Changes saved is a digital, interactive narrative that reflects upon users’ agency within the pandemic reality. The pandemic reality is one of absolute mediation, constructed and experienced predominantly through online applications and platforms, through the imposition of the digital over the physical, through the precariousness that now permeates our lives. Individuals are called to abandon previous models of being-in-the-world and restructure their routines exclusively within this particular ecosystem. The latter hands over both a new set of tools to reconfigure our everydayness and a new space of contingencies to do so. A complex mixture of once usual practices becoming unfamiliar, estranged habits coming back to the surface and unexpected ones arising in an unprecedented pace, pandemic times suddenly shattered our norms and made us construe those anew. Crafting new routines, forgetting old ones, stretching obsessions or revealing those secretly lying in the background, grew into the ‘currency’ of the pandemic times. Constructing everydayness within the digital territories of the pandemic generates behaviours that have soon proven to become highly predictable but also ones that don’t cease to surprise us. It’s a rather complex situation where users were suddenly challenged with the task of quickly figuring out their everydayness through inventive practices in order to sustain their wellbeing. But it is also a situation where great numbers of individuals adopted highly methodological performances, so meticulously structured that came to resemble well organized automated systems. By pushing operations to the limits and welcoming both errors, bugs and glitches, as well as rule-bounded schemes, users became creators, players, agitators—compliant and defiant all at once. The agency of the users radically shifted in divergent and unforseen directions, ones not experienced before, ones that can’t be defined as good or bad, efficient or problematic. The reality of covid19 is one of finite systems and universalized behaviours which we believe that, at some point, will reach their own exhaustion. But it is also one that won’t stop surprising us, at least not any time soon -especially if the pandemic is further prolonged and if we are to consider the after-effects to be experienced in the long run. With the identification of behavioral patterns in the pandemic landscape as our starting point, we wish to create visual narratives that will dispute and stretch this ecosystem beyond its apparent self-referential exhaustion point. Speculating how users weave novel and absurd experiences within their most intimate spaces, this series of unorthodox storylines will ultimately question how this unprecedented reality may offer the chance to critically re-invent our own finite systems. Whether as a diary, a collection of the new everydayness or a series of speculations on emerging obsessions of the user, Changes Saved attempts to critically reflect on our altering presents and the emerging futures.
