Kate Eichhorn

Thanks to Facebook and Instagram, our younger selves have been captured and preserved online. But what happens, Kate Eichhorn asks, when we can’t leave our most embarrassing moments behind? Rather than a childhood cut short by a loss of innocence, the real crisis of the digital age may be the specter of a childhood that can never be forgotten.

Growing Up with Social Media

The End of Forgetting

A concise introduction to content and the content industry, from the early internet to the Instagram egg. From the time we roll out of bed to check overnight updates to our last posts, likes, and views of the previous day, we're consuming and producing content. But what does the term “content” even mean? When did it become ubiquitous? And at what cost? In this volume in the MIT Press Essential Knowledge series, Kate Eichhorn offers a concise introduction to content and the content industry, examining the far-reaching effects content has on culture, politics, and labor in a digital age. Eichhorn traces the evolution of our current understanding of content from the early internet to the current social mediaverse. The quintessential example of content, she says, is the Instagram egg—an image that imparted no information or knowledge and circulated simply for the sake of circulation. Eichhorn explores what differentiates user-generated content from content produced by compensated (although often undercompensated) workers; examines how fields from art and literature to journalism and politics have weathered the rise of the content industry; and investigates the increasing importance of artists’ “content capital”—the ability of artists, writers, and performers to produce content not about their work but about their status as artists.

Content

In the 1990s, a generation of women born during the rise of the second wave feminist movement plotted a revolution. These young activists funneled their outrage and energy into creating music, and zines using salvaged audio equipment and stolen time on copy machines. By 2000, the cultural artifacts of this movement had started to migrate from basements and storage units to community and university archives, establishing new sites of storytelling and political activism. The Archival Turn in Feminism chronicles these important cultural artifacts and their collection, cataloging, preservation, and distribution. Cultural studies scholar Kate Eichhorn examines institutions such as the Sallie Bingham Center for Women’s History and Culture at Duke University, The Riot Grrrl Collection at New York University, and the Barnard Zine Library. She also profiles the archivists who have assembled these significant feminist collections. Eichhorn shows why young feminist activists, cultural producers, and scholars embraced the archive, and how they used it to stage political alliances across eras and generations. A volume in the American Literatures Initiative

Outrage in Order

The Archival Turn in Feminism

نهاية النسيان

How xerography became a creative medium and political tool, arming artists and activists on the margins with an accessible means of making their messages public. This is the story of how the xerographic copier, or “Xerox machine,” became a creative medium for artists and activists during the last few decades of the twentieth century. Paper jams, mangled pages, and even fires made early versions of this clunky office machine a source of fear, rage, dread, and disappointment. But eventually, xerography democratized print culture by making it convenient and affordable for renegade publishers, zinesters, artists, punks, anarchists, queers, feminists, street activists, and others to publish their work and to get their messages out on the street. The xerographic copier adjusted the lived and imagined margins of society, Eichhorn argues, by supporting artistic and political expression and mobilizing subcultural movements. Eichhorn describes early efforts to use xerography to create art and the occasional scapegoating of urban copy shops and xerographic technologies following political panics, using the post-9/11 raid on a Toronto copy shop as her central example. She examines New York's downtown art and punk scenes of the 1970s to 1990s, arguing that xerography—including photocopied posters, mail art, and zines—changed what cities looked like and how we experienced them. And she looks at how a generation of activists and artists deployed the copy machine in AIDS and queer activism while simultaneously introducing the copy machine's gritty, DIY aesthetics into international art markets. Xerographic copy machines are now defunct. Office copiers are digital, and activists rely on social media more than photocopied posters. And yet, Eichhorn argues, even though we now live in a post-xerographic era, the grassroots aesthetics and political legacy of xerography persists.

Xerography, Art, and Activism in the Late Twentieth Century

Adjusted Margin

Heather Milne

"The fifteen women featured in this volume are some of the best writers currently engaged in avant-garde literary production, defining the contours of new movements and schools of writing. By showcasing their work alongside extensive interviews, Prismatic Publics stages intimate encounters with these key figures as they work in and against feminist, Language, conceptual, investigative and other poetic traditions - often across, between and at the interstices of genres." "Gathered in a single volume, these selections - some dating back to the early 1970s and others appearing in print for the first time - provide an opportunity to trace the diverse networks, influences, dialogues, dialectics and interventions that continue to make Canada's innovative womenwriters a powerful force in avant-garde writing around the world."--BOOK JACKET.

Innovative Canadian Women's Poetry and Poetics

Prismatic Publics

Poetry. What drives the collector? Is the archive a site of order, the convergence of past narratives and present desires, the chaotic reflection of passions spilling over categories? Is every lover an archive waiting to come undone? Every archive a place where the dust of bodies accumulates? One file in a fonds of misplaced manuscripts, FOND is haunted by an author's compulsion to repeat and the archive's inevitable limits. A finding aid guides the reader through a field of drafts, grids and marginalia, but can it account for this conflicting narrative of desire and its inevitable unraveling? A book-length disentanglement of one archive of emotion, FOND dwells in the eerily familiar, exposing the fragility of our most rigid constraints. Kate Eichhorn's poetry and creative prose have appeared in journals such as Matrix, How 2, Bird Dog and CV2. She is also the co-editor of Innovative Canadian Women's Poetry and Poetics (forthcoming from Coach House Books).

Fond

SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2011 GOVERNOR GENERAL'S AWARD Her painful legs refused to emerge. It was a question of a particular movement. A passage from analyses to terrifying hallucination. The pressure oozing out of her. Still nursing she held up the head. Her own singular sensation of pain. Ferociously archival proof of an event that left no other material. Fieldnotes, a forensic charts one forensic anthropologist's series of descents in the first decade of the new millennium - a decade when forensic discourses and experts became ubiquitous in popular culture and on the daily news. But the edgy, passionate and erudite writer of these fieldnotes is no Temperance Brennan or Kathy Reichs. Part parody of popular discourses on the forensic anthropologist, part exegesis of the fieldnote genre, and part response to the natural and human catastrophes that unfolded during the writing of this book, Eichhorn's second collection continues to explore the poetics and affective dimensions of knowledge making at the edges of poetry and fiction.

Kate Eichhorn

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