By Emily Pillinger
Earlier this year the new Digital Futures Institute at King’s invited people to submit videos reflecting on how we live well with technology.
I had been thinking a lot about letter-writing, ever since we held our Making Music out of Myth school workshop in James Corke-Webster’s Letters of Refuge exhibition at King’s last spring. James and I, along with Cheryl and Jeanne, are now preparing to rejoin the charity Art Refuge in Folkestone for a day of letter-writing and talking about ancient and modern displacement with migrants in the UK asylum system.
Between these two events I decided to translate a poem by the Roman poet Ovid: his imagined letter from Penelope (Heroides 1). And this semester I am teaching a module at King’s called ‘Latin Literary Letters’ with some fantastic MA students from King’s and UCL.
All in all, it’s involved a lot of reflection on how the ancient technologies of writing, papyrus-making, shipping, and road-building, are in some ways simply ancient precursors of our modern digital technologies: our mobile devices, our email programmes, and our social media. If Ovid created a Penelope who was so desperate to contact Odysseus that she gave a letter to every passing traveller in case they might bump into her husband, so we too send out emails, messages, and social media posts - and even sometimes our own snail mail, hoping for human connection across time and space.
So I made a video about it, and put it on YouTube!