lapsus linguae

The Gathering Cloud

The Gathering Cloud is a new hybrid print and web-based work by J. R. Carpenter commissioned by NEoN Digital Arts Festival, which takes place in Dundee, UK, 9-13 November 2016.

This work aims to address the environmental impact of so-called ‘cloud’ computing through the oblique strategy of calling attention to the materiality of the clouds in the sky. Both are commonly perceived to be infinite resources, at once vast and immaterial; both, decidedly, are not.

Fragments from Luke Howard’s classic “Essay on the Modifications of Clouds” (1803) as well as more recent online articles and books on media and the environment are pared down into hyptertextual hendecasyllabic verses. These are situated within surreal animated gif collages composed of images materially appropriated from publicly accessible cloud storage services.

The Gathering Cloud – a new hybrid print and web-based work by J. R. Carpenter

The cognitive dissonance between the cultural fantasy of cloud storage and the hard facts of its environmental impact is bridged, in part, through the constant evocation of animals: A cumulus cloud weighs one hundred elephants. A USB fish swims through a cloud of cables. Four million cute cat pics are shared each day. A small print iteration of “The Gathering Cloud” shared through gift, trade, mail art, and small press economies further confuses boundaries between physical and digital, scarcity and waste.

The Gathering Cloud was commissioned by NEoN Digital Arts Festival, Dundee, UK, 9-13 November 2016. Many thanks to the curators Sarah Cook and Donna Holford-Lovell. Portions of this text were first performed at the Bath Royal Literary and Scientific Institution during the South West Poetry Tour, 1-8 August 2016. Thanks and curses to Annabel Banks for sugesting the hendecasyllabic constraint. Thanks to Kay Lovelace, Rachel McCarthy, Michael Saunby, and the fine folks at the Informatics Lab at the Met Office for tips, tricks, and discussions on code and the weather. And thanks to Jerome Fletcher for everything else.

Further reading: NEoN speaks with JR Carpenter

View the work online here: The Gathering Cloud

A Few Views on Interviews

I’ve been interviewed by some really very clever people lately, enough so to prompt me to finally create an INTERVIEWS page for my website. Here are a few highlights:

Last Friday the Montreal-based online journal Lemon Hound published Elvia Wilk in Conversation with J. R. Carpenter, the latest installment in an ongoing conversation Berlin-based writer and editor Elvia Wilk and I have been having since first meeting at In(ter)ventions: Literary Practice at the Edge at The Banff Centre in 2013. Elvia and I met up in London last autumn to dissect various (misleading) terms in the fields of art, net art, literature, and electronic literature. Our conversation ranged over projects both new and old. We discussed code as performance writing, and ending up on the topic of islands as topos, possible only in literature…

Back in January I answered questions from Andrea Zeffiro for J.R. Carpenter: Object-Oriented Interview by Andrea Zeffiro, an interview published by the Media Archaeology Lab at University of Colorado at Boulder. We called it an object-oriented interview because of its focus on, well, objects – including but not limited to slide projectors, cameras, photocopy machines, Roman ruins, geology, process, pragmatics and more… with many thanks to Lori Emerson and team at the Media Archaeology Lab in Boulder.

In November of last year Illya Szilak interviewed me for Huffington Post Books. Here is the resulting article: Reorienting Narrative: E-lit as Psychogeography.

And here’s a video Interview David Jhave Johnston did with me at The Banff Centre about two years ago as part of the series Conversations with Poets about Technology (CAPTA).

JR Carpenter from David (Jhave) Johnston on Vimeo.

Many thanks to all of these interviewers and publishers. For more see: http://luckysoap.com/interviews.html

I first logged onto the internet 20 years and 22 days ago today

On 93/11/05, in the PAVO lab at Concordia University in Montreal, I logged onto the internet for the first time. My user name was JR_CARP. I remember these details because I still have the ID card from that first account. After a few months of writing fictional posts to alt.arts.nomad and other USNET groups I got a UNIX account and dove into the wonderful worlds of Telnet, Archie, Gopher, FTP, Purple Crayon, LambdaMOO, c-theory, ALT-X, and so on. The rest, as they say, is a syslog file.

JR_CARP

I’ve written about those way back times a number of times in a number of ways over the past twenty years. Here links to a few essays which are still online which I’m not too embarrassed about:

A Little Talk About Reproduction 1997

A Brief History of the Internet as I know it So Far 2003

Getting in on the Ground Floor: A Hazy History of How and Why We Banded Together 2007

A Non-Linear Time Line of 20 Years Online 2013

Collaborations are underway toward marking this anniversary. Berlin-based art critic and code-poet Elvia Wilk is currently slogging through the audio archive of an interview we did in London in October. And I am chipping away at answering questions posed by writer and researcher Andrea Zeffiro for what we’re calling an Object Oriented Interview for the Media Archaeology Lab in Boulder, Colorado.

In the meantime, here is a video interview the brilliant and delightful code-poet philosopher David Jhave Johnston did with me at The Banff Centre in 2012, for the series CAPTA: Conversations with poets about technology, in which, there is much discussion of the olden days of internet of yore.