Dr Kimberly Campanello receives Literature Project Award

Congratulations to Dr Campanello, who has been awarded Arts Council Ireland funding to support a new collaborative project.

The Arts Council Ireland introduced the Literature Project Award in recognition of the changing landscape for literary work in Ireland, aiming to support projects that connect literature with readers and audiences. It allows writers and illustrators to research, develop and create work in new and innovative ways.

Poets Kimberly Campanello and Christodoulos Makris have been awarded the Literature Project Award to collaboratively explore space-time dimensions of travel in the age of the digital/anthropocene.

Dublin-based digital publisher Fallow Media will disseminate the result through a discrete digital publication to be released in late 2021.

The project

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. As writers, we ask ourselves how past imaginary navigation in literature informs current non-actual (digital) navigation of texts and geographies? 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.

Dr Kimberly Campanello is a poet and course director of BA English Literature with Creative Writing.

Find out more about Creative Writing at Leeds.

Photograph credit: Ror Conaty