xtine burrough and Sabrina Starnaman with Technical Direction by Dale MacDonald
Epic Hand Washing in the Time of Lost Narratives by xtine burrough and Sabrina Starnaman is a speculative remix that confronts Epic Kitchens, a dataset of first-person cooking videos, with quotes from literature written during or about prior pandemics such as the bubonic plague and the global influenza pandemic of 1918-19.
Epic Hand Washing in the Time of Lost Narratives reveals the arbitrary nature of information preservation and highlights the constructed nature of digitised materials. Blurring the lines between art and archive, or information and dataset, this project furthers discourse about the digital dataset as an authority of knowledge curation.
Moreover, when we are experiencing a once-in-a-lifetime global event, humanity loses its narrative and only constructs one over time. This project explores how these narratives and the mundane work of living day to day in isolation are both at play in our lived experience. What might appear as an everyday action in the original dataset becomes charged with contemporary worldwide conversations in burrough's and Starnaman's work.
The selections from fiction placed in conversation with domestic washing expands the subject or directive to wash your hands during COVID-19 into a centuries-long story of washing, sheltering in place, and illness. Literary selections have been pulled from works written during pandemics or about life during pandemics from the bubonic plague to the global influenza pandemic of 1918-19 from authors like William Shakespeare, Virginia Woolf, Albert Camus, Katherine Anne Porter, William Maxwell, and Giovanni Boccacio.
Epic Kitchens (2018) is a dataset of videos collected by a group of researchers to create non-scripted recordings of all daily activities in kitchens. It is the largest known dataset produced using first-person vision. Each recorded action is assigned a verb like wash, peel, toast or rub to describe and categorise the event. A set of videos used for training machine learning were also tagged with nouns to accompany the verbs. In this browser-based poetry project, 74 videos from the Epic Kitchens 2018 database tagged with the noun hand and the verb wash play for 30 seconds, while a quote is juxtaposed at random. If a viewer holds their cursor over the text, they will see the title of the book, play, or essay to which it is attributed. Clicking on the text advances the narrative to a new video and quote.
This project is published in a Creative Commons license (Zero v1.0 Universal) on Github and the videos are streaming from the Vimeo collection, Epic Hand Washing‚ a sub dataset of videos from Epic Kitchens that have been transformed in size and duration, and re-exported and compressed for streaming online. The navigation at the bottom of the project links to these collections and to a spreadsheet that shows the complete bibliography for the project.
Creative Commons v1.0 Universal