About this Talk
ELÆ [Lynne DeSilva-Johnson] and Orchid Tierney will address strategies for writing through and in response to modern crises with specific reference to the current COVID-19 Pandemic and its intersections with eco-fascism in climate change discourse. We will explore the intersections between experimental writing, remote advocacy, and the public common, and document the possibilities for poetry to critique social injustices.
ELÆ [Lynne DeSilva-Johnson] is a multimodal creative practitioner, curator, cultural scholar and educator. Their work employs text, installation, sound design, performance, digital tech and speculative theory in addressing the somatic, ontological intersections between persons, forms of language, and systems, focused on the study of resilient, open source strategies for ecological and social change. Recent projects and features include How to Human: Resistance Protocols as part of Performing Knowledge at the Segal Center, the Speculative Resilience Radical Practice Library & Lab for the Anarchist Bookfair/Bushwick Open Studios, Dixon Place’s HOT! Festival, and a field lab installation for Ars Electronica / STWST. Publications include Vestiges, Big Echo, Matters of Feminist Practice, The Transgender Narratives Anthology, Choice Words: Writers on Abortion, and many more. Books include Ground, Blood Altas, Overview Effect, Sweet and Low: Indefinite Singular, Boddy Oddy Oddy (an ekphrastic project with painter Georgia Elrod), and The Precarity Bodyhacking Work-Book and Guide, with Cory Tamler and Storm Budwig. In addition to teaching at Pratt Institute, Elæ is Founder/Creative Director of The Operating System / Liminal Lab, and R&D for the Brooklyn node of the Mycelium Network Society. Fine them online via Instagram @thetroublewithbartleby, or web at http://onlywhatican.net
Orchid Tierney is an Aotearoa-New Zealand poet and scholar, currently living in Gambier, Ohio, where she teaches at Kenyon College. She is the author of my beatrice (above/ground, forthcoming), a year of misreading the wildcats (Operating System, 2019) and Earsay (TrollThread 2016), and chapbooks ocean plastic (BlazeVOX 2019), blue doors (Belladonna* Press), Gallipoli Diaries (GaussPDF 2017), the world in small parts (Dancing Girl Press, 2012), and Brachiaction (Gumtree, 2012). Other poems, reviews, and scholarship have appeared in Jacket2, Journal of Modern Literature, and Western Humanities Review, among others. She is a consulting editor for the Kenyon Review.