[-empyre-] fake news

[Anna Munster]

Hi All,
Rather than report on our event from Friday, here’s a link to the Twitter stream from the day: @apb_niea

This is a really comprehensive set of fragments and ideas from all the papers and performances so a nice ‘anarchive’ - providing flavours and tastes rather than preserving and reportage!

One person (and presentation) from the day I did want to mention was by Simon Hunt aka Pauline Pantsdown. For those of you in the ‘north’: Pauline is  the drag character of Pauline Hanson (who is a vicious rightwing politician).
Pantsdown was invented by Simon in 1998 when Hanson’s ‘One Nation’ party was born on a platform of immigrant hate.

Recently Simon revived the fake Pauline to be an online, mainly Facebook, presence, to combat all right wing and christian anti-queer activity in Australia, With 5000 Facebook followers, fake Pauline has developed a series of social media strategies and mechanisms for shutting down, disinvesting and booting out christian lobby groups, neo-nazis and visitors to Australia using social media campaigns. This is done through brute people power - showing up and protesting against alt-righters - but also developing a sophisticated knowledge of the changing landscape of memes, social media embedding mechanisms and exploiting the actual mistakes made in online spaces (poor web design etc) by a lot of christian online presences...

Simon gave us a tour through what he calls: 'online story-telling as activism’. I have to say this was a truly incredible and really heartfelt account of what it is possible to do as a fake!! :
https://www.facebook.com/paulinepantsdown666

You just have to read his-her profile for a great laugh!!! and sorry, Pauline has reached max followers for a personal FB page…but you can read and feel the action unfolding constantly….may all real fakes proliferate (which I think are only possible under a generalised condition of ‘public’ art…)


cheers Anna