Next Stop, SappyFest!

Literary types of all stripes will invade SappyFest this year. Thursday, July 30, I’ll pack a suitcase full of zines and novels and join the migration eastward.

SappyFest is a little independent music festival produced annually in partnership with the Ok.Quoi?! Contemporary Arts Festival, Struts Gallery & Faucet Media Arts Centre. The festival takes place July 31 – August 2, 2009, in Sackville, New Brunswick, the centre of the universe.

If you happen to be in the centre of the universe that weekend, come visit me at the Zine Fair, Saturday August 1, 12 to 4 PM at the United Church. There will be participants from across Canada, a kids workshop, a presentation by Andy Brown (Conundrum Press) and readings by Jeffrey Makie, Jaime Forsthythe and Dawn-Aeron Wason.

Sunday, August 2, 11:00 AM to 1:00 PM, check out the The Vogue Writers Block, a multi-media event at The Vogue Theater (Sackville’s art deco movie theater) featuring The Joe, Catherine Kidd, J.R. Carpenter, Lezlie Lowe, Andrea Dorfman, Ian Roy, and Thesis. I’ll reading a section of my novel, Words the Dog Knows, that traverses three different electronic literature projects (How I Loved the Broken Things of Rome, Entre Ville, and in absentia).

Now a registered non-profit organization, SappyFest Incorporated, the festival was founded in 2006 by the good people of Sappy Records, Julie Doiron, Jon Claytor and Paul Henderson.

Ok.Quoi?! is an interdisciplinary festival of contemporary art, focusing on video, audio, new and independent music produced by Struts Gallery & Faucet Media Arts Centre in partnership with SappyFest. The works of over 50 artists will be presented over 6 days in a variety of screenings, installations, concerts, broadcasts and performances. Alongside exciting international and national work, Ok.Quoi?! features new and innovative projects from local and regional artists. All events save for the Last Chance for Summer Romance concert and barbecue are free, and open to all ages.

More info: SappyFest & Ok.Quoi?!


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E-Poetry Festival – Barcelona 2009

Next week I will present in absentia at the 5th edition of the E-Poetry Festival, which will take place in Barcelona May 24th-27, 2009. Artistic and academic events will take place at key Barcelona venues such as the the University of Barcelona, the Barcelona Center for Contemporary Culture (CCCB) and the Caixaforum, providing authors the opportunity to present their works to a public curious about new poetry and artistic trends employing technology and communication during the Setmana de la Poesia.

The event is organized by UOC’s research group Hermeneia, with the collaboration of Electronic Poetry Center (University of Buffalo) and the Laboratoire Paragraph (Univ. Paris VIII). Keynote speakers will include Roberto Simanowski (Brown University) and Jean Clément (Université Paris 8).

E-Poetry is an international biennial conference and festival of digital poetry. It is the most significant digital literary gathering in the field, bringing together an impressive roster of Electronic Literature’s most influential practitioners from around the world. Authors and researchers will present the latest research and the newest, most important works of electronic literature will be presented. Presenting at E-Poetry will bring my work to the attention of an influential international audience of critics, academics, practitioners and the public.

For more information or to register, please visit: http://www.e-poetry2009.com/

in absentia is a web-based project that uses fiction, digital images, historical maps HTML, javascript and the Google Maps API to address issues of gentrification and its erasures in the Mile End neighbourhood of Montreal. The result is an interactive non-linear narrative map of interconnected “postcard” stories written from the point of view of former tenants of Mile End. In recent years many long-time low-income immigrant and elderly neighbours have been forced out of their homes by economic decisions made in their absence. The neighbourhood is haunted now, with their stories. Our stories. My building was sold during the production of in absentia. Faced with imminent eviction I began to write as if I was no longer here, about a Mile End that is no longer here. The Mile End depicted in in absentia is a slightly fantastical world, a shared memory of the neighbourhood as it never really was but as it could have been. The sterile and slightly sinister “developer’s-eye-view” of the neighbourhood offered by Google Maps satellite imaging has been populated with stories, interrupted with silhouette voids, intimate traces of the sudden disappearances of characters (fictional or otherwise) from the places (real or imagined) where they once lived.

At E-Poetry I will present the piece by giving a brief contextual overview of the work and then read aloud from a number of the stories contained in the work.
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soirée de performances hypermédiatiques bleuOrange

Vous êtes cordialement invitées, invités à la soirée de performances hypermédiatiques bleuOrange, mettant en vedette J .R. Carpenter, Jason E. Lewis et David Jhave Johnston, trois artistes reconnus pour leurs pratiques d’écriture faisant usage des technologies numériques. Ils seront suivis d’une prestation du groupe Graffiti Research Lab – Canada.

J.R. Carpenter est la récipiendaire du Carte Blanche Quebec Award décerné par la Quebec Writer’s Foundation, elle a remporté deux fois la CBC Quebec Short Story Competition, ainsi que, plus récemment, le Expozine Alternative Press Award dans la catégorie Best English Book pour son premier roman, Words the Dog Knows. Ses œuvres de littérature électronique ont été présentées partout dans le monde. Elle est présidente du conseil d’administration du Laboratoire des Nouveaux Médias OBORO à Montréal.
http://luckysoap.com

Artiste du Web, David Jhave Johnston a débuté sa pratique comme poète avant d’intégrer les outils informatiques et numériques à sa production. Il est engagé dans de nombreuses collaborations, notamment avec le collectif torontois Year01 dans le cadre duquel il agit régulièrement à titre de commissaire. Son travail a été présenté notamment aux Biennales d’art contemporain de Montréal, en 2003, et de Toronto, en 2004. Diplômé de l’université Concordia en 2004 en Sciences informatiques, il a également complété une maîtrise en Arts interactifs à l’université Simon Fraser (Vancouver) en 2005 et est actuellement doctorant à Concordia.
http://www.glia.ca

Jason E. Lewis est un artiste des médias numériques et un designer de logiciels. Il est le fondateur de Obx Laboratory for Experimental Media, où il est le directeur des projets de recherche et de création. Leur objet est de trouver de nouvelles manières de produire et de lire des textes numériques, de développer des systèmes permettant un usage créatif de la technologie mobile, d’assurer le design d’interfaces alternatives pour des performances artistiques en direct et d’utiliser des environnements virtuels afin d’assister les communautés aborigènes dans la préservation, l’interprétation et la communication de leur histoire culturelle. Obx Labs est dévoué au développement de nouvelles formes d’expression en travaillant simultanément sur le plan conceptuel, créatif et technique. Les œuvres et les écrits de Jason E. Lewis sur les médias ont fait l’objet d’expositions et de conférences sur quatre continents. Il est présentement professeur associé au département des arts informatiques de l’Université Concordia.
http://www.obxlabs.net

Graffiti Research Lab – Canada. Quand la voix du peuple ne peut se faire entendre par les moyens traditionnels, la population doit opter pour des méthodes subversives. Entraîné dans les profondeurs de la plus grande jungle urbaine de la planète, le Graffiti Research Lab déploie un groupe d’agents canadiens de niveau Splinter Cell élite pour combattre l’establishment et pénétrer la conscience des masses. Extrêmement efficaces dans l’utilisation d’Armes de Défiguration Massive, ces agents dévoyés travaillent à la libération du peuple, et contre la guerre psychologique des agences de publicité. Leurs armes? Peindre avec la lumière et diffuser avec des lasers.
http://www.GraffitiResearchLab.ca

Les performances auront lieu le samedi 2 mai 2009, à 20 heures
à l’Agora Hydro-Québec du Coeur des sciences de l’UQAM
175, avenue du Président-Kennedy, Montréal
Métro Place-des-Arts, accès entre l’UQAM et l’église au toit rouge

Entrée libre
La revue bleuOrange (http://revuebleuorange.org) profitera du colloque international Histoires et Archives, arts et littératures hypermédiatiques (colloque2009.nt2.uqam.ca) pour tenir une soirée de performances d’œuvres hypermédiatiques le 2 mai 2009 à 20 h, et souligner le lancement du second numéro de bleuOrange, revue de littérature hypermédiatique.

bleuOrange est un projet soutenu par le Laboratoire NT2 : Nouvelles technologies, nouvelles textualités et Figura, le Centre de recherche sur le texte et l’imaginaire, tous deux rattachés au Département d’études littéraires à l’Université du Québec à Montréal.

INFORMATIONS
Alice van der Klei
Rédactrice en chef
bleuOrange, revue de littérature hypermédiatique
514 987.3000 poste 1931
info@revuebleuorange.org
http://revuebleuorange.org


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Wired Women Salon # 70 :: Top Chrono

The time has come for our 2008 TOP CHRONO Salon! Once again, Studio XX will showcase the work of talented women artists who will share sneak peeks of their latest artworks, productions or performances. Audiences will enjoy performance pieces, presentations with images and sound, spoken word, music, video and other magnificent surprises true to our artform. Invited artists will be subject to the playful random rules of the universe : each will have between 4 to 7 minutes to execute their presentation. The lenght will be determined by the cast of the dice!

Join us for a fabulous celebration capping off a prolific year of creative endeavours !

With : Lorella Abenavoli, Beewoo, J.R. Carpenter, Darsha Hewitt, Virpi Kettu, Maroussia Lévesque, Hélène Prévost, Nelly-Ève Rajotte and Victoria Stanton.

Wired Women Salon # 70 [Dec. 18] :: Top Chrono
Thursday, December 18th 2008, from 6:00 to 8:00 PM
@ Geordie Theatre Space:: 4001 Berri St., Ground Floor Montreal
Entrance Fee : 6$, free for Studio XX members.

*** Top Chrono Special : one-night only !
Become a member of Studio XX at the event and receive a complimentary copy of our limited edition xxxboîte : http://www.studioxx.org/en/xxxboite

STUDIO XX
4001 Berri St., Suite 201, Montreal (Quebec) H2L 4H2
Between Roy and Duluth
Sherbrooke Metro, or the 24 bus (Sherbrooke)
http://www.studioxx.org

Information :: 514.845.7934
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Tributaries: Behind the Scenes at the Vancouver Launch Event

Over the course of the six months that I was posting to Tributaries & Text-Fed Streams I had the occasion to explain the project many times to many people, often with little or no success. Some said: Wow, that sounds so cool… But I know they’d never read a word of it. Others smiled and nodded even as their eyes literally glazed over. Only a brave few admitted they had no idea what I was talking about. You few, you are true friends.

None of this bothered me of course. I knew that this exploration of the formal, functional and poetic properties of RSS would be best understood in its natural element (online) and would be most closely read by an online community already habituated to navigating the tributaries of text-fed streams.

So why, from day one, did I insist that the commissioning body, The Capilano Review, go to the trouble and expense to fly me from Montreal to Vancouver for a real-time one-time only launch event?

The more open-ended, circuitous and recursive a project sets out to be, the more necessary closure becomes. I posted the last fragment of text from the “original” source two days before the Vancouver launch. Had not had a plane to catch and a mic to get in front of I could have continued frigging around with the texts of TCR 2-50 indefinitely.

Tributaries curator Kate Armstrong supported the idea of a Vancouver launch event from day one. While she was researching potential launch event venues she sent me this email:

HI JR
Do you by any wild chance know Billy Mavreas?

BILLY MAVREAS is a Greek-Canadian artist and cartoonist living in Montreal. His artwork has been shown internationally. He is the author of The Overlords of Glee (2001) and the upcoming Inside Out Overlap (Timeless Books, 2008), and also the proprietor of his enduring project, Monastiraki, a Mile-End magickal curiosity shoppe and art gallery.

I replied:

> Yeah, he’s my neighbour and dear friend and we were at Banff together
> and so on. Why do you ask? He’s having a show at Helen Pitt around
> the same time I’ll be in Vancouver.

The rest, as they say, took a few more weeks to plan. But in the end, yes, we had the launch event at the Helen Pitt Gallery, where my friend and Montreal neighbour Billy Mavreas was artist in residence and the director Lance Blomgren had just agreed to contribute texts to another electronic literature project I’m working on and all three of us are Conundrum Press authors. Thank you Lance and Billy for letting us take over the Helen Pitt for the evening. Special thanks Billy for physically remixing a print copy of TCR 2-50 and handing out the mini-zine results on the spot, and for making such Tributaries-looking wall art for us to all stand in front of. And extra special thanks Emilie for pouring wine all evening and without whom I might not have made it to the gallery at all that day, but that’s another story.

Many dear friends showed up for the event, including some long-lost ones and some never before met in person ones and some in the “I have no idea what this project’s about” category. The pressure was on!

The Tributaries & Text-Fed Streams project is nowhere near as complicated as it sounds. It’s about reading. I held up my copy of TCR 2-50 for the audience to see all the underlined passages, circled sections, arrows, stars and annotations scribbled in the margins. We all do this when we read, don’t we? We interpret, interrupt, form metal images, take notes, and make associations. As I parsed and posted fragments of the essays of TCR 2-50 I marked them up, into JRML, as Kate Armstrong once quipped.

There are hundreds of different ways to read Tributaries & Text-Fed Streams. One good place to start is with the post: What the Heck is RSS?

A good example of JRML is section of Sandra Seekins’ essay dealing with the metaphors and media of biotechnologies which led to me to quote a sequence of pre-genetic-technology references made in literature and philosophy to “metaphors” of bodies as “composites of replaceable parts” in this excerpt: Metaphors of Biotechnology

An intertextual dialogue between TCR 2-50 authors emerges in the matrix/chora section of Kevin Magee’s poem To Write as Speach.

After showing these ways of reading Tributaries I went behind the scenes to show how the piece actually works. I posted an image to Flickr, commented on it, tagged it and then it appeared on the Tributaries main page through the magic of a Flickr RSS feed. I saved a bookmark to del.icio.us and that too was pulled into the Tributaries interface. I posted a new post to Tributaries: Alternate Readings: The In This Issue Remix, then logged into Facebook as Babble Brook (a character created to aid and abet with the Tributaries project). RSS had already pulled the afore mentioned Flickr image, del.icio.us bookmark and Tributaries post into Babble Brook’s profile and pushed news of them out into the feeds of all her friends. Having fed all that info into the text-fed stream, Babble Brook and I got off the mic and let the experts take over.

In a stroke of pure genius Tributaries curator Kate Armstrong invited three experts on streams to perform at the launch event: Dr. Michael Boyce, expert in stream of consciousness; Dr. Maria Lantin, Director of the Intersections Digital Studios, a research space at Emily Carr and thus an expert in data flow; and Dr. Jeremy Venditti, an expert in river geomorphology, turbulence and sediment transport dynamics in gravel-bedded streams. Now Dr. Boyce I’ve known for fifteen years, but Dr. Lantin and Dr. Venditti I’d never met before. This triumvirate of stream experts gave a brilliantly intermingled reading that riffed on the theme of streams. For example, if anyone is still wondering why on earth one would feed the texts of a print journal into a RSS stream, consider the transformational effects of the stream as outlined in this passage quoted by Dr. Venditti:

The Stream – Along the bottom of every gorge is a stream channel. In it may flow a great river or a brook or only a temporary torrent. The stream is there because the slopes of the land guide the water that way, and the stream may thus be said to exist on account of the channel. But in an equally important way the gorge exists because of the stream, for the stream is in fact the maker of the gorge and is still at work on it, deepening and enlarging. Let us look at the stream…
Grove Karl Gilbert and Albert Perry Brigham, An Introduction to Pyhsical Geography, 1902.

For me – standing in the audience having only just emerged seconds before from six intense months of working on Tributaries & Text-Fed Streams – this intertextual interdisciplinary reading of the work was a gift, and a joy to witness. Thank-you Michael, Maria and Jeremy for your generosity and thank-you Kate from coming up with this idea.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the gallery, throughout the evening TCR 2-50 guest editor and contributor Andrew Klobucar had been feeding portions of the readings into the Global Telelanguage Resources Workbench, which is basically a definition-generating machine. Despite having marked up an essay about this tool in Tributaries, it wasn’t until Andrew read performed the definitions generated in response to the evening’s other performances that I understood how innately hilarious the Global Telelanguage Resources project is! Thank you Andrew!

The performances were followed by a set from DJ Leigh Christie, who had already rocked my world earlier in the day during the tech set up. Even when the internet connection conked out, even when the data projector insisted on projecting upside-down, DJ Leigh kept our spirits running high. Thank you Leigh!

The longer you work on a project the more likely a launch event is to feel anti-climatic, especially an entirely web-based project. In this case, this was not the case. I’m grateful to The Capilano Review for seeing the project through to this conclusion. I was blown away by the turn out for the event, by the emotions of reuniting with long lost friends, by the generosity of all of the contributors and performers and by the responses to the work that the event generated.

Here’s how I know the event was a success: all the people who had told me beforehand that they didn’t get what this work was about came up to me after and said that now they get it. That’s about as climatic as you can get.
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Yellow Door Reading

I’ll be reading at The Yellow Door, Thursday, April 27, 2006

3625 Aylmer (between Pine and Prince Arthur) Tel: 514-398-6243

Doors open 7:00 pm Reading 7:30 pm At the door $5

Poets & Prose Writers & Musicians featured:

J. R. Carpenter Poet, fiction writer & new media artist. A two-time winner of the CBC/QWF Quebec Short Story Competition (2004 & 2006), her short fiction & poetry have been published in journals & anthologies in Canada, US, & UK. More information about her writing and web art projects can be found on Luckysoap.com

Stephen Morrissey Published seven books of poetry & chapbooks. He is a founding member of the Vehicule Poets. He is editor and publisher of www.coraclepress.com Visit the poet: www.stephenmorrissey.ca

Victoria Stanton Performance artist who has presented her work nationally, in the U.S., Europe, Australia & Japan. She is the co-author with Vincent Tinguely of Impure: Reinventing the Word (conundrum press, 2001).

Fortner Anderson Co-founder with Ian Ferrier of the Wired on Words record label. His CD, six silk purses, is forthcoming. Read at the Mondes parallè le 50//litté rature festival in Lille, France.

Talleen Hacikyan Fiction writer & visual artist. First prize winner at the 2005 Victoria School of Writing Postcard Story Competition. Selected for the 2003-2004 QWF Mentorship Program. Short story published in Ararat.

Ilona Martonfi Blue Poppy, a first book of poems TBA published by Coracle (2006.) Published chapbook, Visiting the Ridge (Coracle). Poet, editor, producer/host Yellow Door readings. Co-producer/host of Lovers & Others.

Producer/host Ilona Martonfi Tel/Fax 514-939-4173

www.yellowdoor.org/coffeehouse/spoken_word.html/
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The Final Trainwreck is Tonight

Brave the last wet tatters of Katrina – come out to the Casa Del Popolo tonight for the launch of Vince Tinguely’s New Novella “Final Trainwreck of a Lost-Mind Summer”.

I’ll be reading “Gingerly”. Here’s an excerpt:

That was his name for the dog in his head: Ginger Lee. He called her Ginger in public – a Golden Retriever’s name – all wrong for her black hair and blue eyes.

“What’s your dog’s name?” they’d ask him in the park.

“Ginger,” he’d say with a smile.

“Ginger eh? And what’s your name, Fred?” So everyone and their dog started calling him Fred. Wallace had never had a nickname before.

Casa Del Popolo, 4873 St-Laurent
Wednesday, August 31, 2005.
8 p.m. (show starts 9 p.m.)

With readings by:

Vince Tinguely
Dana Bath
J. R. Carpenter
Scott Duncan

Plus an exclusive musical performance by The Sally Fields.

$5 at the door (w/o book)
$10 at the door (if you buy a book)
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