Two Fake News Poetry Performance Workshops took place at the HASTAC Conference in Vancouver, Canada, on May 18, 2019. A third, held at the Digital Methods Summer School in Amsterdam during the week of July 1, 2019, built on their work and would prove to be the culminating artwork for this website: a video of a performance about research personas, the front and back end of the internet, and fake or "junk news" (located in Poems, the left). These workshops were led by the performance scholar and artist, Ioana Jucan in collaboration with Roopa Vasudevan and other international researchers, as part of Wendy Chun's Beyond Verification project. At HASTAC, small groups of scholars, artists, and activists responded to a poem written previously, a meme (see these in Ephemera, to the left), and short directives written about our own affective encounters with social media (available in Ephemera, to the left). These were used as frameworks from which to write a performance script. In the afternoon, new groups received those scripts and made them their own: writing two adaptations or expansions, which they also performed. These are available to the left as "Poems." These scripts came to Amsterdam along with an affect bot (programmed by Roopa). Engaging tough political-economic and theoretical questions about internet culture (see "Ephemera") a final script and performance--CONNECT.CONNECT.CONNECT.--is the culminating artwork of this year-long excursion into radical digital media literacy. Place-based, collaborative, thoughtful and responsive artmaking is the anti-meme lesson plan and final product. This research was undertaken, in part, thanks to funding from the Canada 150 Research Chairs Program, Dr. Wendy Chun, and the Tow Research Travel Fellowship at Brooklyn College.
