2020/21 Literature Project Award (Arts Council Ireland)

I am pleased to announce receipt of a 2020/21 Literature Project Award from The Arts Council of Ireland:

Poets Kimberly Campanello and Christodoulos Makris have been awarded a Literature Project Award to collaboratively explore space-time dimensions of travel in the age of digital/anthropocene. Dublin-based digital publisher Fallow Media will disseminate the result through a discrete digital publication to be released in late 2021.

Time is elastic in the age of the digital/anthropocene, and our perception of physical spaces, including how we navigate them and the resonances they have for us, have altered. This creates a vertiginous contrast between our increasing scientific awareness of geological 'deep time' and the eternal present of the digital 'update' and 'scroll'. The recent past of easy travel has become a distant past, possibly not to return.

We will explore how the two dimensions of travel (space-time) work across each other by writing in dialogue with Italo Calvino's foundational experimental novel Invisible Cities using the novel's key headings as a framework to navigate the space-time of the digital map and search engine. To engage with these headings and create our discrete digital text, we will employ experimental writing strategies of appropriation, documentation, transcription, remixing (recycling), and recombining of digital maps (including landscape, street-view, and the ability to 'travel' from place to place digitally); reviews of restaurants, attractions, and hotels; articles; social media posts; advertisements; audio/visual content; pop-ups and the attendant glitches in loading and streaming content.