Tributaries & Text fed Streams: Launch Event

If you happen to be in Vancouver on Saturday May 24th at 7:30PM, come on down to the Helen Pitt Gallery for the launch of Tributaries & Text fed Streams. I've been working on this project for just over six months now and am thrilled to see it nearing completion. I'm also thrilled to be heading to Vancouver for this launch. I have so many dear friends in that fair city yet have spent next to no time there. Looking forward to seeing you all - you know who you are!

Tributaries & Text-Fed Streams is commissioned by The Capilano Review and curated by Kate Armstrong. The work explores the poetic, formal and functional properties of RSS using the text of an issue of literary quarterly The Capilano Review as raw material raw the creation of a new artwork. Since January I have reading and re-reading the essays, parsing them into fragments, annotating them, marking them up, tagging them and posting them. Once fed into an RSS stream, the fragments are re-read, reordered, and reblogged in an iterative process of distribution that opens up new readings of the essays and reveals new interrelationships between them.

At the launch event I will read from the piece and perform a guided tour of the various streams feeding into and flowing out of it. In addition, curator Kate Armstrong has put together a programme of experimental readings by practitioners in disparate fields such as quantum physics, geography, and poetics, arranged to explore ideas of streams, seriality, or flow. Participants in the launch event will include Maria Lantin, Michael Boyce, Jeremy Venditti, Global Telelanguage Resources, and me, J.R. Carpenter.

The work will be simultaneously launched on Turbulence.org.

Launch Event:
Saturday, May 24th, 2008 at 7:30pm
Helen Pitt Gallery, 102-148 Alexander Street, Vancouver, BC.

A reception will follow.

For those of you who can't make it in person, here are some URLS:

Tributaries & Text- Fed Streams: http://tributaries.thecapilanoreview.ca/
The Capilano Review: http://www.thecapilanoreview.ca/
TCR Issue 2-50 : “Artifice and Intelligence”: http://www.thecapilanoreview.ca/archive.php?id=series2/2_50
J.R. Carpenter: http://luckysoap.com/
Turbulence: http://www.turbulence.org
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Tributaries & Text-Fed Streams: Curatorial Statement

What are the creative and poetic possibilities of RSS syndication and how might the introduction of omnipresent, iterative publishing processes affect our experience of digital literature? How can a book be transformed and reworked through an exploration of the formal and aesthetic structure of the stream?

Tributaries & Text-Fed Streams is a project by J.R. Carpenter, commissioned by The Capilano Review and curated by Kate Armstrong. In this work Carpenter approaches the text of an issue of literary quarterly The Capilano Review (TCR) as a raw material in the creation of a new artwork.

Carpenter draws on a range of strategies and traditions including literary criticism, illustration, blogging, coding, writing, and digital intervention, using these to articulate an experimental space that equates and associates water with text.

The work is an eddy within the internet, a place where information – commentary, image, text, metadata – coalesce for a moment, before flowing back out into and through other channels. The written word mixes and dissolves, never static, not quite discrete. Related imagery circulates within and without the confines of the artwork, raising questions of boundary. We navigate within this work as we would through wild, quiet rivers. Reading is wayfinding. We pass through texts and text fragments, through citations, links, footnotes, self-author, other-author, patches of whimsy. Social media meets scholarly tracemaking. Categories become headwaters: comments, islands. It is a “text-fed stream”, moving with undercurrents and process.

The work extends our experience of the nature of the digital stream and invites new questions about material, temporality, repetition, and the archive in connection with the electronic word.

Kate Armstrong, 2008
Tributaries & Text-Fed Streams
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WOMEN'S ART: TAKING OVER THE WEB

Studio XX launches MATRICULES: Canada's largest public online archive of digital artwork by women and one of the world's largest online archives of women's digital art. Created with invaluable support from Heritage Canada's Canadian Culture Online Program and hosted by Studio XX, Mobile Media Lab and the Department of Communication Studies at Concordia University, Matricules will launch on Tuesday, May 13th, 2008 from 5:30 PM to 7:30 PM at Hexagram Concordia, 1515 Ste-Catherine West (corner Guy) on the 11th floor.

Matricules is an electronic documentary herstory spanning eleven years of research, creation and exploration at Canada's one-of-a kind Studio XX. Mingle with some of Montreal's most celebrated new media artists on a spectacular terrace overlooking Montreal and enjoy a performative reading by J.R. Carpenter, two-time winner of CBC's Quebec Short Story Competition. Prominent interdisciplinary artists Caroline Martel and jake moore will offer their take on the website's creation process and Matricules Project Director Stephanie Lagueux will give audiences a private tour of this remarkable new digital archive.

The xxxboîte, a limited edition artifact comprised of original texts and a DVD produced in celebration of Studio XX's first decade will also be presented and available for purchase as an important addition to any contemporary art collection.

Founded in 1996 with the goal of ensuring a defining presence for women in cyberspace and in the development of the digital arts, Studio XX is Canada's foremost feminist digital art centre for technological exploration, creation and critique. Committed to establishing women's access to technology, with a strong focus on Open-Source software, Studio XX offers artist residencies, monthly performance salons, an electronic magazine, a weekly radio show and HTMlles: an international biennial cyberarts festival.

"Matricules is a privileged gateway to dazzling integral digital artworks" comments Paulina Abarca-Cantin, Studio XX's Director General. "This electronic treasure box offers the public live works by greats like Shawna Dempsey, Chantal DuPont, Deborah VanSlet, Women with Kitchen Appliances, Suzanne Kozel, Isabelle Choinière and AGF to name but a very, very few of the best of the best."

Matricules was made possible through generous support from The Canada Council for the Arts, The Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec, the Conseil des arts de Montréal, Mobile Media Lab and the Koumbit network. Studio XX wishes to thank its members, volunteers and visionary funding partners including Canadian Heritage's Canadian Culture Online initiative.

http://www.studioxx.org
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Air Holes

In 2006 my short story “Air Holes” was one of the three winners of the CBC/QWF Quebec Short Story Competition. The competition called for short stories under 1200 words, my favourite category. "Air Holes" weighs in at a wee 930 words or so. The story was broadcast on Cinq à Six CBC RadioOne July 2006.

In 2007 the competition changed its name and rules and regulations. Now now short fiction, travel writing and memoir all fall into one category, which seems like a cruel and unusual thing to do to short fiction. Oh well. Every three years Véhicule Press still publishes an anthology of winners and honourable mentions. “Air Holes” appears in the most recent of these anthologies, In Other Words: New English Writing from Québec, launched last weekend at the Blue Metropolis Literary Festival in Montreal. Here is the opening paragraph:

"The tide will go out at two today. The kids and I will go down to the beach. Between the tidemarks, beneath our feet, tight-lipped steamer clams will burrow sandy deep. But we'll find them. Their air holes will give them away."
J. R. Carpenter, “Air Holes”

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