2020
19 December 2020
Fell asleep early on the sofa. Like a dear granny. Woke up before 5 am in utter darkness. Ready to start the day doomscrolling before anyone around here dares to wake up. I stared at the audience reactions to the Batman trailer 1989. Read Andrew Sullivan's take on Why 2021 Is Going To Be Epic.
Another Roaring Twenties? I could not help to think about the supposedly superior position we are in looking back in time smiling at long gone vocal styles, visual aesthetics or haircuts while we are stumbling somewhere. Looking back face time meeting 3d facial expressions in AR in 2020 will feel even more helpless and uncanny. Dead people's heads assembled on timeless digital artefacts.
2020 to me is a patchwork quilt dataviz of germany turning dark and even darker. 2020 is sitting in front of a friends house in the countryside facing an old walnut tree and a small lake. 2020 is the camera and screen of my computer, the user interface of various modern enterprise video communication tools, handwritten plans of who is taking care of the kids when. Not how. 2020 is Instagram as a tool of communicating despair and anger and disgust before turning into a useless shopping mall. 2020 is loving strangers on TikTok.
I started the year traveling to Malawi and Poland before everything came to a grinding halt. Looking back it is a bit weird how fast the adoption went. I did a lot of digital workshops, consulting, conference facilitation with a computer and an attached microphone. And i can not deny that it felt great stumbling in front of the computer just right on time coming from the shower or having a quick coffee in your own kitchen, having muted the camera and the microphone. Working at friends places was a bliss too. Thx.
I started a TikTok newsletter on substack in summer. Reading articles about people leaving it, the creator middle class, and the downsides of the indie-journo-newsletter gold rush in winter. I started using Notion as an internal and external planning tool and used it for setting up a website. Diversification was and is a thing. Various projects used various platforms and tools. I am especially happy about planning and facilitating a 10 days WhatsApp-based training on digital storytelling in Malawi.
Looking forward i hope to help facilitate some TikTok projects in 2021, conceptualise and run more hands on eLearning projects and probably do more conference co-hosting because that turned out to be fun. Apart from that i am open for collaborations or probono work. Just write a mail.
The article image on top reflects 2020 to me. I saw the sequence live while starring at the screen for days and days, taking screenshot after screenshot to process that what was happening. It just popped up again on Twitter the other day. The girl with the cake is walking away from the camera. The cake looks perfect. She is taking care in order to get it somewhere in one piece. It will comfort someone in need. Black riding hood. Wearing a mask. Just like batman. This is 2020.
