&Now 2015: Blast Radius

Join this collaborative experimental session of Writing On It All as we take to the walls to explore the intersections between personal identity and bureaucratic language within the structure of forms. How do we translate ourselves into the narratives of the institution, the university, the state, and the nation? How do forms shape our individual and collective identities, and are they re/shaped in turn? Interpolated as employees, students, medical patients (insured and uninsured), applicants, immigrants, business travelers and tourists, voters and consumers, adopters and adoptees, account holders, jurors and criminals, how do we become readable for the statistical eye and what are those opaque areas in which our status remains illegible? We will play with these highly codified and formulaic discourses which are ubiquitous in everyday life, denaturing their apparently natural existence, undermining the universality of subjection to this genre, and proliferating the languages in which forms can be filled out. Getting angry, lyrical, humorous, or unintelligible - and just plain getting back at all those forms - we are going to question the practice of filling them out by projecting them onto walls, creating a collective space of exposure where we can write back and rewrite, and appropriate and refuse, the strictures of literal forms.