Data, as a form of content, occupies both our physical screens and our mental spaces. Over time, we become accustomed to the censoring and filtering algorithms which influence how we perceive and react to the information we see. Paradoxically, even though we are the subjects of this matter, we become habituated to enduring some level of erasure in our online experiences. In one way or another, we have all encountered diverse manifestations of information curation driven by human and machine influences.

A lecture performance by Winnie Soon, The Poetics of Unerasable Characters, will delve into the horrors of erasure, exploring themes of forgetting, remembering, recalling, erasing, voicing, and generating characters. Followed by a conversation with Rachel O’Dwyer, they will ask how we can learn to recognise fragmented memories and archives, how they are leveraged to create the conditions for unusable politics, and how such tactics of silencing and obfuscation can be overcome.