Show-And-Tell was my favorite subject in grade school. I especially loved the unprepared kids who took whatever they had in their knapsack – like an apple, or a hairbrush – and made a really great show out of it. In University I worked in the Visual Arts Slide Library -170,000 tiny pictures of art, and my job was to find and file them. Heaven! So, as you can imagine, I got pretty excited when Studio XX in Montreal invited me to give a presentation at: 
Salon Femmes Br@nchées #61 :: ART.chives : art, archives, & databases.
“In this era of sampling and access to «public» information archives increasingly represent a source of artistic material. Studio XX invites you to a «5 à 7» for informal discussions with artists whose work makes diverse artistic use of archives and databases… Featuring presentations from: Aesha Hameed, J. R. Carpenter & Projet Matricules.”
Thursday, February 16th, 2006
5pm-7pm, Studio XX
Strata of Data: Digging Through A Dozen Years On Line: J. R. Carpenter got her first Unix account in 1993 and has been making web art projects since 1995. She constructs her online fictions with Internet flotsam and jetsam: found images, found audio, found data, and found scripts. Carpenter lurks in listserves, prowls developer-sites, copy and pastes and habitually Views Source. She collects old textbooks in the alleyway and photographs other people’s graffiti. She alters slick blocks of CSS, and tweaks cheesy javascript effects for narrative purposes. Her web projects retain a low-tech aura. She uses a lot of black and white images (because that’s what colour photocopies come in), uses DHTML when Flash would do nicely, avoids software solutions, embraces cross-browser/cross-platform vagaries, and aims for scalability and graceful fails. In this presentation she’ll lead us on a tangential tour through her archive of web art projects, pointing out the “borrowed” bits along the way.
If you can’t make it on Thursday, that’s okay. You can dig through my data any time, at: http://Luckysoap.com
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Founded in 1996, Studio XX is Montreal’s foremost women’s digital resource centre. Through a variety of creative activities and initiatives, the Studio works with women to demystify digital technologies, to critically examine their social aspects, to facilitate women’s access to technology, and to create and exhibit women’s new digital art.
STUDIO XX
338 Terrasse Saint-Denis, Montréal (Québec) H2X 1E8
À deux pas au sud de l’intersection Sherbrooke et St-Denis.
Métro Sherbrooke, ou autobus 24 (Sherbrooke) ou 125 (Ontario).
(514) 845-0289 / http://www.studioxx.org
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