Writing Workshop: Offal
‘Burroughs with the Internet plugged in.’
Taking their cue from Sophie Podolski’s experimental ‘graphic poems’, Offal led a writing workshop in which participants produced texts through techniques of collage and automatic writing, that combined high and low cultural references, to resist structural hierarchies. Texts produced during the workshop were be passed through AI technology using cloned voices, to be transformed into audio works.
Offal is a mysteriously produced ‘audio zine’ transmission and publication, lovingly crafted from the finest literary leftovers and satirical scraps, pressed with warm tranches of absurdist monologue, all set to a soundtrack of the outer reaches of ambient, jazz, techno, hip hop, jungle and electronica.
It publishes new writing by authors, artists and musicians, most recently by Ned Beauman, Actress, Scott King, Max Porter, Gabriel Josipovici, and Viz writer Barney Farmer, alongside a recipe for how to cook Leviathan, a chat with Slick Rick about prison food, fictional MP appointments, and an unsolicited business proposal for Thom Yorke. Since launch in 2023, Offal audio episodes have been individually delivered via WhatsApp on a virtual phone number in a laboriously hacked together digital facsimile of pirate radio to anyone who asks for one.
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BIOGRAPHIES
Dr Mark Blacklock is a novelist, journalist and cultural historian, and teaches on the MA Creative Writing. He is the author of I’m Jack (London: Granta, 2015), The Emergence of the Fourth Dimension (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), and Hinton (London: Granta, 2020), and editor of The Selected Nonfiction of J.G. Ballard (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2023). In 2024 he collaborated with the artist Gemme Anderson on her Artangel installation And She Built a Crooked House. He is co-editor of the literary magazine Offal and its accompanying audio-zine, made using AI text-to-voice synthesis. Mark’s books and essays have been longlisted for The Walter Scott Prize, The SFRA Pioneer Award, and the BSFA Prize for Nonfiction.
Rod Stanley is a multimedia writer, editor, creative consultant and independent publisher with a passion for outsider culture and creative mischief. He was editor of Dazed & Confused 2005–2012, founded and edited antifascist arts/activist broadsheet newspaper Good Trouble (2016-2021), and most recently co-founded Offal (2023–), an experimental publication, AI-voiced ‘audio zine’, and performance concept that celebrates and recontextualises the ‘leftovers and experiments’ of the artistic process.
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