lapsus linguae

CityFish in soundsRite, a journal of online sound and writing, University of Western Sydney, Australia

CityFish has been published in Volume 3 of soundsRite, a journal of online sound and writing founded in 2009 by Hazel Smith and Roger Dean as an initiative of MARCS Auditory Laboratories and the Writing and Society Research Group, University of Western Sydney, Australia. soundsRite publishes selected new media work which includes words or sound or both, featuring sound works created for digital embodiment, including generative, interactive and multi-channel pieces, and showcasing writing which is kinetic, generative or interactive.

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CityFish is a hybrid word, title of a hybrid work, tale of a hybrid creature. Part classical parable, part children’s picture book, CityFish is a web-based intertextual hypermedia transmutation of Aesop’s Town Mouse Country Mouse fable. Winters, a Canadian girl named Lynne freezes in Celsius in the fishing village of Brooklyn, Nova Scotia (Canada), a few minutes walk from a white sandy beach. Summers, she suffers her city cousins sweltering in Fahrenheit in Queens, New York (USA). By now Lynne knows everyone knows it’s supposed to be the other way around. Lynne is a fish out of water. In the country, her knowledge of the city separates her from her school of friends. In the city, her foreignness marks her as exotic. Meanwhile, the real city fish lie in scaly heaps on long ice-packed tables in hot and narrow Chinatown streets. CityFish represents asynchronous relationships between people, places, perspectives and times through a horizontally scrolling browser window, suggestive of a panorama, a diorama, a horizon line, a skyline, a timeline, a Torah scroll. The panorama and the diorama have traditionally been used in museums and landscape photography to establish hierarchies of value and meaning. CityFish interrupts a seemingly linear narrative with poetic texts, quotations, Quicktime videos, DHTML animations, Google Maps and a myriad of visual images. Combining contemporary short fiction and hypermedia storytelling forms creates a new hybrid, a lo-fi web collage cabinet of curiosities. The story of Lynne and the city fish unfolds in this strange horizontally scrolling world of absences and empty spaces – furious, intimate, and surreal.

More information on CityFish: http://luckysoap.com/lapsuslinguae/category/cityfish/

CityFish on soundsRite: http://soundsrite.uws.edu.au/soundsRiteContent/volume3/JRInfo.html

Excerpts from the Chronicles of Pookie & JR – a sort of short story – in the Wild issue of Branch Magazine

Pookie strikes again. A sort-of short-story-like prose-esque version of Excerpts from the Chronicles of Pookie & JR appears in Branch Magazine’s Wild issue, guest-edited by Alison Strumberger, launched 1 April 2011 (no joke).

Branch Magazine - Wild

Excerpts from the Chronicles of Pookie & JR is a narrative documentation of the adventures Ingrid Bachmann’s hermit crab Pookie and I had during June of 2009. Pookie is not the wildest of animals, but he is pretty social, for a hermit crab. Pookie’s full name is Pookie 14. Pookie is the star of a Python story generator, and my latest book, GENERATION[S]. For backstory on this story on this story, visit: http://luckysoap.com/statements/storygenerations.html

Branch Magazine is a national quarterly online magazine devoted to exploring the rifts and overlaps of visual and literary arts while showcasing emerging and professional Canadian artists and creators. Branch features contemporary literature, art and design and aims to produce a compelling panoply of art in different media. Each issue is prompted by a particular theme and, depending on how artists interpret the subject, Branch strives to present how artistic minds may bring together a magpie’s nest arranged by its clash and compatibility

Best Behaviour – A Short Story Published in Dragnet Magazine

Dragnet Magazine, a new online/eBook literary journal that “trawls the sea of stories for the best fiction,” has included a short story of mine in their very first issue. The story is called Best Behaviour. It’s fiction, obviously. Given my limited knowledge on the subject, the story is a short one, weighing in at just 879 words. It’s based on an even shorter story. My behaviour is improving in tiny increments year by year.

In 2005, the Montreal-based artist-run centre Dazibao – centre de photographies actuelles commissioned me to write the text for an exhibition called Pixelware, une sublime forgerie featuring new works of digital photography by Mathieu Bernard-Reymond, Sylvia Grace Borda, Sze Lin Pang and Penelope Umbrico. Dazibao encouraged a creative approach. Rather than produce a standard 1000-word catalogue essay, I wrote four 250-word stories, one for each artist.

In response to Penelope Umbrico’s series of photographs of images of mirrors and televisions take from mail-order catalogues, blown up to life size and hung on the wall again, I imagined a girl trapped – on display – in a catalogue-perfect living room trying not to ruin anything, scanning reflective surfaces searching for escape routes. This new story, Best Behaviour, speculates upon how the girl came to be in this room in the first place. I don’t think it’s giving too much of the story away to say that her overbearing yet massively insecure mother has a lot to do with it. Take the second paragraph, for example:

We’ve been living in a rented townhouse on the Forest Crescent for going on two years now, which is some kind of record for us. Twenty-two months we’ve baked in this avocado oven. Ninety-four weeks we’ve bathed in this goldenrod tub. Come over to this place that isn’t quite our place, and here’s the first thing my mother will tell you: “This wallpaper wasn’t our idea!” Floor-to-ceiling horns-of-plenty adorn the breakfast nook. A sandy seashell wainscot rings the bathroom. Renters can’t be choosers. We hang our pictures up wherever former tenants left nail holes.

This first issue of Dragnet Magazine contains some great stuff in it, including stories by Sheila Heti and Jacob Wren. You can read the issue on your computer, as a Website, Flipbook or eBook; on your tablet as a Flipbook or an eBook; or on your phone or eReader as an eBook. For links to all these formats, visit Dragnet Magazine online: http://dragnetmag.net/

To read Best Behaviour on the Dragnet Magazine website visit: http://dragnetmag.net/?q=content/j-r-carpenter-best-behaviour

Entre Ville and in absentia included in the Electronic Literature Collection Volume Two

Two of my web-based works – Entre Ville and in absentia – are included in the Electronic Literature Collection Volume Two, which launched in February 2011. [Prese Release]

ELC2

I’m thrilled that Entre Ville and in absentia appear together in this collection. In many ways, they are the before and after pictures of my old neighbourhood, Mile End, Montreal, where I lived for seventeen years.

Entre Ville was commissioned in 2006 by OBORO, an artist-run centre in Montreal, on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the Conseil des Arts de Montreal. Although I had lived in Montreal for 15 years at the time of the commission, Entre Ville was my first major work about my adopted city. It took me that long to learn the vocabulary. I don’t mean French, or Greek, Italian, Portuguese, Yiddish or any of the other languages spoken in my neighbourhood. I refer, rather, to a visual, tactile, aural, sensorial vocabulary. My home office window opens into a jumbled intimacy of back balconies, yards, gardens and alleyways. Daily my dog and I walk through this interior city sniffing out stories. Poetry is not hard to find between the long lines of peeling-paint fences plastered with notices, spray painted with bright abstractions and draped with trailing vines. Entre Ville is a web-based heat-wave poem presented in the vernacular of my neighbourhood, where cooking smells, noisy neighbours and laundry lines crisscross the alleyway one sentence at a time.

In an intimacy
born of proximity
the old Greek lady and I
go about our business.
Foul-mouthed for seventy,
her first-floor curses fill
my second-floor apartment;
her constant commentary
punctuates my day.

Six months after the launch of Entre Ville, the “star” of Entre Ville, “the old Greek lady,” was evicted from the apartment where she and her husband had lived for twenty-three years. Many long-time low-income tenants were being forced out of the neighbourhood. Fiction was the only way I felt I could give voice to their stories. Our stories – I felt certain my time would come soon enough.

in absentia is a multi-authored multi-lingual site-specific web-based writing project which addresses issues of gentrification and its erasures in the Mile End neighbourhood of Montreal. Faced with imminent eviction, I began to write as if I was no longer there, about a Mile End that was no longer there. I manipulated the Google Maps API to populated “real” satellite images of my neighbourhood with “fictional” characters and events. in absentia is a web “site” haunted by the stories of former residents of Mile End, a slightly fantastical world, a shared memory of the neighbourhood as it never really was but as it could have been. in absentia was created in 2008 with the support of the Canada Council for the Arts. It was presented by DARE-DARE Centre de diffusion d’art multidisciplinaire de Montréal. It launched June 24, 2008. New stories were added over the summer, in English and French. A closing party was held in conjunction with the launch of my novel, Words the Dog Knows, (conundrum press), at Sky Blue Door, November 7, 2008.

This is the second collection published by the Electronic Literature Organization. The Electronic Literature Collection Volume One, edited by N. Katherine Hayles, Nick Montfort, Scott Rettberg and Stephanie Strickland, also included one of my works – The Cape. The long-awaited Electronic Literature Collection Volume Two, edited by Laura Borràs, Talan Memmott, Rita Raley, and Brian Kim Stefans, includes 63 works from Austria, Australia, Catalonia, Canada, Colombia, France, Germany, Israel, The Netherlands, Portugal, Peru, Spain, UK, and USA; written in Catalan, Dutch, English, French, German, Portuguese, and Spanish; Flash, Processing, Java, JavaScript, Inform, HTML, and C++.

ELC2 speaks to both the continuity as well as the bright future of electronic literature. The works include many of the emerging categories of e-lit: mash-ups, geolocative, codework, as well as “traditional” and evolving forms such as hypertext, chatbots, and interactive fiction. The authors list presents readers with both veterans and newcomers to the field.
Electronic Literature Collection Volume Two

Wasn’t One Ocean on CellStories

My short story, Wasn’t One Ocean, was featured on CellStories August 4, 2010. CellStories publishes short fiction for mobile devices. A story a day. Free. In the palm of your hand. If you happen to have an iPhone, iPad, iPod Touch, or a Google-Android based phone like Nexus One, MyTouch or Droid, that is. I don’t. But if you do, follow this link on your mobile device to read the story, and to share it with friends on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Reader: Wasn’t One Ocean by J.R. Carpenter is ready for you to read on your mobile device. Or, if you have a phone that can read QR codes, just zap the one below and your phone will take you right to Wasn’t One Ocean.

Wasn't One Ocean

“It took me years to notice that you didn’t love Montréal the way I did. You never made many friends here the way I did. But then, you never lost friends here the way I did either. When you said you wanted to move to Vancouver I thought: Wasn’t one ocean enough for you? At the time, neither one of us knew that no two oceans are alike.”
J. R. Carpenter, Wasn’t One Ocean

If, like me, you have a mobile phone so old it is barely capable of taking a decent photo of your dog, you may read Wasn’t One Ocean online in Carte Blanche, The Literary Review of the Quebec Writers’ Federation, where it was first published in 2005.

Carte Blanche

TRAUMAWIEN

Computer systems produce an unprecedented wealth of text, only the smallest part of which is contributed by users. Protocols, listings, algorithms, programmes, source codes, universal binary codes – the background operations of the systems themselves write a massively larger share. These text units – produced, read and transmitted by computers – internalize transcodability and transliterality as the computer system’s basic underlying operating principle. The emerging forms of text take place between writing systems and text generators. They produce a new kind of analphabetism, as most of their consumers cannot read nor write them, yet they are involved in our thoughts and actions.

Vienna-based publishers TRAUMAWIEN perceives these new structures of text as literature — a system of virtualization in imagination, always describing breaking points in our perception of world.

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.

TRAUMAWIEN book publications help to highlight technological innovations while at the same time questioning imminent issues of text production in virtual space.

THRAUMAWIEN’s range includes networked texts, algorithmic texts, interfictions, chatlogs, codeworks, software art and visual mashup prose. They also research possible touch points between the book as an object and virtual space in the form of, for example, hybrid books (augmented reality) the first of which will be published in July 2010.

TRAUMAWIEN publications are understood as schemes in which the author remains, but already is marginalized as a producer. The author – in a prototypical trauma book – remains exchangeable by the form of possible writing, writing systems, generating genre.

J. R. Carpenter GENERATION[S]

Schema 2.1 J.R. Carpenter, Montreal / Generation[s]. Code Narrative

Schema 2.2 Ivan Monroy Lopez, Mexiko / Git2Pod. Poetry

Schema 2.3 Audun Mortensen, Norway / Surf’s up (2010). Poetry

VIP schema2 / Barbara Anna Husar. Corpus Sublingual. Raw nd unplugged

Hybrid 1 Philip Hautmann / Yorick. Hybridbuch

http://traumawien.at/preview/

Generating Generation(s)

I’m writing a new book. It’s writing itself, really. It’s called GENERATION(S). It expands upon Story Generation(s), a series of short fictions generated by Python scripts adapted (with permission) from 1k story generators written by Nick Montfort. GENERATION(S) also incorporates GORGE, a never-ending tract spewing verse approximations, poetic paroxysms on food, consumption, decadence and desire, a hack of Montfort’s elegant poetry generator Taroko Gorge.

In the print book, GENERATION(S), the texts the generators produce are intertwined with the generators’ source code, and these two types of texts are in turn interrupted by excerpts from the meta narrative that went into their creation. For example, most of the sentences in the fictions generated by I’ve Died and Gone to Devon started off as Tweets, which were then pulled into Facebook. Some led to comments that led to responses that led to new texts. The following exchange started as a Tweet, was pulled into Facebook, became this sentence in Devon.py: “On a clear day, from the top of the drive we can see south to the sea,” and led to this blog post: To See the Sea. All these stages of intermediation are represented in the print book iteration of GENERATION(S).

Generation(s) will be published by TRAUMAWEIN, Vienna-based publishers of international works of codework, interfiction, microprose, chatlog, gamelog, twitter / facebook feeds and other new narrative forms, every 3 months in book form and in much more frequently online.

“The thing about trauma is to make “screenshots/timestamps” of those never ending stories going on.” Luc Gross, TRAUMAWIEN

GENERATION(S) goes to the printers by the end of this month and will be launched in Vienna July 23, 2010.

Book Launch – Art Textiles of the World: Canada

A recent essay by J.R. Carpenter entitled “Mapping Multiplicities: A Narrative of Contingences” has just been published in a new art book, launching on Wednesday, April 15, 2009, at the Montreal Centre for Contemporary Textiles, 5800 St-Denis Studio 501, Montréal, at 5 pm.

Art Textiles of the World: Canada features essays by Alan Elder, Sandra Alfoldy, J.R. Carpenter, and Lisa Vinebaum, with a foreword by the Editor. The book is devoted especially to the work of twenty important Canadian artists who have developed a very personal language through their mastery of one or more of the various techniques in the field of textiles. The artists presented in the book are:

Jennifer Angus, Ingrid Bachmann, Sandra Brownlee, Dorothy Caldwell, Lyn Carter, Kai Chan, Barb Hunt, Barbara Layne, Louise Lemieux Bérubé, Marcel Marois, Mindy Yan Miller, Lesley Richmond, Ruth Scheuing, Joanne Soroka, Joanna Staniszkis, Patrick Traer, Barbara Todd, Laura Vickerson, Yvonne Wakabayashi and Susan Warner Keene.

From April 15 to May 22, 2009, the Montreal Centre for Contemporary Textiles (MCCT) will take advantage of the publishing of this prestigious book to bring together in its gallery examples of the work of these artists. The art works are varied: murals, sculptures, installations created through the use of new technologies, of traditional techniques and of unusual materials. It is a must-see inventory of creative contemporary Canadian textile art on show until May 22.

The launching of the book and the exhibition will be held on Wednesday, April 15, 2009, at Montreal Centre for Contemporary Textiles, 5800 St-Denis Studio 501, Montréal, at 5 pm.
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WORDS THE DOG KNOWS excerpted in Geist #71

I love Geist Magazine. And not just because they just published an excerpt of my novel Words the Dog Knows in their latest issue (Winter 2008-2009 #17). No, I love Geist because they picked a particularly odd ball section of the novel to excerpt, a section that speaks to the very core of what the novel is about, a list of rhetorical words the dog-sitter is convinced the dog knows. As they put it over at Geist: “A human interprets the way a dog interprets the world of humans.”

Here are a few words from that list:

home Home is where they keep the kibble. Home is both the origin and the terminus of the walk. Locus of the soundest sleeps, at home all scents are known.

cyberspace The place where people go while dogs are sleeping.

infinity In the time between sleep and waking there is the great nothingness of the nap.

Read the rest on Geist.com: Words Dogs Know

P.S. Another reason why I love Geist is that they published a very short story of mine called Roads out of Rome back in issue #63, two years ago to be precise, that expanded to become one of my favourite sections of Words the Dog Knows. Thanks Geist.
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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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