Post-Inter-Hyper-Active

Back in Montreal. After a week of wall to wall presentations, performances, pitches and heated discussions in the chill windowlessness of the RICE Television Studio.

Saw every imaginable kind of work (and some unimaginable kinds of work) that works on screens of every size from 800 x 640 to HD to mobile phone. Sold photocopied mini-books to the most digital people. Got pre-cursive with Daniel Canty. And navigated all kinds of interactions, digital and social and nature-related. Hiked the Hoodo trail without the aide of GPS. Bought a touque and stumbled through a string of glittering cold nights. Mingling of new friends and old at sunset BBQs by glacier-fed rivers (two in total), dance parities (impromptu or otherwise), with djs (Mama Fatou or otherwise), live cinema performance from SOLU (Finland via Barcelona), Notsosimpleton Flash art whisked from the wall, Props Pub shenanigans, and whisky in the Leighton Studios. Made it to breakfast all of once, which is one time more than in all of the seven weeks of Babel Babble Rabble, and the construction site outside Lloyd Hall 119 brought new meaning to The Loudest Room.

Clutching a bundle of business cards collected from a cross-country cross-section of business and art world sheer raw talent, and a DVD from the super solid Randy Knott, I left the high sky and hay fever sun sometime yesterday afternoon, in a muddle of loose-end packing, all-at-once good-byes and off campus brunching. Drove to Calgary in a carful (a word like careful, but moving faster down the highway) of some of the best people I know, who I was loath to leave, my dear friends: Girl at Work Sandra Dametto, that Monkey Michael Boyce and Alexis O’Hara of Filthy Lies and movie star eyes. And brand new friend the mad and mighty Clauda, whose name probably isn’t spelled that way at all. Flew through a few time-zones with the irrepressible Matt Donnelly for entertainment. Happy to return to rainy Montreal late last night. Stepped out of the mountains into the heat and humid and wet. And slept, and slept, and slept well for the first time in a week.

photo by alexis o'hara
The Three Wicked Witches of JPL

photo by alexis o'hara
Feeling the Love, and the dancehall, from Mama Fatou

[both photos from the kooky kamera of Alexis O’Hara]
. . . . .

Interactive Active

It’s strange and wonderful to be back at Banff so soon after the Babel Babble Rabble residency. So many memories of so many people in so many unexpected places. I’m am eternally grateful to Emily Page and the BNMI for this opportunity. There are amazing people presenting and performing all day and night and I have to shake my head sometimes to make sure I’m not dreaming, but too hard because a) I don’t want any of this stuff I’m learning to fall out, and b) I’m extremely hung over.

Here are some Interactive Screen and other BNMI URLs:

The Banff new Media Institute
http://www.banffcentre.ca/bnmi/

Interactive Screen O.6 Wiki (scroll to bottom for ongoing list of URLs referenced in the conference)
http://iascreen06.wikispaces.com/

Anne Galloway’s very up-to-date blog on the event
http://www.purselipsquarejaw.org/

PRE-CURSOR (my presentation)
http://luckysoap.com/is06/

photo by SOLU: http://www.solu.org
. . . . .

PRE-CURSOR


It’s great to be back at Banff. It feels like I never left, only managed to not eat at the dining hall for a few weeks. Interactive Screen 0.6 – Media: Margins: Migrations is well underway. Saturday evening we meeted and greeted in the bracing mountain air. So many amazing people here. Yesterday was our first full day of think tanking. Yesterday evening I went into town to buy a touque because it’s so cold here at night. I presented this AM and am now free to listen, learn and roam. More information on the presentation I just gave and on the conference/think tank in general: http://www.luckysoap.com/is06/
. . . . .

IS 0.6 Abstract

Interactive Screen 0.6 is fast-approaching. The agenda is firming up and abstracts will soon become less so. I present on Monday, August 14, 2006 at 10AM along with Vancouver/New York based artist Kate Armstrong in a session called Creative Commons: Art, Activism, and the Database. Here’s the abstract I sent in moments before yesterday’s deadline:

Pre-Cursor: A discussion of political and pragmatic aspects of independent production, online publication, fabricating fiction and recycling code. J. R. Carpenter will chase narrative threads across media and trace technological continuities between her hypertext fictions and their precursive forms, which include: the book, the zine, the lab report, the slide show, the guide book, the bulletin board and graffiti.

Sound abstract? Here are some specific examples:

The Zine: Fishes & Flying Things

In 1995 I tried to start making zines with a computer instead of a photocopier and wound up making my first website instead. I still make zines with a photocopier.

The Slide Show: Send More Than Words… EVERYBODY LOVES PICTURES

In 2003 I found this sequence of captioned photos that my uncle took and sent to my grandmother 40 years ago and the forgot about. A borrowed slide-show script brought them back to life.

The Lab Report: The Cape

The images, diagrams and maps in The Cape are culled from a hard copy of an Environmental Geologic Guide to Cape Cod National Seashore published in 1979, which happens to be when the story is set.

The Guide Book: How I Loved the Broken Things of Rome

The cluttered interface of How I Loved the Broken Things of Rome is inspired by the pedagogical style of the modern guide book and a 500 year history of travel writing.

Graffiti: Entre Ville

Entre Ville is an amalgam of the graffiti tags, gardens, garbage and gossip of my back alleyway… You can’t make this stuff up.

. . . . .

Interactive Screen

By my calculations I’ve yet to be back from Banff for as long as I was away at Banff for the Babel, Babble, Rabble: On Language and Art residency. And now, thanks to some strange twists of fate, some hustle, and some just plain good fortune, The Banff New Media Institute has invited me to return to participate as a Senior Artist in Interactive Screen, August 13-18, 2006.

Interactive Screen is a new media development think tank now in its 11th year, which is long, in Internet years. Canadian and international new media types converge at Banff each summer to ponder, study, workshop, present, perform, mentor, share, discuss, collaborate and reflect on the current state of new media art and the shape of things to come.

A think tank is not a think tank without a subtitle. This year’s is: Interactive Screen – Margins: Media: Migrations. “Margins can be taken to mean ‘profit.’ They also point the way to the ‘outside’. These terms provide us with a means to turn and twist the meaning of media. Media forms have the power to migrate through the boundaries that define our experience – turning them inside out, and outside in. At the interface, it becomes possible to make ‘profit’ share in the values that we choose to make ours.”

For more official-sounding writing like this please visit the official-looking website: http://www.banffcentre.ca/bnmi/programs/interactive_screen06/

And a think tank needs to be stocked with every size fish. As an independent producer of mostly free art, I fall within the “outside” meaning of “margin” rather than the “profit” meaning. I am extremely grateful to BNMI and the Banff Centre for inviting me anyway, and for paying my airfare, because otherwise I would never in a million years be able to attend, benefit from, or contribute to such an awesome event.

One of the things I was reminded of during the Babel Babble Residency at Banff is that I make really low tech high tech art, and I persist in doing this for some pretty stubborn yet specific reasons. So at Interactive Screen I’ll attempt to address their general theme: High Tech/Low Tech/New Tech/No Tech: innovating, recycling and sharing technologies in a culture of wealth and waste. I’ll talk about artists and independent orginizations and producers near and dear to my heart; indi-publishing and zine culture; how and why I re-use and recycle found images, found texts, and found code; and how I’ve used the web to remain independent and sometimes circumvent certain cumbersome institutions.

I’ll post more as I sort through the ideas and issues of this theme. In the meantime, here are some of my other Internet Writings on related themes:

“Responsa Literature: Partial Replies to Scattered Questions”
“Ingrid Bachmann: Digital Crustaceans v.0.2: Homesteading on the Web”
“A brief history of the Internet as I know it so far”
“A Little Talk about Reproduction”

. . . . .

Responsa: An Overview

Responsa Literature: partial replies to scattered letters
http://luckysoap.com/responsa/

Introduction: confessions of an avid letter writer

Why is it that everyone I know lives in New York?

Part I: Writing is Hard

“Irene left a note on his kitchen table. The spelling was weak and Irene, examining her note, marvelled at how difficult writing things down was compared to saying them. Saying something was as easy as laughing; writing caused you grief, as though you were mourning somebody who had abandoned you too soon.”
Rose Tremaine, Sacred Country

Part II: Writing from Exile

“Is the place any token of the author?”
“indicat auctorem locus?”
Ovid, EX PONTO, I. VII.

Part III: Responsa

“What conditions precipitate the writing of a letter? A physical distance separates the writer from the reader and we write to cover that distance. Wherever we are, when we write, we write from a local position. Time passes between the writing of the letter and the reading of it; more time passes between the reading and the reply. ‘Between the too warm flesh of the literal event and the cold skin of the concept runs meaning.’ [Derrida] From his exile at the edge of the Empire, Ovid writes: ‘“In so long a time why has not they hand done its duty and completed even a few lines?’ The reply embodies another question. ‘Is not the writing of the question, by it’s decision, by its resolution, the beginning of repose and response?’ [Derrida]”
J. R. Carpenter, Responsa

Part IV: Network Communication

Me: Hey, how come this anonmous ftp thing doesn’t work?

Tech: You spelled anonymous wrong.

Me: Again.

Me: I heard about this thing called pine for reading email.
Do you know about that?

Tech: Yeah.

Me: Well, how do I get it?

Tech: Pine is for weenies.

Me: I’m a weenie.

Tech: vi editor rules.

Me: I want pine.

an escerpt from the essay:
“A brief history of the Internet as I know it so far”
J. R. Carpenter 2003.

Part V: Location, Location, Location

When we write, we write from a local position.

“My dear Herr Kappus: I have left a letter of yours long unanswered, not that I had forgotten it – on the contrary: it was of the kind that one reads again when one finds it among other letters, and I recognized you in it as if you were close at hand. It was the letter of May 2nd, and you doubtless remember it. When I read it, as I do now, in the great stillness of this faraway place, your beautiful concern for life moves me even more than I experienced it in Paris, where everything has a different ring and dies away by reason of the monstrous noise that makes all things tremble. Here, where a vast countryside is around me, over which the winds come in from the seas, here I feel that there is nowhere a human being who can answer you those question and feelings which have a life of their own within their depths; for even the best men go astray with words, where these are to express something very gentle and almost unutterable.”
Rainer Maria Rilke, written from ‘Temporarily at Worpswede near Bremen, July 16th, 1903. Letters to a Young Poet

Part VI: Optimism

“Router level Interconnectivity of the Internet looks like a giant, blood-shot eyeball.” from “Digital Crustaceans v.0.2: Homesteading on the Web” and art review by J. R. Carpenter of a show
Ingrid Bachmann at Gallery Articule, Montréal, Québec, April 4 – May 4 2003.

“Pookie” – a biological, digital, quasi-fictional manifestation of Ingrid Bachmann’s imagination – explores a fascinating corner of the web at www.digitalhermit.ca

In Closing:

“Nothing is more occult than the way letters, under the auspices of unimaginable carriers, circulate through the weird mess of civil wars; but whenever, owing to that mess, there was some break in our correspondence, Tamara would act as if she ranked deliveries with ordinary natural phenomena such as the weather or tides, which human affairs could not affect, and she would accuse me of not answering her, when if fact I did nothing by write to her and think of her during those months – despite my many betrayals.”
Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory

Related Links:

Nomad Web: Sleeping beauty awakes, by Ingrid Bachmann
http://www.research.umbc.edu/~lmoren/nomadweb.htm

the electronic version of The Virtual Community, by Howard Rheingold
http://www.rheingold.com/vc/book/intro.html

A Vernacular Web, by Olia Lialina
http://art.teleportacia.org/observation/vernacular/

A little Talk About Reproduction, by J. R. Carpenter
http://luckysoap.com/reproduction/

All this with pictures:
http://luckysoap.com/responsa/


. . . . .

MIT4: The Work of Stories

Responsa Literature: partial replies to scattered letters
J. R. Carpenter
Abstract: The term “responsa literature” refers to all written rulings made by rabbis under Jewish law, in response to questions submitted to them in writing, throughout the post-Talmudic period. Initially, the great distances that separated Diaspora Jewry from the scholars of Babylon necessitated this type of question and response law making. Montréal poet Anne Carson has written: “People in exile write so many letters.” She speaks of Ovid who, nightly, “puts on sadness like a garment and goes on writing.” I was, in effect, born in exile. A first generation Canadian, I spent much of my early life writing letters to my grandmother, trying to piece together a story for her of who I was and to elicit from her some idea of where I had come from. She rarely wrote back. When she died I found that she had saved my letters, stuffed in no apparent order, into books and piles and drawers. I have since become fascinated with collections of letters. In this paper, I will draw on letters, literature and historical sources to discuss ways in which contemporary forms of diaspora, as may result from divorce, emigration, or economic migration, alter family narratives. I will explore some of the ways in which media and communication technologies have forever altered the responsa form. Letter writing has re-emerged, in the form of email. Does the immediacy of this question and response mode of communicating bring us any closer to piecing together an idea of who we are and where we come from?

Presentation Friday May 6, 2005
Call Session 2, 5 – 6:30
Room 56-167, MIT
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