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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. 

 


About the Book  

What happens when a woman goes online? She becomes a girl. 

 The unwritten contract of the internet, that a user is what is used, extends from the well-examined issue of data privacy and consent to the very selves women are encouraged to create in order to appear. Invited to self-construct as “girls online,” vloggers, bloggers and influencers sign a devil’s bargain: a platform on the condition 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.” 

Told via the arresting personal narrative of one woman negotiating the (cyber)space between her identities as girl, mother, writer, and commodified online persona, Girl Online is written in a plethora of the online styles, from programming language to the blog/diary, from tweets to lyric prose, taking in selfies, social media, celebrity and Cyberfeminism. See more details here  


About the Speakers

Joanna Walsh 
Joanna Walsh a multidisciplinary writer for print, digital and performance. The author of 11 books, she was the recipient of the 2020 Markievicz Award for Literature, which she used to create the digital/print hybrid project miss-communication.ie. She is a UK Arts Foundation Fellow, a university teacher and editor, and an arts activist. She founded and ran @read_women (2014-18) described by the New York Times as ‘a rallying cry for equal treatment for women writers’, and currently runs @noentry_arts. 

Caroline Campbell 
Caroline Campbell (www.loiteringtheatre.org ) is a London/Dublin based artist and filmmaker working with d.i.y. robotics, myth, protest and queer dissent. Recent work includes a giant Twitter-scraper eye-rolling machine (based on Angela Merkel) that reacts realtime to the annoying comments of patriarchs and their allies online: www.themerkelmachine.org. Caroline is currently researching the future embodiment of artificial intelligence, at Goldsmiths College London. Campell’s visual arts practice consciously operates in stealth mode online – as part of a practice of resistance to surveillance capitalism etc.