August 12, 2020
Cultural critic David Levi Strauss discusses his new book “Co-Illusion: Dispatches from the End of Communication” with poet Roberto Tejada
About this Event: Cultural critic, essayist, and poet David Levi Strauss and poet, and art historian Roberto Tejada discuss Strauss’s latest book, Co-Illusion: Dispatches from the End of Communication (MIT Press, 2020), unpacking the evolving relationships between image, text, and the media’s influence on public opinion.
The political crisis that sneaked up on America—the rise of Trump and Trumpism—has revealed the rot at the core of American exceptionalism. Recent changes in the way words and images are produced and received have made the current surreality possible; communication through social media, by design, maximizes attention and minimizes scrutiny. In Co-Illusion, the noted writer on art, photography, and politics David Levi Strauss bears witness to the new “iconopolitics” in which words and images lose their connection to reality. The collusion that fueled Trump’s rise was the secret agreement of voters and media consumers—their “co-illusion”—to set aside the social contract.
Strauss offers dispatches from the epicenter of our constitutional earthquake, writing first from the 2016 Democratic and Republican conventions and then from the campaign. After the election, he switches gears, writing in the voices of the regime and of those complicit in its actions—from the thoughts of the President himself (“I am not a mistake. I am not a fluke, or a bug in the system. I am the System”) to the reflections of a nameless billionaire tech CEO whose initials may or may not be M. Z.
—————————————————————-
This event will be broadcast on Zoom and YouTube.
Register to watch live and interact via Zoom, or watch live on FotoFest’s YouTube channel at www.youtube.com/FotoFestIntl.
A Q&A with the audience will conclude the event. Questions for the Q&A will be collected live via Zoom’s audio stream and YouTube’s comment function.
Silver Street Studios, 2000 Edwards Street
Houston, 77007 TX
(713) 223-5522
Get directions