Practice Research Group meeting
Dear all,
This is a reminder about the next Practice Research Group meeting on Wednesday 29 November, 2-4pm, at Baines Wing SR (G.36), where Joanna Walsh (joannawalsh.ie) will be in conversation with Kimberly Campanello.
Amongst other projects, Joanna will present and discuss her Markievicz-award-winning miss-communication.ie, the first generative text project* to be supported by the Irish Arts Council.
Miss-Communication.ie is a work of two halves: an AI chatbot trained on Constance Markievicz's prison letters and interviews with 20th century Dublin women collected by Máirín Johnston in her 1988 book Dublin Belles, plus a choose-your-own-critical-theory adventure essay investigating language, autonomy, creativity, and gender identity. Joanna Walsh has both programmed the AI and written the essay, but is she the author of either ‘work’?
Miss-Communication is also published in print by JOAN.
"Miss-Communication is a radical work of art in book form. With effervescent experimentation, Joanna Walsh stretches and challenges parameters of literature, theory, history and the digital world. Brilliantly she aligns a cast of theoreticians with voices of Irish women who speak to us through a dynamic hybrid mechanistic structure, somewhere between screen-play, technical instruction and historical record. Repetition, deconstruction and reconstruction fold into each page making for a unique textual-verbal architecture that deftly subverts limits of thought to create new understanding. Captivating. "
– Anne Tallentire
After a short break, Joanna will lead a workshop using Twine, a simple, free digital narrative tool, to play with the possibilities of digital writing discussed during the first part of the session. This workshop is aimed at everyone who writes--no specialist digital literacy required.
It's essential that participants bring a laptop, and it preferable to download the free programme, Twine before the session. (It is also possible to use Twine direct on any web browser).
Windows Download: https://twine.en.uptodown.com/windows
They should also bring a short text that they would like to explore, de- and reconstruct. This text can be in any genre, fiction or nonfiction, written by the participant or by someone else. As an optional extra, they can also bring one or more digital images they might like to incorporate.
Bio:
Joanna Walsh a multidisciplinary writer for print, digital and performance. The author of eleven books (several co-written with AI that she has coded), her publishers include Semiotext(e), Bloomsbury and Verso. She is the creator of the digital narratives, seed-story.com and miss-communication.ie. Her work has been performed/exhibited at venues including IMMA, the ICA, the Whitworth, PHI Motreal* and Sample Studios Cork. She is the 2020 Markievicz Awardee for Literature in Ireland and a UK Arts Foundation fellow, as well as the founder of the Twitter-based campaigns @read_women (2014-18) and @noentry_arts. She is currently a MSCA postdoctoral fellow at NUI Maynooth.
*The full video of Joanna's work for PHI, #theoryplushouseworktheory, is available here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lTdy5J9xNrU