Statement

This is a work of art that is intended as an explicit indictment of the UK government's handling of the COVID-19 disaster. It builds on Keith A. Smith's idea of the 'conceptual book'; in Smith's case this was a set of written instructions to create a book that would be difficult or highly impractical to make real, such as a bound copy of every single frame of Fantasia. In this case, the instructions are written in computer code and result in a PDF which should be ready to be printed through any variety of on-demand services. Technically speaking, therefore, the actual work should be considered to be the computer program; the book generated is simply a record of the work in a particular state, like a photograph of a performance.

I was inspired to create this work on the occasion of the 1 year anniversary of the first death from the coronavirus in the UK on March 2nd 2020, as an expression of my anger and disbelief at the scale of the tragedy, and of the incompetent leadership that I believe has lead us to such a catastrophically high death rate. Interested in trying to understand the enormity of the figures, I first wrote a very simple script that created a text file containing a mark for each death, arranged in rows of 50 marks:

deaths = open(f"corona_deaths.txt", "w")

for x in range(1, 123296):

deaths.write('|')

if x % 50 == 0:

deaths.write('\n')

deaths.close()

Then, with some sense of the scale of the thing, I set to work designing the book so that I could turn these marks into a comprehendible physical object. I settled on 500 icons per page, and the project fell together fairly quickly over the course of the next few days. As well as a worthwhile artistic creation, it was an interesting personal exercise, pointing me towards further projects of this sort in the future. I have previously created several artist's books which could have been made much less laboriously using similar methodologies, and I am excited to engage in further explorations in this space.

CoronaBook

CoronaBook is a computer program written in Python which extracts the cumulative 'Deaths within 28 days of positive test by date of death' data from coronavirus.data.gov.uk and uses it to construct a print-ready book called The Tally. It first creates each internal page as a png file, then collates these into a PDF, then creates a PDF for the cover. It seemed very fitting that Python, which is one of the most common languages used for data analysis, should be put to this purpose.

The code for this project and a full readme can be found here:

https://github.com/SydneyCardew/CoronaBook

The Tally

The Tally is the book which is created by CoronaBook. As stated above, it should be considered more of a record of work than a piece of art in its own right; nevertheless, the purpose of the work of art is to create this book. It can thus be thought of as well in the context of Sol LeWitt's 'Wall Drawings', which consist of sets of instructions for creating drawings within a gallery space.

A version of The Tally can be purchased here:

https://www.lulu.com/en/gb/shop/sydney-cardew/the-tally/paperback/product-yrj5gy.html