in turn: where n equals someone you do not know multiplied by y (someone who is left behind).
I think better when I am travelling; for the moment we cannot journey anywhere. Whilst in global isolation can we still imagine other worlds, other places and other peoples?
I will take your figures and cartographise you; each incremental increase moving me across the earth to a different location, both real and imagined – the digital realisation of mathematical abstraction. I find myself in the deserts of In Amguel. I find myself in the Kara Sea, in Xudun, in the Gulf of Guinea, the Seychelles, Tchirozerine, and the Norwegian Sea. Cadaveric cartographies that move me closer to your realities. We are still connected – I travel so that you are remembered.
In Amguel – 24.03.2020
24°00’00.0″N 3°39’58.0″E
24.000000, 3.666111
DMM – Degrees and Decimal Minutes constructed through date (24/3) and the number of people infected by Covid-19 in the UK (6,6661). Rock formations springing up like couch-grass. Franny recounts a dream: “There is a desert. Again, it wouldn’t make any sense to say that I am in the desert. It’s a panoramic vision of the desert because of its ocher colour and its blazing, shadowless sun. There is a teeming crowd in it….”
Kara Sea – 25.03.2020
80°00’00.0″N 78°25’25.2″E
80.000000, 78.423667
DMM – Degrees and Decimal Minutes constructed through the number of people infected by Covid-19 in the UK on 25/03/2020 (8,078) and the number of people infected by Covid-19 globally (428,220). Smooth space meets a vast geological rupture – these cliffs leak into the sea. These vast, vast walls meet the cold, cold waters and these cold, cold waters meet the blue, blue sky – a striation of space made beautiful through its leakages. “One side of a machinic assemblage faces the strata, which doubtless make it a kind of organism, or signifying totality, or determination attributable to a subject; it also has a side facing a body without organs, which is continually dismantling the organism, causing asignifying particles or pure intensities or circulate, and attributing to itself subjects what it leaves with nothing more than a name as the trace of an intensity…
Xudun – 26.03.2020
8°55’44.4″N 47°35’16.4″E
8.929000, 47.587889
DMM – Degrees and Decimal Minutes constructed through the number of people infected by Covid-19 in the UK on 26/03/2020 (8,929) and the number of people infected by Covid-19 globally (475,878). writing itself unfolds like a camel ride, with unpredictable speeds, slownesses, spurts, and stoppages. “Overburdened by the weight of pre-existing values and educational accretions, the camel travels into the desert where it transforms into a lion. Destroying the values, idols and burdens that weigh upon the beast of burden, the lion supplants the camel’s duty to the other’s command (‘thou shalt!’) by affirming a willing critique of establishment thought (I will!). Having instantiated the transformation of all accepted beliefs, the lion undergoes the final transformation of becoming-child…”
Gulf of Guinea – 27.03.2020
1°09’56.9″N 5°17’46.1″E
1.165806, 5.296139
DMM – Degrees and Decimal Minutes constructed through the number of people infected by Covid-19 in the UK on 27/03/2020 (11,658) and the number of people infected by Covid-19 globally (529,614). A gulf. Not a void, instead a space in which two forces embrace and unify. This is not an abyss, nor is it a difference that separates and classifies; it is a plateau on which the velocity of a vast body of water caresses and communicates with the land which in turn has its own paths moulded and altered accordingly. Nautiloids: “In general the physical and mental form of conscious beings is an expression of the character of the planet on which they live. On certain very large and aqueous planets, for instance we found that civilisation had been achieved by marine organisms. On these huge globes no land-dwellers as large as man could possibly thrive, for gravitation would have nailed them to the ground. But in the water there was no such limitation to bulk. One peculiarity of these big worlds was that, owing to the crushing action of gravitation, there were seldom any great elevations and depressions in their surface. Thus they were usually covered by a shallow ocean, broken here and there by archipelagos of small, low islands.” “Star Maker”, Olaf Stapledon
Seychelles – 28.03.2020
1°27’32.4″N 59°43’30.7″E
1.459000, 59.725200
A multitude of islands, a conglomerate of platforms and interconnected out-croppings. Strata meets strata meets strata and then they fall away only to rise again. We are archipelagos in ourselves: not continuous lands, we are ever inconsistent but consistently rise in surprising architectures of being. The spaces between these architectures are the true frames of fascination. This isolation, the quarantine we are in now, is one that the FarRight, and those who exact control upon others and indeed, upon themselves, cannot bear, as its reflective surface focuses on their interior malignancy.
“The problem is no longer getting people to express themselves, but providing little gaps of solitude and silence in which they might eventually find something to say. Repressive forces don’t stop people from expressing themselves, but rather, force them to express themselves. What a relief to have nothing to say, the right to say nothing, because only then is there a chance of framing the rare, or ever rarer, the thing that might be worth saying.” G.Deleuze
I should stop there…
Tchirozerine – 29.03.2020
19°31’19.2″N 6°47’18.9″E
19.522000, 6.788570
DMM – Degrees and Decimal Minutes constructed through the number of people infected by Covid-19 in the UK on 29/03/2020 (19,522) and the number of people infected by Covid-19 globally (678,857). The landscape seems to extend infinitely. The sky too. Vast and indecipherable. Into the space pours tears – space tears and ruptures – as we introduce ourselves. The movement of the air that flew undisturbed is excited and jostled by our presence; it slows and sweeps around, investigating the new agent. Weep for the lost horizon.
Norwegian Sea – 30.03.2020
72°22’12.0″N 1°57’24.8″E
72.370000, 1.956900
DMM – Degrees and Decimal Minutes constructed through the number of people infected by Covid-19 in the UK on 30/03/2020 (19,569) and the number of people infected by Covid-19 globally (737,589). These images taunt me with their wilderness and confident loneliness. Their peaks and valleys rise and fall like economic graphs: all meet the smooth eternal stretch of deep blue and sky blue, striated space and striated finances will be, when we return, not as they used to be. Towards equality and unity we march, in our own solitary cells.
Chewy Cosmos 
Love this. All of it. So much in common . 🙏 “The problem is no longer getting people to express themselves, but providing little gaps of solitude and silence in which they might eventually find something to say. Repressive forces don’t stop people from expressing themselves, but rather, force them to express themselves. What a relief to have nothing to say, the right to say nothing, because only then is there a chance of framing the rare, or ever rarer, the thing that might be worth saying.” G.Deleuz
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