ANNOUNCING EXPOZINE 2007

Expozine annual small press, comic and zine fair has been running in Montreal for six years now. I’ve missed it for the past two years in a row, for very good but not very interesting reasons mostly related to not being in the country. This year’s event is still two months away, but registration is already open and I have booked a table for Sunday, November 25, 2007, mostly just so I make sure remember to stay in town that weekend.

This year Expozine will take place on Saturday, November 24 and Sunday, November 25, 2007, from 12 p.m. to 6 p.m. at 5035 St-Dominique (Église Saint-Enfant Jésus, between St-Joseph and Laurier, near Laurier Métro). Free admission.

This incredible event brings together over 250 creators of all kinds of printed matter – from books to zines to visual art and comics – in both English and French. In the past six years, Expozine has become one of North America's largest small press fairs, attracting thousands of visitors as well as exhibitors from as far afield as Chicago, Toronto, Ottawa, and Quebec City! It is one of the city's cultural success stories, and due to its ever-increasing growth, this year's edition will be expanded to two days.

Expozine brings together a multitude of publications and printed works that are often difficult to find in the first place, much less altogether in the same room! The result is a rare opportunity to peruse the work of hundreds of young and emerging authors, publishers and artists, and to see what the winners of last year’s Expozine Alternative Press Awards are up to. Not to be missed!

To reserve a table at Expozine, register before November 12, 2007 http://www.expozine.ca/en/index.php

For information on becoming a sponsor, and thus gaining good karma and great indi-street cred, contact expozine at archivemontreal dot org or call 514-282-0146.
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a+b=ba? [blog+art=artblog?]

JavaMuseum is a Forum for Internet Technology in Contemporary Art Founded in 2000 by Agricola de Cologne as a virtual museum focusing on net based art. Over the summer, the JavaMuseum invited artists to submit art projects using blogging technology to a show called a+b=ba? [blog+art=artblog?]. The results are in and this blog, Lapsus Linguae, is among the selected works. Here’s the full list of artists selected for a+b=ba?

Babel (UK)
Tauvydas Bajarkevicius (Lithuania)
Raheema Beegum (India)
Hans Bernhard (Austria)
J. R. Carpenter (Canada)
Antony Carriere (USA)
Dylan Davis (Australia)
Ryan Gallagher (USA)
Fabian Giles (Mexico)
Ellie Harrison (USA)
Gita Hashemi (Canada)
Jeremy Hight (USA)
Aleksandar Janicijevic (Canada)
Richard Jochum (USA)
Seth Keen (Australia)
Kyon (Germany)
Yvonne Martinsson (Sweden)
Vytautas Michelkevicius (Lithuania)
Alex Perl (USA)
Karla Schuch Brunet (Brazil)
Robert Sloon (South Africa)
Michael Szpakowski (UK)
Andres Torres (Chile)
Matthew Williamson; (Canada)
Salvatore Iaconesi (Italy)
Juan Patino (Argentina)

The show a+b=ba? is curated by Elena Julia Rossi (Rome/Italy). It will launch in November during NewMediaFest 2007 in partnership with the 3rd Digital Art Festival Rosario/Argentina.

JavaMuseum is part of [NewMediaArtProjectNetwork]:||cologne
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how to get paid

Recently I agreed to make a website for a friend, something I hardly ever do any more. I am a web artist, not a web designer. Everybody knows that the worst thing about doing design work is dealing with the clients, and that the best of friends make the worst of clients. My friend, who shall remain nameless here, is that special bread of visual artist who doesn’t verbalize well. He works with found and natural materials. He can do amazing things with toothpicks and twigs and bottles and buttons, but he’s not the most technically savvy person I know. He also happens to be Chinese and in his sixties. He has a formidable design aesthetic, an imprecise grasp on the English language and naturally he’s one of the most stubborn and particular people I know. Not counting myself of course. So why on earth would I agree to make a website for him? Because I knew I could. And because I knew if he went to a web design agency he’d wind up paying way too much for a website that could not possibly reflect him, how he lives and how he works. I would charge him for my time of course, but I knew money would be the least compelling part of the equation.

Making the website would be the easy part. I wasn’t fazed at all when he had nothing to say about what the site should look like other than: Something simple that looks good. I knew I knew what he had in mind. Or what would make him happy, at least. Years ago I wrote a catalogue essay about his work. That’s how we met. And we’re still friends.

The best compliment: once the site was up another friend said she thought he’d made the site himself, it looked that much like something he would do.

The real challenge was yet to come. My friend insisted I teach him how to update his new web site himself. We climbed up into his attic studio to spend an afternoon huddled around his antique iMac. Imagine trying to remember everything you’ve now forgotten that once you never knew. Like, there is a right-click button on the mouse. No spaces in file names. You have to save a file before you upload it. You have to put the images inside the images folder. Don’t think for one minute that I’m making fun of my friend here. I’m mean to say it’s quite wondrous, in this WYSIWYG world of Web 2.0, to spend an afternoon answering questions tantamount to Where do babies come from? and Why is the sky blue?

As far as I was concerned, the tutorial was part of the bargain. I had promised to teach him but had not promised that he’d learn. But in the end he turned out to be quite a good student. We just kept doing exactly the same thing in exactly the same way over and over again, which is, after all, the sad secret behind most web design. He filled half a scribbler with notes and arrows, sketches and scrawls and by the end of the afternoon I was fairly wowed by his tag-editing prowess. I was also in bad need of a drink.

We stood and stretched and turned of the computer. Here, he said. And handed me a stone. A cool oval of Tibetan turquoise the size of a quail’s egg. I told my friend Camilo about this exchange later in an email and said: "J. R. you certainly know how to get paid, Tibetan stones are hot in the stock markets of the soul, and to be valued much more than shit smelling, mind polluting money." I couldn’t agree more.

The next day my friend and I went to the market. I took this picture of him on the long walk home. And didn’t noticed until after that the sign on the lamppost was advertising $99 WEB SITES. Fortunately my friend didn’t notice it at all.


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