a zine from quarantine by AHACk

The game Telephone, according to Sarah Ahmed, involves affects of perversion wherein a single statement mutates unexpectedly in the process of passing from one individual to another.  In Happy Objects (2010), Ahmed terms these affective perversions as a line of “conversion points”; we prefer a chain of reactions.

These communicative perversions involve secrecy at their core: they result from any number of miscellaneous misreadings, misunderstandings, and misinterpretations that produce sporadic blurrings between intent and consequence, reality and fiction. What one receives from another is transformed and made anew by the force of affects we each bring. When we were sent into lockdown due to the COVID-19 pandemic, we too desired to attend to a mode of community-making that prioritized digital secrecy as its affective link, in staunch opposition to what might otherwise have been a totally isolated quarantine experience. A shared secret unexpectedly enabled moments of digital intimacy.

This artwork is the result of our 40-day zine-creation project that took place from April 17th to May 27th, with participants physically dispersed to all ends of our world, but connected virtually via the digital sphere. Our aim was to create an anonymous chain reaction: each piece is a reaction to the piece that came before it, and in turn inspired the creation of the piece that came after it. What spawned this correspondence was a document containing medical definitions and microscopic images of the virus.  Each link in the chain had 60 hours to work on their submission and discreetly pass it on within a shared email account everyone had access to -- trust and truthfulness, the backside of secrecy and manipulation, became equally integral to the realization and communicative mode of our digital project. 

Our quaran-zine can be read as a digital performance of both the radical uncertainties and potentialities of correspondence. Each piece taken by itself contains a cryptic autobiography: we know nothing of its origin, its inspiration, nor its authorship or assembling-process. We can only take stabs in the dark at its “truth”. By seeing each piece as a link in an assemblage, however, it is precisely the spectral presence of omissions that direct us down the wandering paths of affective linkage. Hints of unforeseen affiliations and perverted loyalties between the pieces might be traced. Physical handwriting, drawings, and found objects -- a dirty Hello Kitty-patterned face mask, a shuffled pack of tarot cards, cut-out magazine letters -- juxtapose starkly against the self-conscious digitality of form. An uncertain narrative arises.

How does the after connect to the before? What “real lives” do these digital artifacts possess? How do these secret digital connections, by representing a totality, perform a kind of collective truth-telling -- a makeshift, anonymized testimony of our experiences in isolation? 

More unknowns float out of this digital-physical precarity. Some members of our project still remain anonymous to each other -- we have affectionately called them “bots”. How can we trust that they exist? Case #5 disconnected; a void exists in its place. Nonetheless, the movement of communication persists, the chain is unbroken. The deferral of identity is intrinsic to the whole of our correspondence. 

The zine was first launched digitally on Instagram: every day a new link in the chain. The contents of a hitherto anonymous correspondence laid bare for public eyes. Despite our efforts put into creating this project, we cannot even expect loyalty from any readers. A digital audience demands our faith -- a blind leap that the incipient correspondence we forged between each other might find a reciprocating witness, a willing reader. We invite you to follow our collective train of thought in the order of its presentation -- or choose your own path, creating clouds and clusters of concepts, ideas, and symptoms that are present and persistent even without a directed touch. Proceed as you please: Things will keep moving anyway. 

aaronhasasymptom: a chain of reactions

Zine submitted to dgtl fmnsm festival HOT MESS.

An amalgamated spawning: in striving to reject the structures of traditional academia and in favour of de-institutionalization, this zine is an open process of works-in-progress, DIY responses to theoretical interrogations - no formal end, yet nonetheless nodes in a non-linear web. 

https://issuu.com/aaronhasacar/docs/sarah_connor_has_a_dream_-_single

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