Join us for a lively conversation with acclaimed author Joanna Walsh, a multidisciplinary writer for print, digital and performance who will discuss themes of her new book, Girl Online, with Caroline Campbell, London/Dublin based artist and filmmaker.
Part personal essay, part feminist meditation, Girl Online explores the out-of-hours work of writing a ‘self’ online, as mothers, caregivers and gig workers in the culture economy. Our guests reflect on the book’s proposition, ‘that the girl online must sign the devil’s bargain of the internet, that one is given a platform only on the condition’ that they commodify themselves, eternally youthful, cute and responsibility-free, hiding offline domestic, professional and emotional labour while paying for their online presence with ‘accounts’ of personal ‘experience.’
This book launch and talk draws on Walsh’s witty, genre-defying style borrows from the online languages of coding, tweets and blogging, and pays tribute to femme discourse. Ultimately she asks, is the personal internet a trap, or can it also be an opportunity for survival, and resistance?
Book copies of Girl Online will be made available to purchase on the evening via publishers Verso Books
From 7.15pm Music in the Courtyard will be performed by Olesya Zdorovetska, a powerful and innovative voice, fluent in a diverse range of disciplines and working internationally across numerous fields of activity. As a solo performer and collaborator she crosses the fields of improvised, jazz, Afro-Caribbean, contemporary classical, traditional and experimental music, and regularly composes for film and theatre.
Refreshments are available for purchase at IMMA’s Outdoor café The Flying Dog.