GETTING TOGETHER, APART Virtual Care Lab Creates Remote Connection BY KELLY RAPPLEYE The Virtual Care Lab (VCL), launched at the start of pandemic life, provides a digital community space for the wide-ranging interests of artists, disability activists and remote-togetherness enthusiasts to converge. Words like collectivity, togetherness, collaboration, participation and community abound across the VCL, which describes itself as “a series of creative experiments in remote togetherness” and offers a plethora of trans-disciplinary workshops that live up to this mantra. The homespun, early-internet aesthetic of the VCL’s virtual home base invites experimentation, with bright colors, endearingly mismatched and haphazardly placed images that maintain a consistently welcoming vibe. VCL is created and run by two kaleidoscopic artists and cultural workers—filmmaker and sound artist Sara Suárez and digital arts virtuoso Alice Yuan Zhang—in partnership with NAVEL, the vibrant community arts space and nonprofit that has been developing a presence in DTLA since 2014. While COVID brought a sudden surge of digital alternatives across arts and cultural platforms, and long overdue attention to digital and expanded practice art, the VCL seems to have estab-
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lished a digital arts platform uniquely suited for longevity. VCL’s primary focus is cultivating inclusive publics and experimenting with non-commodified ways of getting together. Serial, processual community events and workshops, like the monthly Organizers Hour for local activists, provide a consistency and regularity that pushes against the fractal, alienating temporality of internet immediacy and the constant onslaught of “newness” and real-time engagement demanded by social media platforms. Every Saturday (2 p.m. PST), Kenny Zhao takes VCL participants on “field trips” to explore and learn from community spaces on the internet, with guided discussion exploring what kind of social glue holds each together. Zhao describes these events as experiments in “collaborative ideation,” a concept delineated by author-activist Adrienne Maree Brown. Brown’s theoretical framework for activism is inspired by LA sci-fi icon Octavia Butler, and fights to reclaim creativity, imagination and radical dreams of futurity from the jaws of capitalism, colonialism and the cult of neoliberal individualism, through collective creative practice. The VCL’s digital infrastructure is spread across a home web-
