&Now 2019 Conference

How do multimodal poetics and collaborations converge with social activism? How do they create unexpected coalitions and healing through expanding performance and digital arts platforms? This panel looks at multimodal poetics as explicitly collaborative work responsive to increasing social division. At the convergence point between art form and artist, we see political hope emergent in sustained collaborations between backgrounds (QTPOC/queer/South Asian/Cuban-American communities) and craft (game design/virtual reality/spoken word/music composition). We posit that coalition-building functions across these spaces precisely because of their dependence on cross-arts and cross-discipline collaboration. These convergences include:

1. Two collaborators (VR Designer Aaron Holloway and Visual Artist Jordan Havlicek) on a VR Poetry game created with a cohort of poets, wherein participants can build, draw, write, and visit politically mediated identity;
2. Twitter poetry (Visual Artist and Performer Jan Okemgbo) spliced with video game playing footage, which is produced in open access media as a video poetry;
3. Two collaborators – (Poet Dr. Patrick Milian and Composer Emerson Eads) – on the song cycle they produced in the ambiguous space between art song and chamber opera on queer love resisting binaristic social formations, The Gleaners; and,
4. A spoken word poetry performance and discussion (Poet and Performer Ananya Garg) on navigating South Asian and queer identity as collaboratively negotiated between performer and audience.

Finally, to situate the seven speakers and their four hybrid performances and discussions, the panel host (C. R. Grimmer) will frame the conversation and suggest audience engagement. This framing comes out of the panel host’s own the conversation through their research on activist poetry and related multimodal poetics from the 1960’s to the present, and their framing questions will ask how contemporary digital and public arts coalitions create historically grounded spaces for building necessary, emergent worlds of activist poetics.