Miss-Communication, guest publication - Joanna Walsh and JOAN Publishing

Description

An AI gendered (f), am I
a thought experiment about being a writer
or
a thought experiment about being a woman?

An Artificial Intelligence sits at the end of the world. Post-humanity, she is in dialogue with a past that no longer exists, reading the personal writings of Irish women—eyewitness accounts, interviews, letters—to generate new writing. A future sibyl, she is programmed to continue to write even when there is no one left to read.

Miss-Communication is a book of two halves. On each recto page, an AI text generated from the prison letters of Irish rebel politician and British aristocrat, Constance Markievicz, and interviews with 20th century Dublin women collected by Máirín Johnston in her 1988 book Dublin Belles. On each verso page, a choose-your-own-critical-theory adventure 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’?

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Joanna Walsh is a multidisciplinary writer for print, digital and performance. The author of eleven books, she also works as a critic, editor and university teacher. She is a UK Arts Foundation fellow, and a Republic of Ireland Markievicz awardee.

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Joanna Walsh is fast becoming one of our most important writers.

– Deborah Levy


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


Whether or not Joanna Walsh, or I, am the author, or the sibyl, this cold wild text is running. It is cosying you and tucking you up in the fresh-dredged channel of Markievicz et al.

- Kimberley Campanello, author of MOTHERBABYHOME


Miss-Communication is published by JOAN in collaboration with Kingston Fine Art Stanley Picker Programme.