Cartographies of Erasure : A #100hardtruths-#fakenews Writing Workshop
led by Lynne DeSilva-Johnson with Alex Juhasz
Location: Occidental College, Global Crossroads, McKinnon Center
Date: Sunday, May 13, 2018
Time: 3-6pm
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“The territory no longer precedes the map, nor does it survive it. It is nevertheless the map that precedes the territory,… that engenders the territory, and…it is the territory whose shreds slowly rot across the extent of the map.” – Jean Baudrillard, in Simulacra and Simulation [/box]
In the Cartographies of Erasure workshop, part of Alexandra Juhasz’s collaborative poetry project as “radical digital media literacy in the time of Trump,” we consider the contemporary phenomenon of “fake news” as located within an long, insidious history of imagined projections of the “real” onto the ideological, historical, narrative, and scientific imagination.
How have the physical and social sciences, architecture, media, and other disciplines co-produced “official” models and “maps” of place, body, and identity that “precede the territory,” erasing existent ecology, experience, difference, story, etc? How have cartographic and documentary practices become “facts,” driven by political economic agents and agendas?
We ask, too, what perceptions, choices, and identity formations are offered (or refused) to the body inscribed into (or erased out of) an imagined place? What allows a body / system / network to deviate from, exceed, or refuse predetermined mappings, definitions, or structures?
We will read and respond to excerpts from a range of texts, explore our embodied cognitive relationship to our responses through somatic exercises, and produce our own textual experimentation based on media from the #100hardtruths-#fakenews digital media literacy primer.
Read more on previous workshops: Fake News Poetry Workshops as Radical Digital Media Literacy
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[box]Facilitator Bios:
Lynne DeSilva-Johnson [they/them/xe/per] is an interdisciplinary creator, scholar and performer. They are an Assistant Visiting Professor at Pratt Institute, as well as Founder and Managing Editor of The Operating System. Lynne’s work addresses, in particular, the somatic impact of trauma on persons and systems, as well as the study of resilient, open source strategies for ecological and social change. Lynne is co-editor, with Jay Besemer, of the forthcoming anthology, “In Corpore Sano: Creative Practice and the Challenged Body.” They are the author of Ground, Blood Atlas, and “In Memory of Feasible Grace,” as well as two forthcoming titles, the chapbook “Sweet and Low,” and the collaborative Body Oddy Oddy, with painter Georgia Elrod. Recent or forthcoming publication credits include No, Dear, Wave Composition, The Conversant, The Philadelphia Supplement, CDC Poetry Project, Gorgon Poetics, POSTblank, Vintage Magazine, Live Mag, Coldfront, the Brooklyn Poets Anthology, Resist Much/Obey Little: Poems for The Resistance, and YesPoetry. Performances and work have appeared widely, including recent features or projects at Artists Space, Bowery Arts and Science, The NYC Poetry Festival, Parkside Lounge, KGB Bar, Carmine Street Metrics, Eyebeam, LaMaMa, Triangle Quarterly, Undercurrent Projects, Mellow Pages, The New York Public Library, Launchpad BK, Dixon Place, Poets Settlement, SOHO20 Gallery and many more. They are always still beginning.
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Alexandra Juhasz is Chair of the Film Department at Brooklyn College. She writes about and makes feminist, queer, fake, and AIDS media. Her current work is on fake news, online feminist pedagogy, YouTube, and other more radical uses of digital media.
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Getting to Occidental College:
Occidental College is located in northeast Los Angeles in the community of Eagle Rock, between Pasadena on the east and Glendale on the west. Our street address is 1600 Campus Rd., Los Angeles, CA 90041.
Visit the official Occidental College Maps and Directions page for driving directions from Burbank Airport, LAX, and areas around Los Angeles.
Attached you will find a campus map that has been annotated to navigate you to visitor and guest parking and a walking route to the Johnson Hall Global Forum where the poetry workshop will take place.
Visitor and guest parking is free and does not require a permit.
This workshop is co-sponsored by the Center for Digital Liberal Arts, with special assistance from Chris Gilman, the Associate Director of the CDLA and designer of the Global Crossroads Media Wall.
