Amy Ireland is an experimental poet attuned to the darker labyrinths of theoretical and poetic production. She is currently writing a PhD on Xenopoetics at the University of New South Wales (UNWS), where she also teaches and lectures on Creative Writing and is co-convenor of the philosophy and aesthetics research cluster Aesthetics After Finitude; which is soon holding a two-day, single session conference hosted by the National Institute for Experimental Arts (NIEA) featuring keynote speakers Mohammad Salemy and Reza Negarestani (5-6 February, UNWS).

Ireland, whose research focuses on questions of agency and technology in modernity, is engaged in various poetry projects involving sound, linguistic transcoding, 3D-printing, encryption, stealth technology, and projectiles. She has also been known to collaborate with the infernal sound duo LORD AUCH! (‘a pataphysical venture that constellates glitch beats, raucous adjacencies & xenopoetics as a metic incantation of unsound hyperstition’), and is a member of the technomaterialist transfeminist collective ‘Laboria Cuboniks.’

Amy has exhibited or given performances of her creative work in various venues across Sydney, London, Toronto, Paris, and most recently, Melbourne, where she is featuring in a pop-up exhibition curated by Renata Lemois Morais for Pause Fest (2015). And, as if all that wasn’t enough, this veritable powerhouse has brought to life numerous rogue publications, specialising in erotica and collective zine projects, some of which can be found in the National Library of Australia.

EC: What is the cunt?

AI: The cunt is a headless, wordless mouth. It’s the fuck in the forest overwritten by the narcotic platitude of the nightingale’s song in Jean Renoir’s Partie de campagne. It’s the black roots that squirm beneath the innocuous flower Mallarmé designates as the emissary of his ‘pure notion.’ The cunt is a ditch with an upturned car in it. The cunt fucks you up. First thing it says to you when you come out of it is ‘prepare yourself for death,’ but it doesn’t speak, it secretes. Its language is equivalent to the desecration of language—each emission betrays the logical speech of its cephalic double up top—that mouth in the head that will not shut up, that pontificates, instructs, and moralises ceaselessly. Against the logorrhoeic tyranny of the word, CUNT = DIGIT = ALGORITHM (AQ 94;13). A rotten sun, eater of eyes, extravagant zero, the night. Below all, the cunt is the abyss. Dangerous and open—that abyss that makes you want it against the other mouth’s better judgement.

EC: What’s your most fucked-up fantasy?

AI: Being killed by Twitter.

EC: How, if at all, does this relate to Xenofeminism?

AI: Xenofeminism takes cyberfeminism’s positive valuation of technological alienation seriously, it is turned on with—and by the machines, rejects originary authenticity, and has days where it wants to merge with matrix. But it is far too level-headed to ever want to go all the way with Twitter.

EC: Would you like to eat yourself?

AI: The threshold where one’s self ends and food begins is nothing more than an illusion set up to buttress a nonsensical mythology of human significance. The sooner ‘one’ learns to understand this threshold’s fragility and inevitable incursion, the better. ‘You’ are an epiphenomenal accident of matter. All notions of individual unsavouriness are fleeting. The subject of anthropocentric bias can be tough to bring up—unless you eat it first.

Yes, I would like to be eaten by myself, but not to want or expect it. Personal affirmation vitiates the violence, it deploys a restricted economic openness in the place of a general, unaffordable one. What is better is to have the outside eat itself through you. There are multiple means of bringing this about.

1. Sneak up on yourself and eat yourself by surprise, as violently as possible. Otherwise you are teaching yourself a lesson on matter’s behalf rather than letting matter eat for itself.

2. Why not feed yourself to something against your will? I worked in an abattoir for a long time and I always wondered about feeding myself to the machines. A boy called Duncan fed his arm to one while I was there. He chose the biggest machine—it was the size of an entire a room, designed to collapse a chicken neatly into nine bits: two thighs, two legs, one breast, two wings, two ribs. KFC owned it. After years of staring at these precise formal permutations of a body slithering off the end of the conveyor belt as the machine churned them out, I too began to have fantasies of corporeal reformatting. How nice to go through the grinder. But perhaps this is all too industrial and quaint.

3. What would be really ecstatic would be to be devoured—gradually—by sensual nanotech. Not ouroborically from end to end, but starting from the middle and speeding up—then getting yourself reassembled into a machine that generates intermittent plumes of purple vapour, some kind of cyber-water-feature for an off-planet shopping mall.

EC: What, if anything, has this got to do with your broader project?

AI: The machinic absorption of thought. And this [EC?/:-p]:

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