Words on the Move IV

Words on the Move: The Digital Body

Keynes Library, 43 Gordon Square, Birkbeck College
31 May, 2019, 10am-6pm

Words on the Move IV looks at embodiment in digital space. In collaboration with creative writers from Palestinian Writing Workshop in The West Bank, Palestine, the Akwaaba group in Hackney, and members from Giocherenda in Palermo, Sicily, this workshop will explore how mapping and walking can help stimulate stories, made from memories and imagination, and connect individuals who have lost their homes. Together with artists, dancers, designers and writers, they will explore the issue of dematerialisation on the web, of AI as a site of potential expression, of prosthetic and cyborg enhancement, and explore virtual media as an unexpectedly productive zone of haptic knowledge ; we shall reflect upon the multi-media character of internet communications as a para-linguistic, polyglot, macaronic arena where exchanges can take place between people without languages in common through embodied systems of sound, and movement.

The Words on the Move IV programme here, where you can find the list of speakers along with the papers and ideas they presented.

Speakers Alex Reuben and Chris Frith made a wonderful collaborative piece during the lunchtime walk, 'The Question of Ownership 2: Creating in a Digital-Physical Space'.

This event is organised by Marina Warner, Steve Willey and Luke Williams, and is supported by the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities and the Contemporary Poetics Research Centre, Birkbeck.

Image credit: Bloomberg & Chanarin, 'The Painter's Wife', Spirit is a Bone. Poster Design by Joseph Bradley Hill.