lapsus linguae

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”

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The Cape Caper

THE CAPE is also now listed on function:feminism in the New Works, 2006: http://www.functionfeminism.com/2006.html The other artists listed are: Juliet Davis, Marika Dermineur, Karen Hibbard, Tamara Lai, Barbara Lattanzi, Cat Mazza, and Evelin Stermitz.

function:feminism is created in conjunction with The Feminist Art Project, at Rutgers University, New Jersey (USA): http://feministartproject.rutgers.edu/

Note that the 1996 foundation of Studio XX is listed in the function:feminism cyberfeminist timeline. Happy Xth Birthday Studio XX!

I’m not quite sure how THE CAPE made its way to function:feminism. I may well have submitted it myself and forgot. If anyone knows more about this than I do, please send me an email with the Subject: The Cape Caper

Warning: Cape Cod is a real place, but the events and characters of THE CAPE are fictional. The photographs have been retouched. The diagrams are not to scale. http://Luckysoap.com/THECAPE
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THE CAPE on BathHouse

My web/ art/ narrative/ project, THE CAPE, has been included in the Spring 2006 issue of BathHouse, online now.

Edited by current Creative Writing graduate students at Eastern Michigan University, BathHouse promotes interdisciplinary and hybrid arts with a special emphasis on language and innovation in art that blurs the lines of conventional form and genre.

BathHouse takes its name from the 19th-century sanatoriums, bathhouses, and mineral water wells that flourished in Ypsilanti, Michigan, until truth in labeling laws were passed. The “foul smelling” waters of the Atlantis well, in the vicinity of the current Jones-Goddard dorm on the EMU campus, were bottled and shipped nationwide as a cure for 33 disorders of the blood.

http://www.emich.edu/studentorgs/bhouse/main.html

Artists in the Spring 2006 issue of BathHouse are: Mark Amerika, J. R. Carpenter, Joe Clifford, Mark Cunningham, Christopher Garlington, Diane Greco, Mary Kasimor, Braxton Soderman, Lynn Strongin.

Warning: Cape Cod is a real place, but the events and characters of THE CAPE are fictional. The photographs have been retouched. The diagrams are not to scale.

http://Luckysoap.com/thecape
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<< Entre Ville >>

a new web/ poetry/ video project
by J. R. Carpenter

LUCKYSOAP.COM/ENTREVILLE

LAUNCH / LANCEMENT: le jeudi 27 avril à 14h30 – Thursday, April 27 at 2:30PM

Salon des amis, Musée des beaux-arts de Montréal
1380, rue Sherbrooke Ouest

Commissioned by/ Une commande d’oeuvre d’OBORO, Laboratoire nouveaux médias et produite dans le cadre des activités spéciales du 50e anniversaire du Conseil des arts de Montréal

“My studio window opens into a jumbled intimacy of back balconies, yards 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 art poetry project presented in the vernacular of my neighbourhood, where cooking smells, noisy neighbours and laundry lines criss-cross the alleyway one sentence at a time.” J. R. Carpenter, 2006.

“Mon studio donne sur un méli-mélo intime, fait de ruelles, de balcons et de cours arrières. À tous les jours, nous partons à la recherche d’histoires, mon chien et moi, reniflant chaque centimètre de l’antre de cette ville. La poésie n’est pas difficile à trouver entre les longues rangées de clôtures à la peinture craquelante, tapissées d’annonces de toutes sortes, d’abstractions vivement peintes à la bombe, drapées de vignes en cascades. Le résultat est Entre Ville, un projet sur Internet, présenté dans le cadre vernaculaire de mon quartier où la bouffe se sent, où les voisins bruyants et les cordes à linge s’entrecroisent dans la ruelle, une phrase à la fois.” J. R. Carpenter, 2006.

LUCKYSOAP.COM/ENTREVILLE
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Building Broken Things

The fabulous folks at the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art have put up with countless email and even a few phone calls from me over the past few months, regarding the now very imminent exhibition of How I Loved the Broken Things of Rome. Thank you Dave. Thank you Camilla, and Gina and Chloé. And Mark and José, who I actually got to talk to in person one day in February. Last night I boarded a fast train from Montréal to Toronto. Now, finally, at long last, the last leg of this great adventure is under way.

MOCCA’s putting me up in the Gladstone Hotel. The Gladstone is very glam, very post-Victorian. As many of you many know, but I didn’t until MOCCA put me up here, an actual real life artist has designed each of the rooms. I’m in the Biker Room, designed by Toronto-based artist and curator Andrew Harwood. The bedside lamps are made of motorcycle helmets and there are three portraits of Peter Fonda from the film “Easy Rider”. The portraits have sequins and glitter on them. The windows open out onto the Price Choppers parking lot – quite a popular hang out from the sounds of things.

This morning, over at MOCCA, I got to unpack a flat-screen monitor that had never been unpacked before. Then my new best friend Hri got out the measuring tape and the masking tape and after a while put some orange paint on the wall. Tomorrow – we tackle shelves and plinths. I learned the word plinth from Mark back in February and now I just love saying and writing it. I can’t wait to actually build one! Actually, Hri is going to build my plinth. Or maybe Marks, who isn’t the same as Mark. Either way, a plinth it will be. And a big one too. Until then, sweet easy rider dreams.
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How I Loved the Broken Things of Rome

How I Loved the Broken Things of Rome
a hypertext/ poetry/ video/ installation by

J. R. Carpenter

Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art
952 Queen Street W.,Toronto, ON, CANADA
http://www.mocca.toronto.on.ca

Exhibition: April 13 – 23, 2006
Gallery Hours: Tuesday – Sunday 11 – 6
Public Reception: Saturday April 15, 2 – 6PM
imagesFestival Closing Party: Saturday April 22, 9PM

The artist will be in attendance at these events.

Presented in Association With the 19th Annual imagesFestival
http://imagesfestival.com

How I Loved the Broken Things of Rome is a Web Art Finalist in the Drunken Boat PanLiterary Awards 2006. http://luckysoap.com/brokenthings
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Strata of Data: Digging Through A Dozen Years Onine

Show-And-Tell was my favorite subject in grade school. I especially loved the unprepared kids who took whatever they had in their knapsack – like an apple, or a hairbrush – and made a really great show out of it. In University I worked in the Visual Arts Slide Library -170,000 tiny pictures of art, and my job was to find and file them. Heaven! So, as you can imagine, I got pretty excited when Studio XX in Montreal invited me to give a presentation at:

Salon Femmes Br@nchées #61 :: ART.chives : art, archives, & databases.

“In this era of sampling and access to «public» information archives increasingly represent a source of artistic material. Studio XX invites you to a «5 à 7» for informal discussions with artists whose work makes diverse artistic use of archives and databases… Featuring presentations from: Aesha Hameed, J. R. Carpenter & Projet Matricules.”

Thursday, February 16th, 2006
5pm-7pm, Studio XX

Strata of Data: Digging Through A Dozen Years On Line: J. R. Carpenter got her first Unix account in 1993 and has been making web art projects since 1995. She constructs her online fictions with Internet flotsam and jetsam: found images, found audio, found data, and found scripts. Carpenter lurks in listserves, prowls developer-sites, copy and pastes and habitually Views Source. She collects old textbooks in the alleyway and photographs other people’s graffiti. She alters slick blocks of CSS, and tweaks cheesy javascript effects for narrative purposes. Her web projects retain a low-tech aura. She uses a lot of black and white images (because that’s what colour photocopies come in), uses DHTML when Flash would do nicely, avoids software solutions, embraces cross-browser/cross-platform vagaries, and aims for scalability and graceful fails. In this presentation she’ll lead us on a tangential tour through her archive of web art projects, pointing out the “borrowed” bits along the way.

If you can’t make it on Thursday, that’s okay. You can dig through my data any time, at: http://Luckysoap.com

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
Founded in 1996, Studio XX is Montreal’s foremost women’s digital resource centre. Through a variety of creative activities and initiatives, the Studio works with women to demystify digital technologies, to critically examine their social aspects, to facilitate women’s access to technology, and to create and exhibit women’s new digital art.

STUDIO XX
338 Terrasse Saint-Denis, Montréal (Québec) H2X 1E8
À deux pas au sud de l’intersection Sherbrooke et St-Denis.
Métro Sherbrooke, ou autobus 24 (Sherbrooke) ou 125 (Ontario).
(514) 845-0289 / http://www.studioxx.org
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THE CAPE goes on the road

THE CAPE has been included in: THE FIRST INDEPENDENT FREE INTERNET ART GALLERY – a cultural non-profit association operating between Turin, Milan and Venice promoting international art.

Cape Cod is a real place, but the characters and events of THE CAPE are fictional.

“The Cape, as Cape Cod
is often called,
is, as you may know,
a narrow spit of land.” [JRC]

I built THE CAPE out of Internet flotsam and jetsam: found images, found audio, found data, and found scripts.

Visit THE CAPE: http://luckysoap.com/THECAPE
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Entre Ville, Commissioned by OBORO

I am pleased and honoured to announce that I have been commissioned by OBORO (Montréal) to create a new web art project to be presented in conjunction with the 50th anniversary celebrations of the Conseil des arts de Montréal in January 2006. As a result, this autumn I will once again have the great pleasure and privilege to work with the fine folks at the Oboro New Media Lab.

Artist’s Statement: My studio window opens into a jumbled intimacy of back balconies, yards 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. The result is Entre Ville, a web-based project presented in the vernacular of my neighbourhood, where cooking smells, noisy neighbours and laundry lines criss-cross the alleyway one sentence at a time.

Saint-Urbain Street Heat

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Broken Things on Drunken Boat

How I Loved the Broken Things of Rome has been named a finalist in the Drunken Boat PanLiterary Awards – Web Art Section. The final results of the competition will be announced later this fall. Broken Things will appear in the next issue regardless. DrunkenBoat.com is an international online journal for the arts featuring poetry, prose, photography, video, web art, and sound.

How I Loved the Broken Things of Rome was created between 2002 and 2005 in Rome and Montréal with the generous financial support of the Oboro New Media Lab artist in residency programme and the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec.

Milli gazie again to Barbara Catalini in Rome and Stéphane Vermette in Montréal.
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