HemiPress Launch and Reception

HemiPress Launch and Reception

Tuesday, Feburary 21
5-7 pm

Please join us as we officially celebrate the launch of HemiPress! We are thrilled to announce our Gesture series with the release of Electronic Disturbance Theater 2.0/b.a.n.g. lab's [({  })] Transborder Immigrant Tool. We will also be celebrating the release of issue 12.2 of emisférica, "States of Devotion: Religion, Neoliberalism, Biopolitics." Reception to follow.

HemiPress
HemiPress is the Hemispheric Institute’s digital publications imprint, created to house and centralize our diverse publication initiatives. Using a variety of customized open-source digital humanities platforms, HemiPress includes the Gesture short works series, the Duke U.P./HemiPress digital books, stand-alone essays, and the Institute’s peer-reviewed journal emisférica, alongside interviews, Cuadernos, and other online teaching resources. It also provides state-of-the-art multilingual publication capacities and immersive formats for capturing the “live” of performance, as well as a digital “bookshelf”—the interface that houses all of the Institute’s publications and connects communities of readers across the Americas.

Gesture
Gesture––the new Tome series from HemiPress––publishes short, evocative digital works that combine multimedia and writing to make an original critical intervention in the fields of performance and politics. “Gesture” performs across various expressive arenas. From Medieval Latin gestūra, gesture is a mode of action. It refers to a movement by the body intended to express a thought or feeling, an emotion, an idea, an opinion, and a political posture. The embodied, communicative, affective, and political dimensions of the word open up an expressive field of possibility, which ranges from the impulse to communicate to the accomplished act. Gestures can be both fleeting expressions and iterable, quotable enactments that cite previous acts and positions. The digital gesture signals a command. Gestures often accompany speech, but they are not reducible to verbal language. Gestures capture the many forms of expression that make up a communicative act. Gesture invites scholars, activists, and artists to submit work that enacts a position, a movement, a critical reflection.

[({ })] Transborder Immigrant Tool
This Gesture foregrounds the mediatic, aural, and poetic dimensions of Electronic Disturbance Theater 2.0/b.a.n.g. lab’s Transborder Immigrant Tool project. Incorporating photography, video, audio, poetry, and prose, this Gesture works across four languages of the Americas—English, Spanish, Nahuatl, and Ayuujk/Mixe––to produce a uniquely rich digital experience of this important work at a critical moment of political transformation.

Hemispheric Institute of Performance & Politics
20 Cooper Square, 5th Floor
New York, NY 10003