In this post-truth era, how does one navigate the endless information available and choose a viable narrative of reality? In How to Know What's Really Happening Glasgow-based writer and curator Francis McKee looks at various techniques for determining verity, from those of spy agencies and whistle-blowers to mystics and scientists.
You get to your hotel room after a long journey. You drop your bag, turn out the lights, and lie down. A few hours later you wake up in total darkness. For a good minute you have no sense of who you are—though once you turn on the television, or more likely, log on to the Internet, then information floods your mind. You may ask: How do I know what's really happening? This book offers a simple route through the morass of information. It will outline the things you need to know to answer this question. What's more, the techniques revealed here can be adapted for many circumstances you will encounter in life.
This book is part of the “Kayfa ta” series, a publishing initiative of artists Maha Maamoun and Ala Younis. Each book in the series is a monographic essay commissioned in the style of how-to manuals that situate themselves in the space between the technical and the reflective, the everyday and the speculative, the instructional and the intuitive, and the factual and the fictional.
Francis McKee (born 1960) is an Irish writer and curator working in Glasgow. His research interests include the exploration of open source theory as a potential economic model within the arts, the role of the archive in contemporary art, and modes of curatorial practice.
