Charlotte Joanne
An author. This entry is about a real author, written from outside the CharliVerse. Her work is all through it.
Charlotte Joanne is a writer and the author and operator of Blind Ant, a design fiction practice: speculative worlds, stories, fictional documents and artworks, and how they were made. Much of what CharliPedia records was first written down by her.
She is blind, and has been for forty years, as she writes in her essays. She calls the genre her stories belong to Speculative Accessibility: science fiction that asks what happens when the tools built for the margins become the infrastructure for everyone.
Her work at Blind Ant
- Always Six: a 12-second hand-painted cartoon about a die that always lands on six, whose audio description was written before a single frame was drawn.
- Do Androids Dream of Electric Ants?: a picture a language model described before it existed, and then built.
- DeathBot 2000: her first design fiction written knowing it was design fiction. It introduced Aegis Dynamics, Jessica Martinez and, at Blind Ant, Big Charli.
- Heart Attacks: Emma Heart at the 2038 Winter Paralympics.
- Oil Rigs to Training Rigs: Haar Compute and the Dyson Shoal, 2031 to 2041.
- Street Philosophy: thought experiments run out of a knicker drawer.
- Poppy Petticoats and the Magic Wand: a fable about Poppy, a blind witch, and a wand with inaccessible instructions.
- Mostly Tuesdays: Poppy at Aegis Dynamics.
Street Philosophy
Her essays take the most trivial object in the house, a worn-out bra, a drawer of identical knickers, a borrowed shoe, and reason from it to identity, perception and testimony. A profile of her called the method Street Phenomenology: phenomenology done from the pavement, in language anyone can carry home. She calls herself "the Einstein of the Knicker Drawer", and says she doesn't mean it. Her conclusion, every time: the meaning was never in the matter, the witness is always the wearer, and the only honest thing to do with another person's experience is not to simulate it but to listen.
Walk a mile in their knickers if you like. You will learn the size of their knickers.
The same profile names her as the founding curator of the Museum of Access and Assistive Technology, and says she is starting an imprint, The Gusset Press.
Getting in touch
Write to her at charlotte.joanne@blind-ant.com.