unthinking
photography

'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 quotations from literature written during or about prior pandemics such as the bubonic plague and the global influenza pandemic of 1918-19. The project 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 work furthers discourse about the digital dataset as an authority of knowledge curation. Part of the 'Data / Set / Match' programme.

This article is an overview of the projects 'Epic Handwashing in a Time of Lost Narratives' and 'A Kitchen of One's Own' weaving a thread between the technical and the conceptual: the projects are linked historically by the writing and arguments put forth by Virginia Woolf, technologically by computational juxtapositions of text and image, as well as poetically in the viewer’s experience through a speculative remix.