lapsus linguae

In(ter)ventions: Literary Practice at the Edge Residency at The Banff Centre

It’s plus 12 degrees Celsius in south west England. Snow drops in blossom in the glade along the drive. Lambs frolicking in green fields. And I’m preparing to depart for Banff, Alberta where the high today was minus 14 and the white is not blossom but snow. Why? Why, for the love of literature of course. And, for the love of mountains.

I’m thrilled to be returning to Banff once again, this time to serve as faculty for In(ter)ventions: Literary Practice at the Edge, an new residency offered by Literary Arts at The Banff Centre February 14, 2011 – February 26, 2011.

Faculty:
Fred Wah – collaboration and hybridity
J. R. Carpenter – digital literature
Lance Olsen – new narrative

Guest Speakers:
Oana Avasilichioaei
Debra Di Blasi
Erin Moure
Darren Wershler

I’ll be performing along side Darren Wershler and Lance Olsen at The Club, Theatre Complex at The Banff Centre Thursday, February 17, 2011 – 7:30 pm. [more info]

null

GENERATION[S] Book Launch and Performance Event at Cabaret Fledermaus, Vienna, December 14, 2010

My new code narrative book, GENERATION[S], and all the other awesome books in TRAUMAWIEN Edition Schema 2, will launch at Cabaret Fledermaus in Vienna, Tuesday the 14th of December. Or, Dezember, as they spell December in Vienna. Or, Vien, as they spell Vienna in Vienna. I love being part of a production I can’t even read the PR for! I can’t wait to return to Vienna, where all the buildings look like cakes. And I really can’t wait to see the Cabaret Feldermaus. The original was opened in 1907. The interior was designed by Josef Hoffmann. Several other well-known artists of the Viennese Art Nouveau, including Gustav Klimt, contributed to the design of the stage and furniture, as well as posters, postcards, pins and cutlery. Those days are over, alas. The TRAUMAWIEN launch event will be held in the new Cabaret Feldermaus, founded in 1967, and basically unchanged since, despite it’s recent transformation into a disco club. In different places in Europe “disco” means different things. In this case, I sincerely hope there’s a disco ball, to mirror the glittering mosaics of the Feldermaus of old.

In any case, it seems fitting that GENERATION[S] will launch in a venue that has seen many generations come and go. The paradoxes of this setting also seem to be in keeping with those embraced by GENERATION[S] Vienna-based publisher TRAUMAWIEN. As TRAUMAWIEN editor Luc Gross writes, “TRAUMAWIEN considers the paradox of transferring late-breaking digital aesthetics into book form, as new media narrative snapshots of literary genres otherwise quickly lost in the immense output produced by web every second.”

GENERATION[S] is one such snapshot: a book collecting sentences written in Twitter, pulled into Facebook, commented upon, rewritten, retweeted, recommented, rewritten, collated into arrays, parsed by Python scripts, output as short stories in terminal windows, copied and pasted into a Word doc, spaced, placed and paginated, transformed into a book by TRAUMAWIEN’s brilliant designer Julian Palacz. In the book, the digital process are reordered. The output stories come first. They are interspersed with Facebook screenshots showing the first instances of certain of the sentences they contain. The source code follows the stories it generates. Download instructions are offered. One sentence at a time. Wash, rinse, repeat.

For more info on GENERATION[S], TRAUMAWIEN and all the other awesome books launching in Edition Schema 2 visit: http://www.traumawien.at/preview/

Purchase GENERATION[S] online: http://www.amazon.com/Generation-s-J-R-Carpenter/dp/3950291032/ref=ntt_at_ep_dpi_2

TRAUMAWIEN Schema 2 Launch Poster

Präsentation der Edition Schema 2
J. R. Carpenter, Montreal
Ivan Monroy Lopez, Mexico City
Audun Mortensen, Oslo

Präsentation der Edition Hybrid 1
Philip Hautmann, Wien

Coups
Barbara Anna Husar, Wien
Olivia Kaiser, Wien
Brian Larosche, Oslo

Tanzmusik
Schellackplatten – Otto Jekel
othon.jekel.at

Dienstag, 14. Dezember 2010, 19 Uhr OPEN END!
Cabaret Fledermaus
Spiegelgasse 2, 1010 Wien

http://traumawien.at/

Whisper Wire: A Poetry Generator Transmitting and Receiving Electronic Voice Phenomena Through Haunted Media

Whisper Wire is a new poetry generator by J.R. Carpenter, a text transmitter, a code medium sending and receiving a steady stream of strange sounds, disembodied voices, ghost whispers, distant wails and other intercepted attempts to communicate over vast distances through copper wires, telegraph cables, transistor radios and other haunted media.

From the outset, telegraphy has been associated with otherworldly presences. If intelligence and consciousness could be transmitted independent of the body, surely the dead could speak to the living though electromagnetic means. This perception persisted nearly a century, even as telegraph and telephone networks girdled the globe with cables, signals, switches and stations.

null

December 14, 1901, three short sharp clicks skipped this grid. The Morse letter S travelled from Poldu, Cornwall — not troubled at at by the curvature of the Earth or the salt wet and wind of the Atlantic — to Saint-John’s, Newfoundland, where it was received by a telephonic headset held to the highly sensitive receiver of Guglielmo Marconi’s waiting ear.

Was the Morse letter S appended to Saint-John’s that day? Hoax rumours abound. Some suggest that what Marconi heard was actually a harmonic — a connection, yes, but not a transmission. Distance distorts. Distance distends. We hear what we need to. Wireless technology revealed a vast, unfathomable ocean of silence and static. Deep listening into that void can return uncanny results. Whisper Wire generates an unheimlich poem of un-homed messages, a spectrum of strange and unexplainable sounds, hunting the either for a listener, a receiver, a media to haunt.

The source code of Whisper Wire is itself possessed. Whisper Wire is a remix of Nick Montfort’s Taroko Gorge. Excerpts and source code of another of J.R. Carpenter’s remixes of Taroko Gorge, titled simply GORGE, appear in her new hybrid code narrative book GENERATION[S], published by TRAUMAWIEN.

Whisper Wire will be performed in Edinburgh on Halloween night at Inspace… no one can hear you scream, an evening of language in digital performance presented by the third International Conference on Interactive Digital Storytelling and New Media Scotland.

Whisper Wire will become a live wire during this 20 minute hybrid performance. Performance writers J.R. Carpenter and Jerome Fletcher will mix generated text, javascript, found sounds and live readings from the works of decadent authors, Medlar Lucan & Durian Gray and others.

“As we stand on the clifftop at Poldhu, watching the wind which roars in off the Atlantic whipping spindrift off the tops of the waves, we are filled with an overwhelming sense of horror. Between here and New York nothing but grotesque tonnages of uncooked haddock swim. Nowhere is Nature present in such profusion, and we have chosen to expose ourselves to it for the next three days!

At this spot a century ago, Guglielmo Marconi set up a circle of masts by which he would transmit the first radio signals beyond the curve of the earth. We too are here to communicate. Not with the Living, however, but with the Dead.”

Medlar Lucan & Durian Gray with Paul Renner, The Hell Fire Touring Club, Oxford: Pharsalia, 2004, page 21.

48 hours | Inspace… no one can hear you scream.
Sunday 31st October 2010, 7.30 for 8pm.
Inspace, 1 Crichton Street, Edinburgh EH8 9AB

Inspace

Inspace… no one can hear you scream: an evening of language in digital performance

Sunday 31st October 2010, 7.30 pm, the third International Conference on Interactive Digital Storytelling and New Media Scotland will present an evening of language in digital performance with works by Martin John Callanan, J.R. Carpenter, Jerome Fletcher, Donna Leishman, Maria Mencia, Netwurker Mez, Stanza and Christine Wilks. The performance event will be held on Halloween. There will be a haunted theme.

48 hours | Inspace… no one can hear you scream.

Sunday 31st October 2010, 7.30 for 8pm.

Inspace, 1 Crichton Street, Edinburgh EH8 9AB

ICIDS Conference Program

Inspace

Reading in London: 7 Poets for Oxfam Autumn Fundraiser

I will be reading some very short prose pieces at Back To School: 7 Poets for Oxfam Autumn 2010 Fundraiser, Wednesday, 29 September, 2010 – 7 pm, at Oxfam Books and Music shop, 91 Marylebone High Street, London W1 (10 minutes walk from Baker Street tube station).

The evening will feature seven poets, from Canada, Britain, Ireland, and New Zealand:

Carole Baldock – British poet and editor-publisher of Kudos and Orbis magazines

Charles Boyle – Faber poet, publisher and novelist, shortlisted for TS Eliot Prize

JR Carpenter – Prize-winning Quebec writer, poet and performance artist

CL Dallat – Irish poet, writer and musician of significance

Helen Oswald – shortlisted for the current Forward Prize for Best First Collection

Anna Smaill – a leading younger poet from New Zealand

Anthony Thwaite – legendary poet-critic, and editor of Larkin’s Collected Poems and Selected Letters

This event is supported by Kingston University and hosted by Todd Swift.

Please reserve seats for these events by contacting shop manager Martin Penny by email or phone 020 7487 3570 or oxfammarylebone [at] hotmail [dot] com

Admission free. All money raised goes to Oxfam, a registered charity.

For more information, please visit the Eyeware blog.

txt/performance/net at MACHFELD, Vienna, June 26

I’m doing a digital text installation and performance at MCACHFELD in Vienna Saturday, June 26, thanks to the generosity and super organizational prowess of Vienna-based digital sound visual interactive poet, member of the institute for transacoustic research and member of the vegetable orchestra Jörg Piringer, who set the whole thing up.

MACHFELD (Michael Mastrototaro & Sabine Maier) was founded 1999 in Vienna. Based on Mastrototaro’s cyber-novel of the same name, MACHFELD developed an art-label focused on: web-art, short- and experimental films, streaming-projects, interactive installations as well as works for the public space. Since 2004 MACHFELD has run an interdisciplinary Medialab in Vienna, with projects, exhibitions and installations / screenings in Africa, Europe, Central- and North-America.

If you happen to be in Vienna Saturday, 26 June, come by MCACHFELD for an evening with txt/net-installations & -performances by:

j.r. carpenter
http://luckysoap.com/

peter moosgaard
http://duebomba.blogs.sonance.net/

jörg piringer
http://joerg.piringer.net/

with a guest appearance by decadent chef Durain Gray.

machfeld invitation

Saturday, 26 June 2010 at 20:00
machfeld | studio
2., max winter platz 21/1
Vienna, Austria

PW10 Performance Writing Weekend at the Arnolfini

I will be presenting digital work in PW10 Performance Writing Weekend at ARNOLFINI in Bristol, UK, May 8-9, 2010. PW10 is part of Lingua Franca, a series of exhibitions and events looking at intermediary language, linguistic translation and the subjectivity of language presented by Arnolfini during 2010.

As part of the Lingua Franca season, ARNOLFINI has collaborated with the Performance Writing and English with Creative Writing fields at University College Falmouth to create PW10: a weekend of performances, talks, readings, digital and audio / visual work exploring interdisciplinary approaches to language, textuality and environments for writing. PW10 artists and writers include Ric Allsopp, Emma Bennett, J.R. Carpenter, Nisha Duggal, Drew Milne, David Prior, Jean-Jacques Lecercle, Tony Lopez, Marianne Morris, Nancy Reilly-McVittie, Redell Olsen and Aaron Williamson.

A two-day workshop exploring the theme of writing and water, accompanying the PW10 Performance Writing weekend. Led by University College Falmouth lecturers Jerome Fletcher and Simon Persighetti, this practical writing project will use the floating harbour adjacent to Arnolfini as a site to explore the relationship between writing and water.

PW10 will run May 7-9, 2010. These dates coincide with the opening of a major re-site of a text/audio installation by Caroline Bergvall and Ciarán Maher, “Say Parsley,” running for 8 weeks in the ARNOLFINI Gallery, Sat 8 May – Sun 4 July, 2010.

“Say Parsley” is a sparse sound and language installation by London-based French-Norwegian writer Caroline Bergvall and Irish composer Ciarán Maher. Organized across a number of spaces, the installation becomes a place for mishearings, recognition, assumptions, misattribution. You hear what you want to hear. You hear what you think you hear. The background to Say Parsley is the biblical ‘shibboleth’, a violent event where language itself is gatekeeper, and a pretext to massacre. The pronunciation of a given word exposes the identity of the speaker. To speak becomes a give-away. Are you one of us, not one of us? How you speak will be used against you. The most recent example of a large scale shibboleth was the massacre of tens of thousands of Creole Haitians on the border of the Dominican Republic in 1937, when the criteria for execution was the failure to pronounce ‘perejil’ (parsley) in the accepted Spanish manner, with a rolling ‘r’.

PW10 May 8-9, 2010
ARNOLFINI
16 Narrow Quay, Bristol BS1 4QA

In(ter)ventions – A Note on the Agenda

In case I haven’t mentioned this already, I am really, really, really excited about In(ter)ventions — Literary Practice At The Edge: A Gathering happening at The Banff Centre February 18, 2010 – February 21, 2010. I had the good fortune to be involved in the planning of this event. In December 2008, Steven Ross Smith – Director of Literary Arts at The Banff Centre – invited Marjorie Perloff, Lance Olsen, Fred Wah and me to Banff for a three-day think tank on bringing new practices to the the Literary Arts program. The incredible diversity of practice, knowledge and experience at that table was both humbling and exhilarating. It has been wonderful watching the many names, works, issues and ideas from a vast array of literary practices we discussed coalesce into the dreamboat agenda we have today.

The best part of this agenda is, now we get to go enact it – live in real time in Banff. On Friday, February 19, 2PM, I’m on a panel on Digital Effects – Digital Literary Creation & Dissemination with Stephanie Strickland and Chris Funkhouser moderated by Nick Montfort. Later, at 8PM that evening, I’m doing a reading/performance with Lance Olsen and Erin Moure. Then, on Saturday February 20, at 3:30PM, I’m presenting a screening of digital literature co-curated with Ram Devineni. For the rest of In(ter)ventions I’ll be litstening, watching and reading with rapt attention, catching up with friends and generally resisting the urge to ask everyone for their autographs.

The full In(ter)ventions agenda (pdf): http://www.banffcentre.ca/programs/id/0900/925/agenda.pdf

. . . . .

In(ter)ventions: Literary Practice At The Edge

In(ter)ventions — Literary Practice At The Edge: A Gathering is a conference unlike any held previously in Canada. Over the course of four days, thirty six forward-thinking literary artists will create a context for the demonstration and discussion of cutting-edge literary practice. In a mixture of panels, papers, readings, performances, and more, participants will explore digital literature, interactivity, collaboration, cross-disciplinary work, formal innovation, “uncreative” writing, new modes of dissemination, and literary pedagogy.

Within the rapidly changing landscape of literary practice and dissemination, technology has rocketed forward, putting more power into the hands of writers and other artists. New literary modes have appeared and continue to develop, and the ability to share information rapidly across disciplines has resulted in exciting and challenging cross-pollination. In(ter)ventions will explore the edges of literature, where technology, innovation, and literary practice meet.

This conference is open to writers, new media artists, students, critics, educators, and others who want to contribute to, or listen in on, the conversation taking place with regards to innovative modes of literature. Participants will come away from this cutting-edge conference with a better understanding of the future of literary practice and inspiration to further explore emerging trends in the discipline.

In(ter)ventions: Literary Practice At The Edge: A Gathering
The Banff Centre, Banff, Alberta, Canada
February 18, 2010 – February 21, 2010

Director: Steven Ross Smith
Presenters: Charles Bernstein, Jen Bervin, Christian Bök, J.R. Carpenter, Maria Damon, Ram Devineni, Craig Dworkin, Al Filreis, Christopher Funkhouser, Kenneth Goldsmith, D. Kimm, Larissa Lai, Daphne Marlatt, Nick Montfort, Erin Moure, Lance Olsen, Stephen Osborne, Marjorie Perloff, Kate Pullinger, Stephanie Strickland, Steve Tomasula, Fred Wah

Further information || Agenda (PDF)
. . . . .

Wild Party – Skype Tea with World Tea Party at Centre A

Part slumber party, part jungle party, WILD PARTY goes on 24/7 in a bedroom in an 18th c country house in South Devon, England. The kettle is always on in this wilderness of laptops, iPods, data projectors, bad puns, random theories, tea trivia, tea lights, throw pillows, paper cut-outs and painted plywood trees. Drop in on a fiction writer in stripy dressing gown, a teenager in a wolf suit, a butler in track pants, a stuffed cow in a plush coat and a panda in a bikini for a cup of Wild Berry Tea.

J. R. Carpenter, Aphra Kennedy Fletcher, Jerome Fletcher, Mooey and Panda, with guest appearances from Couch Potato (who is basically a potato) and The Zebra Socks, will broadcast one hour of their ongoing WILD PARTY live via Skype from Sharpham House, South Devon, England, to Centre A, 2 West Hastings St., Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, February 13, 1400 PST / 2200 GMT

WILD PARTY is part of WORLD TEA PARTY
Celebrations of global Tea Culture
Presented by Centre A
February 12-28 & March 12-21, 2010
Gallery Hours: 2:00 pm – 10:00 pm
Free admission before 6:00pm
Opening Reception: Friday, February 12, 7:00 pm

Centre A is pleased to present World Tea Party, animated by lead-artist Brian Mulvihill (aka Trolley Bus), one of the world’s leading tea masters and calligraphers based in Vancouver. Mulvihill is producing a special Olympiad edition of The World Tea Party.

Previous versions have been presented for large publics at the Winnipeg Pan Am Games, the Venice Biennale, the National Gallery of Canada, the Hollywood Bowl, the Eiffel Tower and other venues. The project is based on the notion that humanity shares in the drinking of tea a spirit of generosity and understanding that both celebrates and transcends our cultural diversity. Tea is the most common beverage in the world community.

The World Tea Party is a “social sculpture” that involves the creative empowerment of the audience and the general public. Its interactive aspect makes the World Tea Party an effective vehicle for a debate about the relationship between the Olympics and the Downtown Eastside.

Free Tea and Large Scale Video Projections
During gallery hours, tea is offered for free, both inside the gallery and at times on the street, while video projections are shown on the building’s exterior windows daily from 6:00 pm to 10:00 pm.

Two 5,000 lumen video projectors will be used to project images 40 feet wide across the front windows of the gallery. Content will include works by commissioned artists, live images of performances, pre-recorded tea images, documentation of the World Tea Party in different contexts

Special Events
The World Tea Party features a number of special events, including Skwxumesh First Nations artist Cease Wyss, who will host a First Nations welcome event on Sunday, February 14, featuring indigenous herbal teas. On Saturday, February 20, Jun Oenoki, who is Associate Professor, Communication Studies, Tokyo Keizai University and artist-in-residence at Centre A, will produce a teleconference with partners in Yokohama which will be streamed live to the Internet and edited for outdoor display. The traditional Japanese tea ceremony is presented by the Urasenke society of Vancouver. The relaxed atmosphere of the World Tea Party invites conversation and informal performances. New additions to the line-up will be posted to the website.

Local Network – “Bright Light” partnership of 10 DTES arts groups
World Tea Party is key station in the City of Vancouver’s Olympic and Paralympic Public Art Program: Bright Light, an initiative that provides pedestrian friendly light-based public art works, projections and performances along Carrall Street, Hastings Street and in the neighbouring area. The project brings together a consortium of 14 creative partners, including Access, Helen Pitt, Downtown East Cultural Centre, Artspeak, LIVE, UBC Architecture and others. Centre A acts as a hub and meeting place for Bright Light.

Come have a cup of tea!

Please see these websites for complete event schedule:
www.worldteaparty.com
www.centrea.org
http://bright-light.ca/
. . . . .