JEWELSH: Continuing Covid Conundrum....

As we move into the second year of the pandemic and the third wave in Norway it becomes more urgent to think of ways to make sense of continuing to produce art under the circumstances. Where will it go? Who will see it? Does it even matter any more? As opportunities for large scale art works in public venues are scarce, other strategies are necessary. Online distribution for example, but how effective or satisfactory is that really? I remember the days of net.art in the mid nineties. A revolution of sorts, then just like the dot.com boom, it was over.

Norway had engaged with notions of online art at a national level. I was one of a number of artists who received commissions to make net-based art projects, accessible through a national portal. At some point the server got switched off. These projects might just as well never have existed.

Most artists, of necessity, have some kind of personal web site or blog. But how often does anyone look at these - including this one? We are constantly bombarded with links to innumerable sources of information, every day we click our way through page after page, but apart from certain things, like the front page of a newspaper we regularly read, how often do we actually return to a page or a site we have previously visited?

Adding new information or updating becomes more an act of archiving, and less one of publishing. But in a time of limited options it is at least something that can be done. Perhaps in the future, post pandemic, there will be a massive campaign to get our art offline and out into the world, in physical spaces, to be approached by the physical bodies of a public. I'd like to see our cities and towns after Covid as huge "salon" exhibitions - uncurated, democratic, just a celebration of what artists have managed to do despite the circumstances!

In the meantime, some screenshots from an ongoing photo enterprise that could be in print, but for now exists only digitally. Walking, observing and documenting is something that can be done, with minimal resources. Some of the images are shared online in Facebook groups including Edgelands and similar. Sharing in that way is at least a form of visual communication within a quite tolerant milieu.