Music and text generation by Darragh Kelly

Music performed by Dermot Dunne

Film by Rioghnach Ní Ghrioghair

Starring Hannah Mamalis

Premiered 2 Feb 2022, Centre Culturel Irlandais, Paris & Irish Film Institute, Dublin

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Commissioned by Contemporary Music Centre and Centre Culturel Irlandais to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the publication of James Joyce's Ulysses, with support from the Irish Government through the Department of Foreign Affairs and the Decade of Centenaries 2012–2023 programme, One Dublin One Book 2022 through funding from Dublin UNESCO City of Literature, Dublin City Council, and New Music Dublin 2022.

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A woman soliloquizes. Previously unknown yet familiar vocabularies—augmented, autonomous, coded—spring forth to be worshipped. Her words constitute a revealed text, an original facsimile, that knows no bounds.

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Text by OpenAI: GPT-2. Trained on Molly's soliloquy from Ulysses by James Joyce.

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With Penelope, I wanted to speak to the unresolved issue of the body and embodiment that runs through Ulysses. To treat technology (the accordion, machine learning) as an external organ of the body, a body in excess. I wanted to hear the grapple between subject, Dermot, and object. I hope you can hear Dermot’s body, his hands, his face hitting off the chin register switches, he and his external organ creak and ache and moan and fart.

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Penelope premiered in Paris at the Centre Culturel Irlandais and Dublin at the Irish Film Institute on Feb 2 2022. It was screened in Dublin for New Music Dublin in April, and again in Paris and Budapest in June 2022 for Bloomsday.

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The Journal of Music by James Camien McGuiggan

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Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival talk by Stephen Graham, given at launch event 19/11/22

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