As the frame for our lives has become forcibly smaller, we’ve encountered a strange paradox. Lockdown life has led to intensive focus on the ‘real’ self – the fleshy bits, but also the inner self – the bit that rests underneath our usual distractions and shared rituals. At the same time, our digital lives have become more vital – web interfaces are the only way for us to be together. They have necessarily replaced our real life interactions.

Magda Tritto questions the value of our new online niceties – in her Is language a virus?, now familiar email platitudes are contrasted with the grim emptiness of the physical world. Danyang Liu takes the precedence of our online selves to its logical conclusion: in Mailbox, our digital ‘soul’ lives on in cyberspace after death, without the need for our bodily existence. Artificial intelligence removes us even further, and is the subject of Emotional Dialogue, in which Zhiqiang Li prods and highlights the gaps in the logic and reason of AI assistants – it seems humans are still needed after all.

Ping Mu presents a primal response to confinement in her C.301 Cyberspace Odyssey: an intricate though claustrophobic domestic environment is the setting for an exploration of the human psyche via an ape-like avatar. In Cheong A Kang’s The One for The Whole, The Whole for The One, glimmers of individual deviance from societal norms can be seen by those who are looking closely. A deeply personal perception is also revealed by Ruo Hsin Wu in The Sound of Memory. Minute details of daily life become dreamlike ruminations on dementia and essential humanity.

Olivia Ahmad