In April 2020—only weeks after the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a global pandemic—the New York Times published an article titled “Why Zoom Is Terrible.” Quoting a gustatory simile from Sheryl Brahnam of Missouri State University, the article declared, “In-person communication resembles video conferencing about as much as a real blueberry muffin resembles a packaged blueberry muffin that contains not a single blueberry but artificial flavors, textures and preservatives.”1 It has been a year marked by the absence of “in-person” connection, or in the language of our field, of spatial copresence. The COVID-19 pandemic has fundamentally disrupted our ability to share space. Spatial copresence, it turns out, is what the coronavirus requires to spread. The virus, in this sense, is a phenomenon of the live. While technologies like Zoom have maintained our capacity for temporal copresence, the now ubiquitous status of “Zoom fatigue” points to new ways to consider spatial copresence, and by extension “liveness.”

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再次“活”起来：对（后）大流行世界中的缩放、共存和活跃性的思考

2020 年 4 月——就在世界卫生组织宣布 COVID-19 为全球大流行病几周后——纽约时报发表了一篇题为《为什么 Zoom 很糟糕》的文章。文章引用密苏里州立大学的谢丽尔·布拉南 (Sheryl Brahnam) 的一个味觉比喻，宣称：“面对面的交流类似于视频会议，就像真正的蓝莓松饼类似于包装好的蓝莓松饼，其中不包含单一的蓝莓，而是包含人工香料、质地和防腐剂。 。”1这一年的特点是缺乏“面对面”的联系，或者用我们领域的语言来说，空间共存。COVID-19 大流行从根本上破坏了我们共享空间的能力。事实证明，空间共存是冠状病毒传播所需要的。从这个意义上说，病毒是一种活生生的现象。虽然像 Zoom 这样的技术保持了我们的时间共存能力，但现在无处不在的“Zoom 疲劳”状态指向了考虑空间共存的新方法，并延伸到“活力”。