Code is intended both as a computer-based language to program software and as a functional and visual language for organizing administrative processes, visualizing information, performing behaviour control, and reinforcing shared imaginaries based on surveillance and dread. This special issue of Digital Culture & Society deals with the concept of code in relation to the Covid-19 crisis. The contributions depart from the idea that both forms of coding have become dramatically intertwined during the pandemic and are structuring a new way of being in and seeing reality. They explore the new forms of data-driven surveillance and representation of the pandemic evolution at the level of real-time epidemiology, sensor technologies, science policies, push media, and the heterogeneous counter-discourses that try to subvert them.

Julia Ramírez-Blanco (Dr. phil.) is contemporary art lecturer in Barcelona University. She works on the intersections between utopia, visual culture and activism. Ramón Reichert (Dr. phil.) works as a European project researcher at the University of Lancaster within the Erasmus+ program. He is the program director of the M.Sc. Data Studies at Danube University Krems, Austria. He is a lecturer at the Department of Communication and Media Research at the University of Fribourg, Switzerland, and a lecturer in Contextual Studies at the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of St. Gallen, Switzerland. Francesco Spampinato (Dr. phil.) is an associate professor at the University of Bologna. A scholar and writer of contemporary art history and visual culture, his research focuses on the relationships between art, media, and technology.