Ten years ago the novelist created slogans that captured the isolated nature of contemporary life. But when Covid-19 hit, his artworks began to feel eerily prescient
I was in Toronto for both waves of Sars in 2003. You didn’t quibble with the disease. Globally, it killed one in 10 of its victims. Toronto had 44 deaths. The Toronto Sars experience was similar to, but different from, Covid. One huge difference is that in 2003, the internet and smartphones were still in semi-infancy. There was a crazy deadly virus out there and like now, people wore masks and stayed inside. But importantly, they weren’t spending all their waking hours terrifying themselves with dire forecasts, quack statistical modelling, blatant misinformation and political toxic waste – and the Sars experience was clearly, distinctly, far less scary than Covid-19. There’s a lesson there.
Eight years later in Vancouver – and this will ultimately connect up – I hosted a “YouTube Night” at a friend’s nightclub. My MacBook Pro was linked to a jumbo screen, and guests shouted out directions for where to surf next. It was a terrible idea. Going online remains an entirely solitary activity and everyone that evening left feeling unsatisfied. The nightclub had asked me to do posters advertising the event. I liked that idea, but I wanted them to have huge words so that people could read them while driving by in their cars, so I used the nightclub’s house font, a bold sans serif called Knockout, which had originated on boxing posters. I created 10 slogan-like statements that made sense in 2011, but which would have been meaningless to someone 20 years ago. We then pasted them on to construction hoardings around Vancouver. The most popular slogan remains: i miss my pre-internet brain.
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