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Pelican Stairs: A Wapping Great Pandemic Memoir

Pelican Stairs is a multimedia art project started during the depths of Covid-19 lockdown in 2020. The project's reflections on how one's umwelt (one's unique experience of living in one's environment) changes in response to an all-encompassing crisis can serve as a guide, or a provocation, about how future cities need to be reimagined to encompass flexible life-pattern options for their denizens not only to survive but to thrive through the challenges before us. I took photos of my local neighbourhood, Wapping in London, on my daily walks between March and September. I often visited the Thames shore area by climbing a set of steps known as Pelican Stairs. Using those photos as a training set, I generated new images with a Generative Adversarial Network (GAN), which I paired with excerpts from my diary during the same period. The unsettling, almost-real images contrasted with the mundane reality of the diary entries allow the viewer to viscerally (re)experience the inherent tension between an increasingly uncertain external reality and internal attempts at control or sense-making through normal, everyday habits. The project is hosted at https://pelicanstairs.art, and the project includes an interactive element through a Twitter bot which responds to a specific prompt by sharing a random image of generated art from the project.