Book launch Josje Weusten + Seeing is believing
During the presentation of her book Fake Fish – a dystopian novel about the devastating impact of fake news and the cancel culture on the European Union – author Josje Weusten will have a conversation with Dr Jan de Roder. After their conversation, a documentary on synthetic media and Deepfake, one of the main themes of the book, will be shown. Afterwards, in collaboration with book store De Tribune, books will be sold and signed.
About the book
FAKE FISH is a dystopian literary novel which looks at the devastating impact of Fake News and Cancel Culture on the European Union through the eyes of a diverse cast of characters, with each individual compelled to navigate the chilling effects of the 'deep fakes' which threaten to unravel their very perception of reality. They are forced to choose between safety and freedom, truth and fiction.
Think Atwood meets Tarantino.
The novel is largely set in Maastricht, including Lumière Cinema and several of the university’s buildings. The novel is published by the independent literary publishing house Sparsile Books (Glasgow, UK).
About the author
Josje Weusten (PhD) is a Dutch fiction author, writing in English, living in Belgium. Next to a writer, she is a senior lecturer and academic, teaching literature, poetry, and creative writing at Maastricht University. Josje Weusten aims to write fiction, which invites us to consider multiple perspectives; never settling down on one meaning. Striving for this, she takes to heart Oscar Wilde’s words that ‘A truth in art is that whose contradictory is also true’.
Her short stories have appeared in Litbreak Magazine (NY), Burningword Literary Journal (LA), Flash Fiction Magazine (NY), and Low Hanging Fruit (LA). She is a regular essayist for The Independent Publishing Magazine and founder and chief editor of the Telling Stories Magazine. Her work has been nominated for Best Small Fictions (2024 edition) awarded by Altcurrent Press in the category micro-fiction. FAKE FISH is her debut novel.
Author website: https://josjeweusten.com
Instagram handle: https://www.instagram.com/josj...
About the Interviewer
Dr. Jan de Roder is assistant professor of literary studies at the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at Maastricht University and an esteemed essayist, specialised in the literary essay. His essays on contemporary literature have been published in Yang, Raster, Parmentier and Armada. He has been a member of the editorial team of Parmentier and Armada.
In addition, Jan de Roder has been board member of the Jan Campert foundation and has been a jury member of the Constantijn Huygens Prize and the P.C. Hooftprijs, one of the most important literary prizes in the Netherlands, awarded alternately for prose, poetry, and essayistic writing. The Royal Academy of Dutch Language and Literature awarded the Five-Yearly Essay Prize to his collection of essays HET ONBEHAGEN VAN DE LITERATUUR (2003).
VPRO Tegenlicht: Zien is geloven - English subtitled
This episode of the famous Dutch informative television programme Tegenlicht looks at how social media, information bubbles and Deepfake affect our reality.
We are living in an “infocalypse”, says British disinformation expert Nina Schick. In her book Deepfakes and the Infocalypse - What You Urgently Need to Know, she outlines a society inundated by too much information, where it is no longer possible to distinguish between information and disinformation. With the advent of social media, various groups in our society tend to increasingly retreat into their own echo chambers. Here, they experience their own subjective truth. This makes it increasingly difficult to reach consensus on how the “real” world should be seen.
This well-researched episode of the VPRO programme Tegenlicht sheds light on the consequences synthetic media can have on the spread of misinformation.