Grappling with worship, art in this forced digital age

Every few days since the coronavirus pandemic has begun, a cycle transpires online. Somebody talks, half-idealistically, of all the great art that will be made under quarantine. After all, they say, Shakespeare wrote “King Lear” in a quarantine against the plague. Surely, the great Coronavirus Novel is imminent.

Almost immediately, dozens of people reject this idea. All the novels written under, and about, quarantine are destined to be terrible, they say. They’ll all bear the same few trite titles.

As this pandemic changes the way we engage, perhaps permanently, with physical and digital space, and as legions of artists now find themselves unable to gather or perform, it’s worth asking what the next generation of art — whether literature, music or theater — will look like.

The coronavirus is forcing us to contend with questions implicit in the digital age: What is art in the age of the internet? How can the internet allow us to express, and experience, emotional vulnerability? How can we feel like we are part of something from such an aesthetic remove?

These are questions that have been asked not just by artists but by clergy, as we figure out what presence means in worship in a digital space. What can evening prayer offer on Zoom? How can we take spiritual communion via livestream?

For now, the options we have for worship and gathering feel, understandably, like second-best. But the question of what it means to be digitally present, and what a constructive theology of digital space might look like, remains largely unexplored.

That, however, may be changing. Last month, my husband and I were guests at a “personal concert” of one of his favorite artists: the folk singer Joe Pug, whose tour for his new album had been canceled because of the pandemic. Pug offered us (and up to five connections total) an intimate concert: a combination of conversation and request-based songs, slightly reconfigured to match the gentler atmosphere of the event. Songs that we’d heard dozens of times before on Spotify took on new resonance, as they were played not for a hypothetical general public but specifically for us.

Even videos of artists’ concerts, small and large, reflect music played for several people, usually strangers. In this case, Pug played for us — conversing with us between songs about our interests, dedicating songs to our recent marriage and otherwise adapting his style to just a couple of people — people he’d never met, whose dialogue informed his work. It gave us the feeling of watching and being seen at the same time.

An actress friend, likewise, is working on a film shot entirely on Zoom — dealing with the isolation of the pandemic through Zoom calls.

Likewise, the New York Neo-Futurists, who normally perform a variety of experimental theatrical projects in the East Village, are now experimenting with digital form: “Hit

Play,” a new podcast, has thus far offered listeners theatrical guided walks around New York, raps, prayers and a crime drama.

All these productions don’t just use the internet as a medium but play with the very nature of digital isolation and connectedness: the strange interplay of voyeurism and vulnerability that defines our desire to watch others, and our simultaneous fear of and desire to be watched ourselves.

Each of these projects deals less with coronavirus itself than with the social fallout of lockdown and what it means to be present in a digital age. These are questions that our culture has not satisfactorily asked before the lockdown — and those with which we will have to contend long thereafter. How we inhabit, explore and even become vulnerable in spaces traditionally understood as “disembodied” or “low stakes” are among the most important artistic questions of our digital age.

These are questions that will define our understanding of presence and absence not just in the artistic sphere but in the liturgical one as well.