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The Covid 19 pandemic brought a moment of reflection on the many seemingly unsolvable contemporary crises, including the climate crisis, gender and social inequality, racism, colonialism, as well as social and economic harms inflicted by the platform capitalism. The experience of the hyperobject of the pandemic crisis allowed us to relate to other major crises, thus opening up the space for empathy and a hope for change. This reflective moment was dimmed in 2022, with the war in Ukraine urgently requiring a swift response. However, the new crises did not extinguish the old ones. We believe there is a need to revisitthe reflections inspired by the pandemic lockdown to prompt the potential of change, even if filled with loss. Pandemic Reflection Machine is a generative, combinatory video installation that allows for revisiting reflections on relations between art making and everyday reality during Covid lockdown, as expressed by 16 international digital artists. Th artists commented on their artworks, the use of platforms, the collaborative nature of digital art, the pandemic situation and all the social issues tied with it in thirteen Zoom interviews. The artists were chosen based on their contribution to the online exhibition Covid E-lit at ELO 21 (https://eliterature.org/elo2021/covid/) with a focus on diversity. From the interviews we have produced the 45-minute documentary COVID E-LIT: Digital Art During the Pandemic, which we hope to present at the conference. However, the documentary used only a small part of the rich material gathered in the interviews, and much reflection on howthe pandemic applies to current social crises and other hyperobjects had to be left out.Pandemic Reflection Machine will allow audiences to dive deeper into the interviews through a recombinatory process collecting sentences from all interviews via interactively selected tags. Our project is designed as a Zoom-like reflection machine prompting the audience to virtually ‘meet’, revisit and reflect on their own pandemic experiences, networks of relations and collaborations and the platforms they experienced it through as well as the future imaginaries that were generated in the process.

Compilations of video clips of Italian mayors berating citizens breaking quarantine to walk dogs, jog, or play ping pong have become something of a ‘viral’ sensation both in Italy and globally. The clips are often amusing, featuring politicians accusing their constituents of vanity, incontinence, and other assorted sins. As anthropologists interested in the politics of accusation , these small-scale disputes allow us to think through the sorts of political horizons that the novel coronavirus is bringing into being. As the virus spreads, we seek to track the sorts of accusations that spread with it as they provoke what we call virological witch hunts. Unlike the episodes of public blaming and shaming some political figures have promoted through national media, virological witch hunts are small-scale, bottom-up, intimate, and usually amplified through local social networks. We link them to the phenomenon of the untori in XVI- XVII century Lombardy, another bottom-up surge of accusations against those believed to be spreading disease that authorities had to deal with. Relying on social media, we have been reaching out to quarantined residents of the province of Bergamo, in the Lombardy region who have been publicly shamed for perceived transgressions in the midst of the quarantine. The responses offer insight into how the pandemic has precipitated what Massimo, one of our interlocutors, has termed a “collective, hysterical version of preexisting individual patterns of blaming and shaming”.

AWAC2 (Analysing Web Archives of the COVID-19 Crisis) is a project developed by the members of WARCnet (Web ARChive studies network researching web domains and events) Working Group 2 that focuses on analysing transnational events. This is one of the first research projects using an IIPC collaborative collection and ARCH (Archives Research Compute Hub), a new interface for web archive analysis created by the Archives Unleashed Project Team and the Internet Archive.

Since its onset, COVID-19 has significantly accelerated and expanded scientific publishing. Drawing on research into open peer review in medical journals, Serge P.J.M. Horbach discusses what impact COVID-19 has had on the practice of peer review and what shifting assessment thresholds for academic research on COVID-19 might suggest about the future of peer review itself.