With the media’s discursive framing and visual rendering of the pandemic comes a new awareness of the environment in which we live. With the assistance of emerging technology—such as neural networks which track and map pathology as it spreads throughout a population—encroaching threats to environment become defined, geographically triangulated, visually and digitally rendered, and disseminated to the public. In a kaleidoscopic reading of disease, the body, and COVID-19, Gemmell draws on Victorian visual culture, discourses of deviance and contamination, data visualization, and cartography to examine how artists’ practices work to overturn hegemonic forms of scientific objectivity and colonial mapping.

Critical of the normative acceptance of capitalist realism—with its reliance on mass surveillance, data mining, and opaque resource-intensive technologies—Nish-Lapidus looks to how other ways of being with complex computation might exist. He adopts the metaphor of “confidence”: a statistical measurement used in machine learning and AI, a term used by magicians and con-artists, and a poignant critical descriptor of our current cultural moment, to develop hypertext and media performance in collaboration with a trained neural network.