Led by Lynne DeSilva Johnson with Alex Juhasz
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
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 a 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 d
