What dreams, hopes, and aspirations were broken by the global coronavirus pandemic in 2020? The Infinite Catalog of Crushed Dreams is an endless stream of procedurally generated disappointment, sadness, and grief. Written in HTML and Javascript, The Infinite Catalog of Crushed Dreams imagines countless events and opportunities that have been ruined by the coronavirus, from high school proms to canceled weddings, from playground crushes to devastated retirement accounts. The list of crushed dreams truly is infinite; with its implementation of infinite scrolling, one can scroll for hours without seeing a repeated entry in the catalog. There are billions of possible combinations.

The Infinite Catalog of Crushed Dreams intersects with the ACM Hypertext theme of “Climates of Change” in several ways. While the work doesn’t explicitly address climate change, it does face head-on the current crisis and the ongoing changes it has forced upon millions. The work dwells on the local and personal, identifying (fictional) people by name in (real) locations across the United States. The crushed dreams likewise are described with exacting precision, an attempt to personalize a crisis so vast that it threatens to elude comprehension. The Infinite Catalog thus occupies a paradoxical space: it calls attention to individuated anguish through the aesthetics of the mathematical sublime. The work makes no overt call to action; rather, it seeks to highlight our personal—and collective—loss. Haunting and melancholic, with occasional touches of humor, The Infinite Catalog of Crushed Dreams is a Borgesian refraction of those alternately terrifying and numbing months in 2020 when everything seemed to fall apart.