The Fake News Poetry Workshops generate much—conversation, contemplation, community, and art about participants' shared interpretations of the connections between social media, verification, and lived truth—like this video poem, "Oppositional Reading," by Yanyi based on #100hardtruth #99 information overload needs positive feedback effects which is based upon "Network Culture: Politics for the Information Age," written by Tiziana Terranova. First and foremost an act of radical digital media literacy given the fact of fake news, the project stays small and local as one refutation to fake news' reliance on the driving logic of scale. Alex goes somewhere, works with a poet and their community, and the process is the point. In the Fall of 2018, the project expanded to engage the links between easy spreadability and fakenews: how some things (many fake) move from place to place online, easily snowballing credibility, volume, and power with no one's care or attention along the way. Fake News Poetry-Video Workshops experiment in the careful, considered relay of one truthful expression from someone to another place, people, time, and format. Interpretation, listening, and respectful artmaking in response to what has been passed on serve to buffer and protect one internet thing as it moves along and becomes yet another; a special sort of anti-meme movement. The video above, is a re-rerendering of a poem written elsewhere (Brooklyn, at the Race in the Media Workshop) which itself responded to hardtruth #99. Eighteen videos made in other places and different times, all responding to poems written previously, and elsewhere, can be found to the left under "Media." As ever, the process of their making trumps "quality" while also generating more things (all saved in this website, built by Partner and Partners, with thanks to Ethel Moore and Erik Riley) including several pieces of public writing, by Alex, about the project as a whole which are also collected on this page.
