Tuesday 23rd September 2025
6.30-9pm
Amateurs!: How We Built Internet Culture and Why it Matters
Since the nineties, platforms have invited users to create in return for connection. From blogs to vlogs, tweets to memes: for the first time in history, making art became the fundamental form of communication. What started as fun soon became currency, something vital to finding friends, work, and love. Then, as ‘meatspace’ job security eroded, online creativity became work itself. Now an internet presence is no longer optional, platforms increasingly charge users. Whatever it is we’re creating online, it isn’t amateur anymore.
Joanna Walsh a multidisciplinary writer for print, digital and performance. The author of twelve books (several co-written with DIY AIs that she coded), her publishers include Semiotext(e), Bloomsbury and Verso. She is the creator of the digital narratives, seed-story.com and miss-communication.ie. Her work has been performed/exhibited at venues including IMMA, the ICA, BETA Festival Dublin, and Sample Studios Cork. She founded and directed the online activist projects @read_women (2014-18), and @noentry_arts (2019_2024). She was the 2020 Markievicz Awardee for Literature, the 2017 UK Arts Foundation fellow for literature; an Anthony Burgess Centenary Writer Fellow at the University of Manchester and a 2024 DAAD Artists in Berlin awardee (refused in solidarity with the Palestine).
Nathalie Olah is the author of three works of cultural criticism, Steal as much as you can (Repeater 2019), Look Again: Class (Tate Publishing) and Bad Taste (Dialogue 2023). She regularly contributes text for major gallery exhibitions and her art writing has been published in The TLS, Art Review, The Guardian, Tate Etc. and Tribune. She is currently based in London.