WORKSHOP ALERT! 🚨
Join SPAM editors Kirsty and Maria for a free workshop on dreams & digital poetics, as part of a jam-packed programme for the Still-at-Home Lit Fringe Festival.
☁️💿☁️💿☁️💿☁️💿☁️💿☁️💿☁️💿☁️💿☁️💿☁️💿☁️💿☁️💿☁️💿☁️💿☁️💿
Derrida once claimed ‘the dreamer invents [their] own grammar’. In this workshop, we’ll be delving into the realm of dreams from a post-internet perspective, exploring overlaps between dream language and the psychic environments of digital platforms. From lightweight writing activities to readings of dreams and poetics, we’ll think about questions around time, memory, intimacy and association within the dreamscapes of sleep and the attention demanding, hyper-environs of social media. Writing about Andrei Tarkovsky’s film Solaris (1972), Jonathan Crary notes that ‘loss of diurnal time loosen[s] one's psychic hold on a stable present, allowing dream as the bearer of memory to be relocated into waking life’. While Crary is talking about life on a space station, might the ‘artificial environment’ of the internet effect a similar temporal displacement? In ‘Digital Dreamland’, we’ll use poetry to venture through a post-internet grammar of dreams and offer experimental approaches to the electronic (un)conscious, both on the page and the screen.
Kirsty Dunlop
Kirsty Dunlop (she/her) is conducting practice-based research on interactive fiction, and essaying as a DFA candidate in Creative Writing at the University of Glasgow, alongside supervision in Computer Science and English Literature. She is the poetry and nonfiction editor at SPAM Press, and writes short stories, poetry, electronic literature, collaborative work and various hybrid forms. You can find recent work published by Trickhouse Press, Wet Grain, Dostoyevsky Wannabe, and a collaborative broadside with nicky melville, THE FACT THAT (2020), out with GONG FARM.
Maria Sledmere
Maria Sledmere (she/her) is working on a DFA in Creative Writing at the University of Glasgow. She is editor-in-chief at SPAM Press and member of A+E Collective. Recent publications include infra•structure (Broken Sleep) — with Katy Lewis Hood, Chlorophyllia (OrangeApple Press), neutral milky halo (Guillemot Press) and varnish//cache (If A Leaf Falls). With Rhian Williams, she co-edited the anthology the weird folds: everyday poems from the anthropocene (Dostoyevsky Wannabe). Her current work includes a seasonal pamphlet series, Sonnets for Hooch, in collaboration with Mau Baiocco and Kyle Lovell. @mariaxrose
23rd May @ 3-5pm (BST)
Register for tickets here.