Christoph Girard and Karl Baumann are pairing up for the crux of what this course is supposed to be about; the gathering of information from UC Santa Cruz faculty/researchers.
Gary Young is a poet whose poetry reflects around the landscape of California; he grew up in Santa Cruz and lived in Los Angeles for the duration of his youth. Young is interested in publishing and expanding literature that reflects lived life in respect to location by means of a small literary press he has worked on for thirty years. From the beginning of the press, he worked on means to improve the generation of literature with better and better technology. The books he published are widely available through the advent and ease of publishing via digital media.
Irene Lusztig was born in Romania but has spent must of her educational career in the UK and the east coast, attending Harvard for undergrad and receiving a MFA in film/video at Bard and then teaching at Harvard, New York Institute of Technology, SUNY Purchase, and Temple University. Her recent work has utilized the filmic medium as a facilitator of personal explorations into history, especially concerning the former Soviet Union, in order "to open a contemporary landscape", revisiting and reinterpreting the original state propagandic version of these events.
They're both working in the geographical/cultural contexts of the areas they were born, or identify with. While Young writes about a personal connection with the experience of surrounding landscape like the mountains in Santa Cruz County, Lusztig works through the personal experience of re-engaging a past cultural landscape, a phantasmal presence of political or familial history. Both appear to be interested in the availability of information to the public through digital variations of older technology (ie publishing and film).
To Lusztig: Does your work seek to not only enact but also provoke historical agency?
To Young: How can literature become readily available publishing them with programs and distributing books via a literary press?
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