We the Dead: Brian Michael Murphy in conversation with Ricardo Wilson

Northshire Bookstore: Brian Michael Murphy - We The Dead - With Ricardo Wilson

In person at our VT location!
Event date:
Saturday, April 29, 2023 - 6:00pm
Event address:
4869 Main St
Manchester Center, VT 05255

Media archaeologist, essayist, poet, and Dean of the College at Bennington College, Brian Michael Murphy will present We the Dead: Preserving Data at the End of the World, a Northshire Staff Pick, with fellow author Ricardo Wilson. Artfully written and packed with provocative ideas, this haunting book illuminates the dark places of the data complex and the ways it increasingly blurs the lines between human and machine, biological body and data body, life and digital afterlife.

"There is something remarkable on every page of this important and intensely fascinating book which reveals just how ensnared we all are to Big Data. Hell, it shifts my understanding of “me”--there’s my body and as Murphy shows there’s also my “data body,” stored piecemeal in some of the hundreds of fascinating environs that We the Dead explores. Murphy dramatizes the big narrative of how the data complex developed, exploded, commodified our lives, and colonized us via technology but with a poet’s eye for detail. White supremacist time capsule aficionados. Books gassed with Zyklon B. Miles of rotting documents. Nuclear armageddon cosplay, the golden record, historical amnesia, self-destructing emails, eugenic whiteness. Human DNA as digital storage.Terrifying and funny. From the Civil War to space tourist venture capitalists and beyond, this is one of those rare books–like Stamped from the Beginning–that is revelatory, epochal." — Reviewed by Dafydd Wood

Locked away in refrigerated vaults, sanitized by gas chambers, and secured within bombproof caverns deep under mountains are America's most prized materials: the ever-expanding collection of records that now accompany each of us from birth to death. This data complex backs up and protects our most vital information against decay and destruction, and yet it binds us to corporate and government institutions whose power is also preserved in its bunkers, infrastructures, and sterilized spaces.

We the Dead traces the emergence of the data complex in the early twentieth century and guides readers through its expansion in a series of moments when Americans thought they were living just before the end of the world. Depression-era eugenicists feared racial contamination and the downfall of the white American family, while contemporary technologists seek ever denser and more durable materials for storing data, from microetched metal discs to cryptocurrency keys encoded in synthetic DNA. Artfully written and packed with provocative ideas, this haunting book illuminates the dark places of the data complex and the ways it increasingly blurs the lines between human and machine, biological body and data body, life and digital afterlife.

Bios

Brian Michael Murphy is a media archaeologist, essayist, and poet, and the author of We the Dead: Preserving Data at the End of the World (University of North Carolina Press, 2022). He is Dean of the College at Bennington College, and Managing and Nonfiction Editor of Northwest Review. His writings have appeared in Lapham's Quarterly, Wall Street Journal, Narrative, Kenyon Review, Fairy Tale Review, Kweli, Media-N, Mississippi Review, and in Italian translation in Ácoma. In Fall 2021, he was a Fulbright Scholar at the University of Naples “L’Orientale” in Italy, teaching in the graduate program in American Literature. He holds a PhD in Comparative Studies from The Ohio State University, where he was a Presidential Fellow, and his work has been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Vermont Arts Council, and the Ohio Arts Council. He has also served as Director of the Kenyon Review Young Writers Workshop, where he previously taught for several years.

Ricardo Wilson is the author of An Apparent Horizon and Other Stories (PANK Books, 2021) and The Nigrescent Beyond: Mexico, the United States, and the Psychic Vanishing of Blackness (Northwestern UP, 2020). An Apparent Horizon and Other Stories was selected as a finalist for both the Vermont Book Award and the Big Other Book Award. His writing can also be found in, among other spaces, 3:AM Magazine, Black Renaissance/Renaissance Noire, BOMB, Callaloo, The Common, CR: The New Centennial Review, Crazyhorse, Northwest Review, The Offing, and Stirring. Ricardo is an assistant professor of English at Williams College and the director of Outpost, a residency for creative writers of color from the United States and Latin America.

If you have questions about this or any other event, please write us at events@northshire.com