Tributaries and Text-fed Streams

a feed-reading of The Capliano Review
a new work of electronic literature by J. R. Carpenter
curated by Kate Armstrong

The Capilano Review, a literary journal based in North Vancouver, has commissioned me to create a new work of electronic literature based on a recent issue dedicated to new writing and new technologies. TCR 2-50 "Artifice & Intelligence," guest-edited by Andrew Klobucar, included essays by: Andrew Klobucar, Global Telelanguage Resources, Sandra Seekins, Kate Armstrong, David Jhave Johnston, Laura U. Marks, Sharla Sava, Kevin Magee, Jim Andrews, Gordon Winiemko, Nancy Patterson and Darren Wershler-Henry.

Tributaries & Text-fed Streams will be a personal, experimental and playful rereading of and response to these essays. I will explore the formal and functional properties of RSS, using blogging, tagging and other Web 2.0 tools to mark-up and interlink essays and to insert additional meta-layers of commentary in order to play with, expose, expand upon, and subvert formal structures of writing, literature, and literary criticism.

Over a four-month period I will read and re-read the essays, parsing them into fragments, which I will then annotate, mark-up, tag and post. Fed into an RSS stream, the fragments will be re-read, reordered, and reblogged in an iterative process of distribution that will open up new readings of the essays and reveal new interrelationships between them. The result of this process-based approach will be a blogchive – part blog, part archive – at once an online repository for the artefacts of re-reading and a stage for the performance of live archiving.

Streams are both literally and metaphorically the central image of the work. Streams of consciousness, data, and rivers flow through the interface and through the texts. Through this process of re-reading and responding, this textual tributary will feed a larger stream while paying tribute to the original source.


Tributaries & Text-fed Streams: A Feed-Reading of The Capilano Review will launch simultaneously on thecapilanoreview.ca (Vancouver) and turbulence.org (New York) in the spring of 2008.
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Getting In On The Ground Floor: A Hazy History of How and Why We Banded Together

In the beginning there were only a few of us. That we knew of. We thought there might be others, but we weren’t sure where to look. We were in a room. It was a small room. If it had a glass ceiling, we couldn’t see it. The point was to share the room, and what was in it. What was in it was a lot of paper and also, a computer. It was our understanding that the computer would replace the paper. We hadn’t got that working yet. We had other, more pressing questions: Where is this place called cyberspace? And who pays for it? We asked around, but no one would tell us anything. Go away, they said. You’re no good at math, they said. Which only made us ask more questions: What are they hiding from us – passwords, codes, equipment? What are we missing – information, networks, power? What don’t they want us to know – that if they can do it we can do it? If they can do it than how hard could it possibly be?

One day we decided we would ask the computer. Computer, do you contain any answers to the many questions you engender? We huddled around it. We only had the one. It was a grey-beige box with a beetle-black glass eye. We knew we had to get past the surface of the thing. We knew that deep down inside our grey-beige box was much larger than it appeared. It was connected to other grey-beige boxes in other rooms. Stashed away inside these millions of boxes there must be billions of answers.

We switched the computer on. There was a click, a whir, and then a steady hum. Soon enough we sat basking in a blue-green glow. A cursor blinked at us. We blinked back. Now what do we do? Expectations were running high. We’d been promised progress, deliverance, another chance. And there was this cursor clearing a path to the command line for us, a clean slate. Before we knew it we were giving it orders: run, kill, execute. This kind of language was hard for some of us to take. Some of us just wanted to: sleep, jobs, stop, exit. Others wanted to know more: list, who, finger, history. Cables coiled at our feet. They snaked out the door. We slipped out with them. So this is how we shed our skin!

We had stumbled into uncharted territory, an outlaw zone where we could be anything, anyone, anywhere. We could be logical. We could be abstract. We could be “it” or “he/she” or we could log in as Guest and cruise anonymous through Archie, Gopher, Telnet and FTP. We wandered around like this for a dog’s age. Which, in Internet years, was just a few days. We still had bodies. Our wrists were sore. And everywhere we went we were: @gender, language thwarting us at every turn.

One day we were minding our own business writing shell scripts on the command line when a bright spec appeared on the horizon. It was a pixel. It was a mass of pixels. The pixels joined forces. Soon they formed a thumbnail, and then a whole jpeg. An image! The next thing we knew no one knew who was issuing commands anymore. We were all clicking away on icons. What we saw was what we got. One thing linking to another, faster and faster, around and around we went.

Now all we have to do is ask, and answers come racing at us. So many answers. What were the questions again? They were merely predictions. They enabled us to move forward. Toward what? We never would have guessed. How many of us there are. How much we do and do not know. How are we going to remember all this? Will our uncertainties be stored online, along with our desires? Maybe we’d better print them out just in case. How necessary is closure? Well, it’s a start anyway.

"Getting in on the Ground Floor: A Hazy History of How and Why We Banded Together," an essay by J. R. Carpenter, published in xxxboîte, an artifact produced in celebration of the first ten years of Studio XX, a Feminist art centre for technological exploration, creation, and critique.


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xxxboîte

Official launch: Wednesday 17 October , 5 à 7
Galerie Yerge au, 2060 Joly, Montreal [map]

xxxboîte is an artifact produced in celebration of the first ten years of Studio XX, Centre d'artiste féministe engagé dans l'exploration, la création et la critique en art technologique. The boîte contains a publication featuring new texts from Kim Sawchuk, Marie-Christiane Mathieu, Anna Friz, J.R.Carpenter, and Michelle Kasprzak and a DVD comprised of documentation of selected projects, presentations and events of the first ten years of programming at studioxx. Inserted into this collection is a limited edition print from Montréal based artist, beewoo.

Faced with the impossibility of fully describing something that continues to shift in form and intentions, commissaire invitée, jake moore, has instead assembled the residue and remnants of the studio’s affects and actions for your consideration. The resulting collection indicates a centre ripe with exchange, diversity, and energy whose development parallels that of contemporary digital technologies.

Artists and projects represented on the DVD include: Kim Sawchuk, Kathy Kennedy, Sheryl Hamilton, Deb Van Slet, Histoire Orales, MXXR, Élène Tremblay, Anna Friz, Annabelle Chvostek, Katarina Soukup, Valerie Walker, Nancy Wight, Hope Peterson, Stephanie Lagueux, Diane Labrosse, Chantal Dumas, Caroline Martel, Miriam Verburg, Genevieve Heistek, Nancy Tobin, Bernadette Houde, Anne-Francoise Jacques and more…..

For more information and/or to order xxxboîte contact studioxx
4001 Rue Berri, espace 201, Montréal. Québec H2L 4H2
tél: 514-845-7934 . fax: 514.845.4941, accès (carte) | info@studioxx.org
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a ten letter word for fun

I’ve been spending a lot of time with the dictionary lately. Either I’m getting smarter or my Collins Concise is woefully out of date. We’ve been on-again off-again since high school. Seen some rough patches. My mother said I’d never get anywhere in life because I can’t spell. How can you look up a word if you can’t spell it? So the Collins got shelved. I mostly just talked my way through art school. And then spellcheck came along. So many obstacles between the dictionary and me. But we’ve always pulled through.

This may seem like a digression, but bear with me. Last month Stéphane and I went to a dinner party. We were all quite drunk by the time we noticed the three saris hanging overhead. We fell into a “how to wrap a sari” discussion with two French philosophers, three new media artists, a documentary filmmaker and a translator. Do they wear underwear underneath? We all wanted to know. Do they use pins? They must use pins. I said: The ancient Romans pinned their togas at the shoulder. Oh what is that word? The translator exclaimed! When she was a child her favourite dictionary had a picture of a toga pin in it. She’d memorized the word. Now here was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to use it in public and she couldn’t remember it. I said: Who cares if you don’t remember it, I’ve just fallen in love with you for falling in love with the word for a toga pin! That’s when Stéphane piped up. Fibula, he said. The word is fibula. Needless to say I went home with him.

We walked the translator part of the way home. She said: You know when people say: If you were stranded on a desert island and could only have one book? Well I’d want it to be a dictionary. If I were stranded on a desert island and could only have one translator I’d want it to be her. Or my brave friend Daniel Canty. He translated the text of Les huit quartiers du sommeil this summer. Pauvre lui. But that’s what he gets for getting me started writing on the theme of sleep in the first place. Somehow when he invited me to submit something to Le Livre du chevete, the third anthology in the La table des matières series published by Quartanier, it didn’t sink in that whatever I wrote would only appear in print in French. I have no idea how long it took Daniel to translate les huit quartiers. It took me six hours to learn how to read, in French, what I had written in English. And that was with the aide of a gigantic Le Robert & Collins French-English dictionary left over from the decades when my French Canadian mother-in-law was an English teacher at Ecole Secondaire Paul-Gérin-Lajoie. I made copious notes on possible replacements for all kinds of words that I thought were errors until Stéphane explained that in most cases they were in fact such brilliant translations that they went right over my head. When I went to meet with Daniel to discuss the text you better believe the Robert & Collins came with me. When he saw it he said: That’s a big dictionary. But it won’t help you.

The next week I handed in an essay for a publication commemorating the tenth anniversary of Studio XX, a feminist art centre in Montréal dedicated to providing women access to technology. Given how complicated the translation of les huit quartiers du sommeil had been, I thought I’d keep this essay simple. It turns out that simple English is the hardest thing to translate into French. I wrote a light-hearted third-person-plural pre-history called: Getting in on the Ground Floor: A Hazy History of How and Why We Banded Together. The first thing I realized when I got the text back from the translator was that that whimsical title is utterly untranslatable. Something else was wrong too, but I couldn’t put my finger on it. Le Robert & Collins was no help. Finally I got Stéphane to look at it. He pointed out that although it is perfectly correct for the third person plural to default to masculine subject-verb agreement in French, in this case, because Studio XX is a feminist organization, all the people in the “we” are women so everything has to agree with the feminine. In my humble opinion, even if Studio XX were a centre dedicated to providing men access to technology, like all the other centres, the translation was still a little flat. As Dr. Michael J. Boyce later pointed out: “The piece is a very good example of the difficulty involved in any translation of any sort of writing that is indelibly stamped with the personality of the writer. The difficulty is not registered in the machinery of transliteration, but rather with the task of capturing its authorship. In this respect, the translator's failure to capture voice in the grammatical sense is only symptomatic, I am sure, of his inability to grasp the spirit, the soul, the personality - in sooth, the voice - of the writing. To coin a phrase, he just didn't get it." Fortunately a second translator was called it and once the gender issues were cleared up I was able to see ways to reinsert my voice. As in writing, as in life.

In the midst of all this translating, I mentioned to my mother-in-law that I was using the hell out of her old dictionary – though not quite in those words. She said she had an extra French-only dictionary if I wanted it and I said: Yes! Absolutely. Then she said she had an English-only dictionary that had the meanings in it, did I want that? I said: But I already know what the words mean in English!

Now I regret that hasty decision. Over the weekend the spine of my geriatric Collins Concise cracked in half at ke: keel over, to collapse suddenly. Now it’s very hard to flip through. Which is really too bad because I’ve recently become addicted to Scrabble – a game I swore I’d never play. Sure I’m witty with words in a cutting cocktail chatter kind of way. And I do write for a living. So you’d think I’d just love Scrabble. But if you had descended from the long line of grammar snobs, spelling fascists and cryptic crossword puzzle fanatics that I did, I assure you, you’d rather chew your own arm off than play Scrabble. So what gives? For one thing I’m not really addicted to Scrabble but rather to Scrabulous, a far superior game. First off all, it’s online. We as a society are no longer limited to playing board games with whomever we happen to be stuck spending the holiday long weekend with. Now we can play long tedious drawn out board games with people we actually like. And we can eat and drink and walk the dog and talk on the phone and maybe even get some work done in between moves. If that’s not progress I don’t know what is. Our chances of sustaining out friendships with our favourite opponents in real life are greatly improved now that we don’t have to endure the sight of their smug scheming or listen to their clucking with triple word score delight. My favourite thing about Scrabulous – you get to use the dictionary! This is great opportunity for Collins Concise and I to spend some quality time together before it falls apart altogether and I trade up to Oxford English. So please don’t tell the old dogeared dear that there’s dictionary built into the Scrabulous application. And a list of two-letter words. Finally, world domination is within my reach! Um, well, word domination at least.
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Who is this girl in the auburn locks?

Who is this girl in the auburn locks? Does anyone know?



I met her at a party the other night. We had a long conversation about the power ballad. But my attention was divided. Patti Smith was in town. And every time the doorbell rang I got my hopes up just a tiny bit. Auburn locks sat on a sofa next to a tiger calm as could be, beneath a seahorse lamp across the room from a rack of records next to a rack of antlers. There were at least four record players in the room. They played early Led Zeppelin and early George Michael, but wisely not at the same time.



The hostess was a leggy redhead with a way words and closet full of dresses. Guest girls came and went in them, passing each other with bare-armed polyester swishes up and down the not-quite-spiral night-blue stairs. In the kitchen canapés were served: swordfish squares and sliced duck skewers. I met this blond on the way to the bathroom who didn’t seem to know anyone. Then what are you doing here? There was a Pop Montreal poster on the doorway. So you just wandered in? Patti never wandered in. By the time I made my way back from the bathroom the girl with the auburn locks had up and disappeared. I’m fairly sure the tiger on the sofa was to blame.


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