With the lengthy time once spent in non-places, air lounges and transfer limos now converted to domestic ennui, I turn to reading Don DeLillo. To anybody who has read Don DeLillo, this may explain why platforms, instead of academic possibilities, suddenly trigger in me weird crossover thoughts of inelegant high heels, huge expanses of shipping containers, mind-numbing metropolitan flatscapes, mountain top removals and plateau’d heaps of waste.

These connections, you have to understand, correspond to a time before the quick rise of electronic social networks, and the subsequent accidental demise of bodily webs of like-minded people. Such trippy yet physically-bounded connections were of a time before a virus sent us into a state of corporeal absence, screen surrealism and algorithmic addiction. Even so, as Svedaliza shabrangs along, the unexpected dislocation of metaphor builds up insidiously. What do you have left after the multiple, unfortunate one-night stands of a pandemic with various digital platforms? A flattened cityscape without the arousal of random encounters in places that you had never dreamed to visit. A zoombie urbanism of illusive e-connectivity, all lingo, all-formulaic, all on-demand. In contrast, outside, streets would now be empty if it wasn’t for the food lines and a temporary return to the toxic traffic of supposedly protective individual transport units. So, when reality starts to melt and you pump up the AC, adjust the rear view mirror and just recall the lack of irony & people in Superstudio’s griddy-gritty surfaces.