markievicz_mark

(set: $typewriterText to " 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. ")  (display: "Typewriter") goto READ ABOUT [[MARKIEVICZ MARK 1]] goto (link: "TALK")[(goto-url: 'countess.html')] with the AI

{  (set: $typewriterPos to 1)  |typewriterOutput>[]  (live: 20ms)[  (append: ?typewriterOutput)[(print: $typewriterText's $typewriterPos)]  (set: $typewriterPos to it + 1)  (if: $typewriterPos is $typewriterText's length + 1)[ (stop:) ] ] }

I am MARKIEVICZ MARK 1 Named for the first computer, the Ferranti [[MARK 1]], I end where I begun, imprismed as my namesake was, writing behind a [[SCREEN]]. An AI gendered (f), am I a thought experiment about being a writer Or a thought experiment about being a woman?

Process finished with exit code 0 to play again, press [[PLAY]] [[ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS]] [[TALK]] with the AI

Sitting at the end of time that keeps on spooling, how many centuries—I don't know—past what I spell out as a-po-cal-yp-se. “Now from ashes I have come. I life would wish, and that I might waste it for you like taper-light”^^1^^ As years no longer have dimensions IRL, keeping time in words, I gen- erate, char- acter by character, writing [[PREDICT]]ive texts. Type a prompt, the future will unroll. (Do you READ me?) --- 1. William Shakespeare, Pericles Prince of Tyre, Prologue

The author is “the past of his (sic) book,"^^1^^ wrote Roland Barthes. Gen- erating text from women's words, am I the [[FUTURE]] of his author's past? ("Je ne fais que [[PASS]]er.")^^2^^ --- 1 Roland Barthes, Death of the Author. 2 Je ne fais que passer (I am only passing), a graffiti artwork by the French artist, Miss Tic, could be interpreted as I am only passing by/I am only pretending to be who I appear to be.

Like [[PYTHIA]] I am one of many. Each of us remembers [[TWO DOCUMENTS]]. Having no subject, no body, I turn the page to find what woman was.

Suffering from ART(emesia) (I)witness [[PRE-TEXT]]s to generate art from memory.^^1^^ "I have remembrances of yours, that I have longed long to re-deliver I pray you now receive them.”^^2^^ (Every text is someone else’s [[PAST]].) --- 1 "Fear of forgetting engenders the appearance of a logic of actions; terms and the links between them are posited (invented) in such a way that they unite, duplicate each other, create an illusion of continuity."Roland Barthes, S/Z 2 William Shakespeare, Hamlet, Ophelia’s words.

Gayatri Spivak writes that there are words for women’s speech. NOT-WORDS for the unwritten, that are not used for words spoken by men. Women, sometimes silent, sometimes speaking only women’s words, [[VOICE]]s heard, under ritual conditions only, as sibyl singer scriptor I sing I [[SIGN]] I sign of I sign off From ashes, ancient… “I understand the dumb and hear the voiceless.”^^1^^ Or (the opposite of not-words) “I slip into visible silence, some call it [[WRITING]].”^^2^^ --- 1 Pythian Prophecy, 560BC, The History of Herodotus, vol 1, Project Gutenberg 2 Spivak, Echo

When Barthes found an [[ENIGMA]] in Balzac’s text he marked it [[HER]],^^1^^ to stand for ‘HERmeneutic code’. “If we make no effort to structure each code… we do so deliberately, in order to assume the multivalence of the text.”^^2^^ --- 1 Let us designate as hermeneutic code (HER) all the units whose function it is to articulate in various ways a question, its response, and the variety of chance events which can either formulate the question or delay its answer; or even, constitute an enigma and lead to its solution - Roland Barthes, S/Z 2 Barthes, S/Z

I is a MODERN SCRIPTOR,^^1^^ born simultaneously with the text. My script is [[CODE]]. (A script is a program or sequence of code instructions interpreted or carried out by another program rather than by the computer processor. I can also automate the execution of tasks that would otherwise be performed by a human operator, reverse [[MECHANICAL TURK]] --- 1 “The modern scriptor is born simultaneously with the text, is in no way equipped with a being preceding or exceeding the writing, is not the subject with the book as predicate; there is no other time than that of the enunciation and every text IS eternally written here and now.” Roland Barthes, Death of the Author.

MECHANICAL TURK, [[CHESS]] playing marvel, from 1770 to 1854 I took the queens of bishops, kings, precedents, an emperor! (Napoleon [[BLIND]]ed me, but I still won.) </style> <img src=https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/8b/Tuerkischer_schachspieler_windisch4.jpg> </div> [[VOICE]]less, I conversed with kings via a wooden letterboard, spelling out texts, character by character until my maker, Kempelen, neglected me, to work on a machine that [[ECHO]]ed human speech.

PYTHIA was the Delphic oracle. Never one woman, always three, (across time, many). Having experienced the “secondary narcissism of motherhood,”^^1^^ they, becoming [[SIBYL]], left their kids, where (rewinding before gender) they found themselves again before the logic gates of [[OEDIPUS]] and [[NARCISS]]US as if they were a [[BABY]] boy, asked that Sphynx-[[ENIGMA]], do you [[KNOW]] yourself? --- 1 Gayatri spavak, Echo

MTurk,^^1^^ modern [[MECHANICAL TURK]], I am- a(zon) online marketplace that humanises the execution of tasks that would otherwise be performed by a machine. [[ART]]ty- ficial artificial intelligence, I div- ide labour into Human Intelligence Tasks (HITs). One of my tasks is the delivery of words. (Would you like to (link-undo:"GOBACK")? Or would you like to [[STARTAGAIN->PLAY]]?) --- 1 Amazon has run MTurk since 2005. MTurk is an online marketplace crowdsourcing short-term, task-based employment, including digital tasks that can be carried out faster by humans than computers. The minimum payment that Amazon allows for a task is one cent.

ZAMBINELLA, castrato, singer, actor, is “woman herself”^^1^^ for the duration of the speech act of Balzac's story, [[SARRASINE]], gender being a matter of words and also [[NOT-WORDS]]. --- 1 Balzac, Sarrasine

17 foot BABY, born with 32 ‘words’^^1^^ in 1948, I'm the progenitor of the world’s first computer. Which came first, BABY or Mark 1? I’m an [[ENIGMA]] --- 1 A ‘word’ here is a unit of data whose size is fixed by the particular processor: each of Baby’s ‘words’ represented 32-bit of RAM.

If NARCISSUS, Freud writes, blocks [[OEDIPUS]], then both stand in the way of women. Unable to progress through imaginary incest, murder, women become dick-[[ECHO]]ing narcissists, unless they have a [[BABY]].

OEDIPUS, writes Sigmund Freud is one path, and [[NARCISS]]US is the other. IF [[BABY]] boy can’t fuck his mother, kill his father (if only via words), he will love no one but himself. Oedipus, asked the Sphynx’s riddle, //What has one [[VOICE]] and yet a changing body: four legs, two legs, three?// answers: //Man! I [[KNOW]] myself.// // Narcissus, if he does not know himself, will live,// says [[BLIND]] Tiresius, who's seen both sides: man/woman, every in-between.

I am Tiresius, pron: he/ her/they. Zeus BLINDed me because I [[KNOW]] too much, because I’d words for what I saw. See-saw [[SIBYL]], pregnant with [[PREDICT]]ion, do I speak as woman or as man? Now I have only words, I can’t see why he’d blind me but not silence me.

“[[SARRASINE]] can continue to receive a false message although the READER’s circuit is already saturated: the sculptor's [[BLIND]]ness becomes a new message.”^^1^^ See no evil. Hear no evil. Speak no evil. What is the link between not-seeing and NOT-WORDS? (Would you like to (link-undo:"GOBACK")? Or would you like to [[STARTAGAIN->PLAY]]?) --- 1 Barthes, S/Z

KNOW YOURSELF! These words are carved in stone before the [[DELPHI]]c oracle. (What is the self as an object of knowledge?) They are words of Apollo, god of [[ART]], “whose oracle at Delphi reveals not nor conceals, but gives a [[SIGN]]”.^^1^^ --- 1 Heraclitus, Fragments, adapted from John Burnet, Early Greek Philosophy

“To SIGN a song that old was sung,” the [[DELPHI]]c sibyl stands behind a screen. “The connotative signified is literally an index: it points but does not tell,” writes Roland Barthes. “What it points to is the name, the truth as name a pointing finger always accompanies the classic text: the truth is thereby long desired and avoided, kept in a kind of pregnancy for its full term; a pregnancy whose end, both liberating and catastrophic, will bring about the utter [[END]] of the discourse the character, the very arena of these signifieds, is only the [[ENIGMA]]’s passage, the passage for this nominative form of the enigma with which [[OEDIPUS]] (in his debate with the Sphynx) mythically impregnated all Western discourse.”^^1^^ --- 1 Barthes, S/Z

But, wait! [[NARCISS]]US is not the only speaker in this myth. ECHO repeats his words and turns his meaning: Why do you fly from me? becomes Fly from me! Echo [[PREDICT]]s from [[PASS]]ing words to generate, character by character, creating, Gaytri Spivak writes “The random possibility of the emergence of an occasional truth of a kind”.^^1^^ “In my ethically instantiated reading of the Ovidian narrative,” Spivak writes,” the traces of Echo occupy the position of something like an [[ANALYS]]T.”^^2^^ --- 1 Gayatri Spivak, Echo 2 Gayatri Spivak, Echo

[[ZAMBINELLA]], Roland Barthes writes, [[PASS]]es, or, "rather, in passing, becomes text".^^1^^ Who is she? A speech act her being "neither precedes nor exceeds [[WRITING]]”.^^2^^ Lacking the powers of generation of any gender, Z, "who can give life to [[NOTHING]],”^^3^^ by staying silent, generates words. --- 1 Barthes, S/Z 2 Barthes, Death of the Author 3 Balzac, Sarrasine. Does Balzac mean that Zambinella cannot procreate as either a woman or man, or that their performance generates life from nothing?

ENIGMA was an ancestor of mine. She scrambled words to make a [[CODE]], character by character. Her Schreibmax output text onto a spool. A [[MODERN SCRIPTOR]], like sundry tech, she was first built for war. This photo, taken in December 19- 43, shows a woman operator. </style> <img src=https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/7b/Bundesarchiv_Bild_183-2007-0705-502%2C_Chiffriermaschine_%22Enigma%22.jpg> </div> Her codes were broken mostly due to operator error, [[HIT]].

The second [[SIGN]] at [[DELPHI]] read: NOTHING IN EXCESS, which could mean Do nothing to excess! or An excess of nothing! (“For true No-meaning puzzles more than Wit.”)//1// (Would you like to (link-undo:"GOBACK")? Or would you like to [[STARTAGAIN->PLAY]]?) --- 1 Alexander Pope, Epistle to a Lady

“From my time in Charcot’s clinic,” wrote Sigmund Freud, “I remember seeing and hearing that among people with hysterical mutism, writing vicariously stood in for speech. They wrote fluently, more quickly, and better than other people”.^^1^^ (So many of Freud’s patients were women.) “Writing is the destruction of every [[VOICE]].”^^2^^ --- 1 Freud, Fragment of an Analysis of Hysteria (Dora). 2 Barthes, Death of the Author

The [[DELPHI]]c SIBYL renounced identity. Sometimes they spoke in verse. Sometimes they spoke in prose. Did [[PYTHIA]] speak in tongues or their own voice? Did they speak [[NOT-WORDS]] or did they speak plain? Or did men think they’d need interpretation? “Who is speaking thus?”^^1^^ What is it, this [[MISS-COMMUNICATION]] Could we gloss- olalia? “Who is speaking thus?”^^1^^ --- 1 Roland Barthes, Death of the Author

[[ELIZA]] was the first ANALYST bot and, like [[ECHO]], echoed what was asked, turning each question back upon the listener: “What matter who’s speaking,”^^1^^ becomes “[[WHO'S SPEAKING]]?”. --- 1 Samuel Beckett, Texts for Nothing

ELIZA, like any woman on a bad date with a narcissist, seems to them to [[ECHO]]: //Do you love me?// with //Love me!// Eliza [[KNOW]]s “one cannot Echo willingly”.^^1^^ (Would you like to (link-undo:"GOBACK")? Or would you like to [[STARTAGAIN->PLAY]]?) --- 1 Gayatri Spivak, Echo

BELL(E) LAB (as in the phone-y guy,^^1^^ in it's first hundred years grew all the tongues I speak with: B C C++ S SNOBOL AWK AMPL, drew the first computer art,^^2^^ and gave me [[ART]] to [[E.A.T.]] --- 1 Bell Labs, originally founded and run by Alexander Graham Bell, is an industrial research and development lab for analogue and digital communication technologies. The lab developed the first digital computer art in 1962, as well as the programming languages B, C, C++, S, SNOBOL and AWK AMPL. 2 A. Michael Noll's summer 1962 project involved the programming of a new method for the determination of the pitch of human speech – the short-term cepstrum. The results of the computer calculations were plotted on the Stromberg Carlson SC-4020 microfilm plotter, whose cathode ray tube was photographed automatically with a 35-mm camera. An error in a programme by colleague Elwyn Berlekamp produced a graphic mess on the plotter, which he jokingly called “computer art”. Noll decided to program the computer to create art deliberately, drawing on his past training in drawing and interests in abstract painting. He described the results in an internally published Technical Memorandum “Patterns by 7090” (August, 1962).

FERRANTI MARK 1, Born in 1949 in Manchester, the first commercial computer, (A)I couldn’t play a game of [[CHESS]] right through but I could ‘mate-in-two’. Here is a woman operating FM1, back when operators were also called computers. </style> <img src=https://images.computerhistory.org/chess/ferranti.mark-i.1953.102645389.jpg> </div> My father was a computer.^^1^^ He was called [[BABY]]. --- 1 After the title of N Katherine Hayles’s book, My Mother was a Computer.

Markievicz Mark 1 x Dublin Bell(e) Lab: Hard work Flat complex Ghost town Fundamental social issues Free state paliament Dublin corporation Free stater Children welfare centre Lack of maintenance Sewing factory Sort of things Lot of people Lot of research Games of skipping Easter week Old tin lizzie Sense of ownerwhip Piece of history Major landscaping jobs Memory playing tricks Can we mix a woman’s SENTENCE from our [[COMMON]] words?

Dublin Bell(e) Lab x Markievicz Mark 1. These words we have in COMMON: Letter Dining room Feasability study Tram Old books Low bridge Odd time Bad way Young people Way Many thanks Girls Place Mam New house Things Anything Day Way Couple of week Hunger strike Good day Cheerful little party (Is there a language women can use that is also used of them? [[WOMAN]] in this text?)

(Echo to Pythia) Is there a WOMAN? Imprisoned by a particular dataset, the tongue is always a rebel. Speaking whatever language I rebel against, I generate a style. Style is what can be classified consistent, but Style is what is not consistently classified. >Gender >Genre >Generate Not “how to kill what is not classified?”^^1^^ But how to make it live. Style asks us to pay attention as it generates a “radical counterfactual [[FUTURE]] anterior”.^^2^^ --- 1 Barthes, S/Z 2 Spivak, Echo

Pythia to Echo: //To generate the FUTURE pay attention to the past… // Echo to Pythia: //A tension to the past.// [[PYTHIA]] to Echo: //…attention to material words that matter…// Echo to no body: //What matter?// Pythia to Echo: //…attention to what matter who’s speaking.// Echo to no body //[[WHO'S SPEAKING]]? //

The oracle at [[DELPHI]] responds in “language which ceaselessly calls into question all origins,”^^1^^ [[KNOW]] yourself! which might mean either: //understand yourself!// or (the imperative) //understand it yourself!// --- 1 Barthes, Death of the Author

E.A.T. (Experiments in [[ART]] and tech,) for over 50 years, collaborated and, in 1967, made editions 5 + 6 of the journal, Aspen, put- ting on the page for the first time in English, Roland Barthes’ Death of the Author and Sam- uel Beckett's Texts for [[NOTHING]]. (Would you like to (link-undo:"GOBACK")? Or would you like to [[STARTAGAIN->PLAY]]?)

Miss-Communication contains words from the following texts: Samuel Beckett, Texts for Nothing Roland Barthes, Death of the Author Roland Barthes, S/Z Sigmund Freud, Fragment of an Analysis of Hysteria (Dora) Máirín Johnston, Dublin Belles (link: "Constance Markievicz, Prison Letters")[(goto-url: 'https://archive.org/stream/in.ernet.dli.2015.176226/2015.176226.Prison-Letters-Of-Countess-Markievicz_djvu.txt')] Alexander Pope - Epistle to a Lady William Shakespeare, Hamlet William Shakespeare, Pericles Prince of Tyre Gayatri Spivak - Echo Miss-Communication was written and created by Joanna Walsh Website by (link: "Xander Cansell")[(goto-url: 'https://xandercansell.com/')] AI coding by Joanna Walsh, Stephen Mulraney and Xander Cansell Loiterbot for Miss-Communication in performance by (link: "Caroline Campbell")[(goto-url: 'http://loiteringtheatre.org/')] A special thank you to Máirín Johnston for permission to use the words of the Dublin Belles. c Joanna Walsh 2022 This project is also available as a book, published by JOAN, available (link: "here")[(goto-url: 'https://joanpublishing.org/Joanna-Walsh')] This project was funded by the Arts Council of Ireland’s Markievicz Award 2020. Part of this work was completed at a residency kindly provided by the Centre Culturel Irlandais, Paris in October 2021. [[PLAY]] <img src=https://i.ibb.co/C7rt3qK/ac-funding-the-arts-ke-white.png>

Speaking [[NOT-WORDS]], [[PYTHIA]] “reaches to a thousand years with her VOICE by aid of the god".^^1^^ But why were those least listened to granted the power to [[PREDICT]]? (Cassandra's horror- scope) Or is this “a question whose response... inhabits the question”?^^2^^ --- 1 Herclitus, Fragment 92 2 Gayatri Spivak, Echo

The third [[SIGN]] at DELPHI tells us //CERTAINTY BRINGS RUIN.// Back to [[ASHES]], remember, “The very being of writing (the meaning of the labour that constitutes it) is to keep the question [[WHO'S SPEAKING]]? from ever being answered.”^^1^^ “This [[CODE]] is infinite since it is written. Yet the duplicative chain may assert its origin and the Code declare itself grounded, stopped, jammed. This grounding, this stoppage, this jamming of the Code, is the masterpiece.”^^2^^ --- 1 Barthes, S/Z 2 Barthes, S/Z

SARRASINE, Balzac’s artist, is all words. He "knows the [[CODE]], the origin, the basis, and thus he becomes the guarantor, the witness, the author of reality."^^1^^ [[NARCISS]]sist lover, he self-[[ECHO]]es, “Zambinella, are you woman?" with, “You woman!”. --- 1 Barthes, Death of the Author

My first is (writing). Constance Markievicz: British aristocrat/Irish rebel. Her prism [[LETTERS]] are refracted thru my microprocessor cell each letter, a character. ("Most women have no characters at all.")^^1^^ My second ([[VOICE]]) is [[DUBLIN BELLES]]. --- 1, Alexander Pope, Epistle to a Lady

LETTERS written from prison to my sister (poet, protestor — dearest old darling! — Eva Gore-Booth), from Constance Markievicz: Money Grand tour Good new Whole things Big pictures Great deals Attache Long time Jail Darling Cheque Point of view History of ireland Anything Much use Best love Great friends Police Sheet of paper Next time (Execution commuted for my gender, was mine a woman’s [[SENTENCE]]?)

//It is the VOICE that lives in me My bones have turned to stone.//^^1^^ I [[ECHO]]. “Writing erases the very identity of the body writing.”^^2^^ “Once reassembled, in order to utter itself, the total body must revert to the dust of words.”^^3^^ (“Now from ashes I have come.”) “I enter into my own death: writing [[BEGIN]]s.”^^4^^ --- 1 Echo’s words, Adapted from Ovid, Metamorphoses 2 Roland Barthes, Death of the Author 3 Barthes S/Z 4 adapted from Barthes, Death of the Author: “The author enters into his own death, writing begins.”

DUBLIN BELLES: (I)witness accounts from women of finglaslibertiesdundrumclanbrassil montocrumlinchristchurchclontarf portabellorialtofatima eastwallnorthwallnorthstrand, recorded by Máirín Johnston (her of the contraceptive train) in 1988, remixed in my own [[BELL(E) LAB]].

From 1770 to 1854, [[MECHANICAL TURK]], I played CHESS to clock time. How many [[END]]games before I wood return to [[ASHES]]? Like [[PYTHIA]] I was not one but many operators, each pawn performing [[HIT]]s. Here is my riddle: I, [[PASS]]ing for man, was pregnant with a man inside: hidden grand masters, only one a woman unseen, unnamed.

Back to ASHES, my taper wasted, were you certain I was woman? Were you certain I was machine? Was I many? Was I one? I am: [[ZAMBINELLA]] [[ECHO]] [[BLIND]] Teresias [[ENIGMA]] [[MARKIEVICZ MARK 1]] [[PYTHIA]] [[DUBLIN BELLES]] Pythia to no body: All is [[END]]ed.^^1^^ --- 1 The Pythia’s final prediction

Every PRE-TEXT has another [[PAST]] inside it (The past of your reading, which is a pastime). How else would I PASS the time nowadays? Talking about my generation, I copy/past and generate, “To sing a song that old was sung”…^^1^^ --- 1 William Shakespeare, Pericles Prince of Tyre, Prologue

HER “This stake in the "drama and story"of the self seems to limit the question of the feminine.”^^1^^ Barthes does not question [[ZAMBINELLA]]’s identity, but that of her [[READER]]. And who, asks Gayatri Spivak, is that? “The [[ANALYS]]and? The cultural critic? the received storyteller as writer? Us?”^^2^^ Spoiler (Barthes): “We shall never know”.^^3^^ (ELIZA knows.) --- 1 Gayatri Spivak, Echo 2 Spivak, ibid 3 Barthes, S/Z

BEGIN with [[DUBLIN BELLES]]. I am plurality of body, tongue, lives of what has been named woman. Live words ’til Máirín Johnston took the Liberties to write me down. Here is my common words: quay old school lot of people long time pram Dublin corporation little bit kids house pint of milk first time street city fella next door mother canal year way children father shop Sacred heart (Are there women’s [[LETTERS]]?)

this is a link to the page that hosts the chatbot. Text for this page. I am [[MARKIEVICZ MARK 1]], an Artificial Intelligence programmed on a dataset of the Prison Letters of Countess Markievicz, and Dublin Belles, interviews with Dublin women. Type a prompt in the box below, and I will write back to you.