I’m still amazed that the pandemic happened; that I spent weeks confined to a flat, trying to stay sane. I got by with suggestions from friends: socialising online, breaking the day into sections, waiting until the daily briefing for my first drink. We invented projects to fill the time, some of them more sensible than others. We took on small doses of madness to inoculate ourselves from a full-blown attack.

A friend sent me a link to the Facebook group where 1.6 million people pretended to be ants. I found others: ‘A group where we all pretend to be running late or have to cancel plans’; ‘A group where we all pretend to work in the same RESTAURANT’. The one I settled for was small and local – ‘A group where we pretend to have picnics on the South Downs Way’.

I spent a couple of weeks reading people’s descriptions of imaginary picnics. The things they’d bought, how they avoided rain showers and, of course, ants in the jam. Someone shared pencil sketches they’d made after eating. Lots of people shared photographs of real-life picnics, shot close-up with only background hints that they were eating them indoors.

The group was tightly moderated, with no discussion allowed about the future, or real-life picnics. I can’t have been the only person who’d imagined that first weekend when they let us free, how many people would be up on the trail enjoying their freedom with Kettle crisps and hummus. I walked 15 miles across the downs that first Saturday, and none of these picnics had made it out into the real world.

Background

It’s hard to believe that it’s been five years since the pandemic. I’ve been re-reading some of my blog posts from the time and they seem like messages from a parallel earth. I’m not sure how we went from there to ignoring covid. I’ve written about the anniversary here.

The covid groups mentioned are real, except for the one about the picnics. The Atlantic had an article about these in June 2020: The Facebook Groups Where People Pretend the Pandemic Isn’t Happening.

Today’s story is part of my South Downs Way collection. I’ve been picking up the threads of these again. There’s a new story about the Devil almost finished, and a self-contained zine I’m playing with. And there’s a website up, which indexes the stories - although the design is too awful to share just now.

The most exciting news is that I will be walking the South Downs Way in the summer. I might even do a mini-zine about the actual walk. If anyone is up for a day of hiking in June, let me know, and we can see if you can join the itinerary anywhere.

Recommendations

I’ve long been fascinated by Ong’s Hat. This was a 1990s multi-media art project by Joseph Matheny, which incorporated online and offline elements. It’s often discussed as the earliest alternate reality game, or because of its similarity to QAnon. Or else, people focus on the storyline as a conspiracy theory - that an ashram in New Jersey actually had found a route to an alternate world.

Earlier this year, Joseph Matheny released Ong’s Hat: Compleat, a combined book and audiobook outlining the full story behind his artwork. Matheny found that interviews often focussed on the same few elements of his work rather than digging into the experiments that led to it, which included a hand-crafted early language model, the meta-machine. The book allows him to tell the whole story.

The combination of text and audio recordings was an interesting one. Both told the same story, but brought out different nuances. It was a great format. I would read a chapter, then listen to the recording that went alongside it. Given the opportunities of the Internet, it’s a shame we’re not seeing more interesting formats like this one.

Matheny’s obsessions matched some of mine at a similar age - Burroughs and Gysin, industrial music, the nature of ‘the book’ and procedural text generation. These blossomed out into a radical experiment where Matheny produced a sort of Gesamtkunstwerk, partly based online, which was informed by his thoughts about magic and improvisation (Matheny would sometimes appear in public as one of his characters). The hours spent listening to Matheny with interviewer David Metcalfe were a fascinating outline of an artist’s life.

Ong’s Hat is an important piece of art. While it is talked about, I don’t think it has yet received the in-depth critical appraisal it deserves. Matheny’s work explored many of the issues around ‘fake news’/propaganda on the Internet, as well as producing one of the earliest experiments around how the online and offline worlds might interact.

It’s sad that we don’t see more online projects with the same ambition as Matheny’s . Ong’s Hat: Compleat is a fascinating ‘book’ about how this work came to be made, and highly recommended. The text and recordings are available in a number of places, all linked from Matheny’s site.