GETTING TOGETHER, APART Virtual Care Lab Creates Remote Connection by Kelly Rappleye

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 established 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 website, a VCL Discord page, and a profusion of inventive, horizontal digital platforms—including withfriends.com, yourworldoftext. com, Twitch streaming service, theonline.town, padlet.com, and are.ne (visual notepad)—among an array of more familiar tools to facilitate modes of remote group collaboration and live participation. On the VCL homesite, the community can access an events Calendar of upcoming “Gatherings,” and a digital archive chronicling past VCL projects; a weekly “Lab Hour” invites community ideation and experimentation. A selection of hand-drawn talismans with flashing collaged imagery bids visitors to enter the VCL “Portal,” each object linking to a different ongoing digital, participatory arts project.

One project created by Kehkashan Khalid (username) is inspired by sci-fi writer and leftist darling Ursula Le Guin’s theory of flash fiction as a thought experiment. The Untold Edition— Collective Diary (2020–21) hosted on Padlet (collaborative digital notepad), displays a watercolor map of the world with sprinkled geotags marking doodles, short fiction musings and snapshots uploaded by contributors across the globe to produce a collective diary. Through another “Portal,” Poetry Soup (2020), a Frank O’Hara poem is accompanied by interactive audience prompts that invite users to create a visual poem in a collage-style webpage.

One highlight of the Lab, Sites of Passage (2020), is a digital video piece by artist Lucy Kerr that was produced in a Gathering, and includes an audience score for ongoing remote participation. The piece explores the themes of embodiment, disconnectivity and the alone-together nature of socializing-by-Zoom. In the hours-long long piece, the eerie voyeuristic eye of the Zoom lens is obscured by a distinct fogginess over the domestic settings, reminding us how similar each of these spaces becomes in the seriality of the Zoom box. Bodies move in and out of the frames performing the mundane daily tasks, while blurred faces read monotonous, matter-of-fact accounts of the rituals and routines that occupy the expansive banality of home-time in lockdown.

Lingering questions run through the varied VCL projects—How can art practice provide a critical social realm to imagine creative modes of collectivity outside the auspices of commodification, borders and capital? Can digital communities dream of alternate futures to the apocalyptic one we seem to be careening towards?

The VCL invites submissions for community-led projects centered on “Care As Practice,” defined as an ongoing project that engages active participation through remote access. This concept of collective care traces to notions of radical care in Black feminism that posits a lived, habitual ethos of communal responsibility and the cultivation of collective nurturing practices as the antidote to neoliberal atomization and alienation. Scholar Maria Puig de la Bellacasa conceives of a “triptych of care—labor/ work, affect/affections, ethics/politics” in which care is the “concrete work of maintenance in interdependent worlds.” These dimensions are interwoven throughout VCL, where an insistence on the real presence of the disembodied other in digital space cultivates a digital practice of mutual care. This paradoxical tension of disembodied collectivity seems to be where the Virtual Care Lab situates itself most comfortably.