Women Writing Together: Digital Eves with Carmen Marcus IN PERSON

As I bent down to look, A shape within the wat’ry gleam appear’d ...IV, 460–466) Milton, Paradise Lost

When we type 'woman' into AI's image generators, the algorithms trained on the idea of woman that's been fed into the web whirrs and spits out a composite of all those fantasies, hates, fears and wants about women and what we see reflected back is something that is disturbingly distorted an un-woman. It's like a magic mirror that shows how messed up our notions of femaleness is. How do we as writers respond to that? In this session we are going to meet Loab, a monstrous woman who haunts the web, find out how she was created, and what her super-composite image tells us about how AI makes women. Then we'll look at ways to creatively work with AI to hack the fantasy of woman and bring some reality to the artificial realm.

Cost

This workshop is subsidised by Arts Council England. Please choose EITHER a free ticket OR a ticket+donation if you're able to support our Future Fund.

All ticket-holders will receive 1 week's access to the workshop recording.

About the tutor

Carmen Marcus is a published author, poet, playwright, creative facilitator, and mentor. As the daughter of a Yorkshire fisherman and Irish chef her writing brings together the practical and the magical. Her play AND THE EARTH OPENED UP UNDER HER won the Faber New Play Award 2023. Her debut novel HOW SAINTS DIE was published by Vintage in 2018, it won New Writing North’s Northern Promise Award and was long listed for the Desmond Elliott Prize. Her poetry has been commissioned by BBC Radio, The Royal Festival Hall, Durham Book Festival and Apples and Snakes. She was named as a BBC Verb New Voice 2015. In August 2022 she was chosen as one of the Writer’s Guild of Great Britain’s recipients of the New Play Commission Scheme. As a community artist Carmen works with creative and cultural organisations to support communities to tell their stories their way. She has been a guest lecturer at the Universities of Leicester, Northumbria and Teesside and has been invited to speak by Penguin Random House and the Northern Writers’ Conference.

Having made the journey from council estate to the bookshelves Carmen is dedicated to supporting working class writers to tell their stories.Carmen is currently working on her play and reading for a PhD at the University of Teesside which asks – what is the role and responsibility of the storyteller within the community. She strives in her work to live up to the words of her first and most influential critic, her primary school teacher, ‘weird, minus one house-point.’