artnodes E-JOURNAL ON ART, SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY 1 A UOC scientific e-journal 2021, Laura Benítez Valero, Erich Berger Artnodes, no. 27 (2021) I ISSN 1695-5951 2021, of this edition by FUOC CC CC ARTICLE First Response Abstract The Covid-19 pandemic, which manifested itself during the early months of 2020, resulted in the activation of the expected official actors on a national and international level in policy, politics, the industrial military complex, pharma and medicine, among others. Being suddenly confined to a minimum of physical interaction, we found ourselves online among a concerned but enthusiastic group of artists, hackers, activists, scholars and other practitioners who organise themselves in informal settings to share, discuss and devise strategies of coping, care and action. They aim to apply their own artistic, activist or research competence to work through the complexities of continuously shifting information and circumstances. The pandemic is not simply an epidemiological crisis but a crisis of sovereignty. We refer here to the notion of sovereignty raised by Achille Mbembe to exercise control over mortality and to define life as the deployment and manifestation of power. Also the question of liveability comes to mind as introduced by Judith Butler and which the pandemic spread out in a wide spectrum, starting from the bare form of Who gets to live? - when it comes to access to medical support and decisions of care - up to What is a liveable life during a pandemic lockdown? In this way the pandemic makes visible and amplifies what was already there, a systemic plurality of inequalities and oppression enacted by predominant hegemonies. As Divya Dwivedi pointed out, the pandemic reveals a different sense of crisis, that is how the processes that have organised life (and lives) are distributed across the world and how some components of this worldwide arrangement have arrived at their functional Recommended citation Benítez Valero, Laura; Berger, Erich. 2021. «First Response». In: Benítez, Laura; Berger, Erich (coord.) «Arts in the time of pandemic». Artnodes, no. 27: 1-9. UOC. [Accessed: dd/mm/ yy]. http://doi.org/10.7238/a.v0i27.378460 The texts published in this journal are – unless otherwise indicated – covered by the Creative Commons Spain Attribution 4.0 International license. The full text of the license can be consulted here: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Laura Benítez Valero Director, Biofriction Head of Theory, Degree in Arts & Design, Escola Massana Erich Berger Director, Bioart Society artnodes E-JOURNAL ON ART, SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY https://artnodes.uoc.edu Universitat Oberta de Catalunya CC NODE «ARTS IN THE TIME OF PANDEMIC»