A Fake News Poetry Performance Workshop took place at ArtEZ University of the Arts in Arnhem, the Netherlands, on October 17, 2019. Working with a handful of students from all over the world getting their training in Theater Practices, we built from previous thinking and art research (from the Beyond Verification group) linking the flow of memes, in particular those about immigration, to character and scenario development around intended audience and affect. With the support of their professors Pavlos Kountouriotis and Nishant Shah, and with performance instructions from project collaborator Ioana Jucan, we improvised scenes from scripts made from a meme, affect felt in the face of fakery, and characters developed from our sense of intended personaes. This data will be fed to our developing affect bot (built by Roopa Vasudevan and Javier Soler) who will render some machinic response for an upcoming workshop at Emerson College.
