lapsus linguae

AUTO_MATIC_BIO_GRAPHIC

I will present a workshop tomorrow at In the Regions of Utopia, the second symposium of the Imaginaries of the Future network, taking place in Newcastle-Upon-Tyne, UK, 28-30 June 2015.

This workshop facilitates an interrogation of place-based identity by calling into question the persistent notion that ‘home’ is necessarily a place. Further, this workshop challenges the inward-facing tendencies of autobiography by employing a computer program to create a collectively authored quasi-autobiographical narrative which is at once dynamic, inclusive, variable, and provisional.

This workshop begins with an exercise prompted by a quotation from Anne-Marie MacDonald’s novel As the Crow Flies (2003), in which the author suggests we may come from events rather than places:

If you move around all your life, you can’t find where you come from on a map. All those places where you lived are just that: places. You don’t come from any of them; you come from a series of events. And those are mapped in memory. Contingent, precarious events, without the counterpane of place to muffle the knowledge of how unlikely we are. Almost not born at every turn. Without a place, events slow-tumbling through time become your roots. Stories shading into one another. You come from a plane crash. From a war that brought your parents together.

With this example in mind, participants are invited to complete the sentence: “I come from…” with statements pertaining to events rather than places. “I come from a plane crash.” “I come from a war that brought my parents together.”

Participants are then invited to complete additional stock autobiographical sentences in ways which challenge the primacy of place. For example, the sentence: “I was born…” may describe a time rather than a place. “I was born on the night shift.”

Each question is asked several times, allowing participants’ responses to riff off each other.

The responses are entered into a computer program as they are given. This program randomly selects one response to each statement and outputs a story. Individual participants’ responses are thereby shuffled into a collectively authored quasi-autobiographical narrative which may be endlessly refreshed. The notion of autobiographical veracity further undermined by leaving key gender signifiers such as Mother/Father to computational chance.

Participants will be invited to speak these narratives aloud in various ways (separately, as a group, in a round). As we consider what sort of stories emerge from this generative, variable, collective, event-driven mode of autobiographical authorship, we will propose new questions by altering the source code. How does our story shift if the statement “I wish…” is changed to “I need…”? How does our conception of regionality or locality shift if we think in terms of coming from shared events rather than places? As we experience events unfolding in real time online, how might we come from a plane crash in Manhattan, or a protest in Hong Kong, or the Occupy movement?

The source code of the AUTO_MATIC_BIO_GRAPHIC program is based on a 1k story generator created by Nick Montfort in 2008. Examples of stories generated by a previous iteration of the AUTO_MATIC_BIO_GRAPHIC program were included in my print book GENERATION[S], published by Traumawien in 2010. Feel free to download the source code and replace the variables with your own life events.

Electronic Literature Lo-fi Style: Where is it? What is it? How does it work?

This informal information session and hands-on workshop led by current Struts Open Studio artist in residence J. R. Carpenter will offer an introduction to the hybrid genre of electronic literature. Using examples from her recent work, J.R. will show how to remix and recycle found code to create new stories, poems and animations. Participants will create a short fiction generator together. A list of links to venues, journals and galleries publishing and exhibiting electronic literature will be offered, for your future reading pleasure. No programming skills required! No special equipment necessary. Bring a laptop if you have one. Bring a pen. Bring a friend.

Electronic Literature Lo-fi Style

Thursday , June 16, 2011, 7PM FREE
Struts Gallery, 7 Lorne Street, Sackville, NB
http://strutsgallery.ca

J. R. Carpenter has been using the internet as a medium for the creation and dissemination of non-linear narratives since 1993. She also makes zines, novels, maps, walks, photographs and performances of various kinds. More information about her projects can be found on her website: http://luckysoap.com

NON-LINEAR NARRATIVES & MULTI-MEDIA POETICS: AN INTRODUCTION TO ELECTRONIC LITERATURE

The Quebec Writers Federation has invited me back to teach another Introduction to Electronic Literature workshop, same title as last year, but this time we’ll have two days instead of one to explore and experiment with the reading, writing and performing of web-based electronic literature – very exciting as last year we had nowhere near enough time.

Two Saturdays, March 6 and March 13, 10:00am – 4:00pm
1200 Atwater Avenue., Room 2 (2nd-floor computer lab)
Registration information.

Electronic literature combines literary and new media practices, resulting in multi-media literary works that couldn’t exist in print form. Consideration of technology at the level of the creation of the text distinguishes electronic literature from e-books, digitized versions of print works, web publishing and other products of print authors ‘going digital,’ none of which will be discussed in this workshop. Unbound by pages and the printed book, electronic literature moves freely across the web, through galleries, performance spaces, and museums, yet does not reside in any single medium or institution. Electronic literature often intersects with conceptual art, web art, performance and sound art, but the reading, writing and performance of electronic literature is situated within the literary arts.

This workshop will begin with a brief historical background of the genre, including a discussion of some of the pre-web literary forms that digital writing evolved from. We will focus on looking at, reading and understanding a wide range of electronic literature produced in various media over the past 20 years. I will show how some of these works were built, give an introduction to HTML, provide a number of web resources and tool for further investigation, then propose a number of ways for beginners to approach the web medium for the creation and dissemination of texts. In particular, we will look at ways to use existing Web 2.0 structures to create distributive literary works. Writing exercises will include: collectively creating a hypertext narrative, remixing Python story generators, writing 140-character stories in Twitter and plotting postcard stories in Google Maps. There will be some technical discussion and experimentation, but prior knowledge of web programming is not required.

This workshop is ideal for experienced writers interested in expanding their existing practices to include web-based forms of non-linear, interactive, intertextual and/or networked literature and media artists exploring textual practices in digital work. If participants have electronic literature projects in mind, we can discuss strategies for creating these works. Visual and new media artists who use are using text in their work and wish to learn more about the literary aspects of digital writing will also find this workshop useful, as will avid readers of experimental literature from Calvino to Borges, and anyone interested in audio/video mashup, performance, remix culture, etc., who wishes to learn about this exciting new hybrid, hypermedia genre.

A list of links to online resources, further technical resources and venues for reading and submitting electronic literature will be provided.

Two Saturdays, March 6 and March 13, 10:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m.
1200 Atwater Avenue., Room 2 (2nd-floor computer lab)
Workshop leader: J.R. Carpenter
Visit the Quebec Writers Federation Website for Registration information: http://www.qwf.org/workshops/spring2010/carpenter.html
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DARTING: A Collective Story Map

Over a period of five weeks a collective of writers of the River Dart worked collaboratively on a web-based writing project about the River Dart and the history – fictional or otherwise – of Dartington Hall. A series of short texts were written separately, for zines, postcards and blog posts. These texts were then collected, found texts and images were added, and all were collated onto this Google Map:

http://maps.google.com/maps/ms?ie=UTF8&t=h&msa=0&msid=109811778856642161490.00046c5ac479d9ec8655d&ll=50.443513,-3.841095&spn=0.538733,1.454315&z=10

For more information on how the writers of the River Dart came to collectively create DARTING: A Collective Story Map, visit their blog: http://dartingmap.blogspot.com/
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NON-LINEAR NARRATIVES & MULTI-MEDIA POETICS AT THE ATWATER LIBRARY

Early Saturday morning, March 28, 2009, I packed a suitcase full of books and headed down to the Atwater Library to lead a six-hour long workshop on electronic literature. For the record, although the Atwater Library is the oldest lending library in Canada, their computer lab is state of the art. Also worthy of note: even the smallest of suitcases, when full of books, is way too heavy to carry up and down the perverse number of stairs leading in and out of the Montreal Metro.

NON-LINEAR NARRATIVES & MULTI-MEDIA POETICS: AN INTRODUCTION TO ELECTRONIC LITERATURE was a one-day workshop presented by the Quebec Writers’ Federation. This being the QWF’s first venture into the realm of electronic literature, I had no idea who, if anyone, would sign up. The turnout was excellent, and students’ backgrounds extremely varied. Which was both exciting and terrifying. Picture it: A poet, a printmaker, a journalist, a video artist, an installation artist, an anthropologist, a professor of Intermedia and a Pearl programmer walk into a room. And I’m standing there with a suitcase full of books.

It’s amazing how quickly six hours can fly by. We covered some but not all of the course outline and discussed many more things besides. I referred excessively to my own work, and pillaged bits and pieces of talks and workshops taught by friends. A subjective chronology of electronic literature from Stuart Moulthrop here, a dash of film history from jake moore there. Victoria Welby’s notes on animation and remediation sure came in handy. A remixology writing exercise lifted from Mark Amerika crossed with an intro to HTML led to a re-mix of Nick Montfort’s The Purpling, a poem recently published on the Iowa Review Web.

The Purpling has ten pages, each with eight to nine sentences, each sentence linked to a different page. We were nine in the class, so we each re-mixed a page and left the index page the same. The only rules, that the first sentence of the re-mixed page start with the same first two words as the original (to correspond with Nick’s file naming system), and that the re-mixed page have the same number of sentences as the original. We took blueing as our theme: blueing of mood, of sky, as whitening agent. And here’s what we came up with: The Blueing.

Thanks to all the re-mixers and re-mixees, and to Lori, at the QWF, for bringing e.lit into the mix.
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NON-LINEAR NARRATIVES & MULTI-MEDIA POETICS: AN INTRODUCTION TO ELECTRONIC LITERATURE

I am teaching an electronic literature workshop through the Quebec Writers’ Federation on Saturday, March 28, 10:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. 1200 Atwater Avenue, Suite 2 (2nd-floor computer lab). This workshop is ideal for experienced writers interested in expanding their existing practices to include web-based forms of non-linear, interactive, intertextual and/or networked literature

The one-day workshop will provide an introduction to reading and writing web-based electronic literature. Electronic literature combines literary and new media practices, resulting in multi-media literary works that couldn’t exist in print form. Consideration of technology at the level of the creation of the text distinguishes electronic literature from e-books, digitized versions of print works, web publishing and other products of print authors ‘going digital,’ none of which will be discussed in this workshop. Unbound by pages and the printed book, electronic literature moves freely across the web, through galleries, performance spaces, and museums, yet does not reside in any single medium or institution. Electronic literature often intersects with conceptual art, web art and sound art, but the reading and writing of electronic literature is situated within the literary arts.

This workshop will begin with a brief historical background of the genre, including a discussion of some of the pre-web literary forms that digital writing evolved from. We will focus on looking at, reading and understanding works of electronic literature. I will show some of my work and explain how it was built, then propose a number of ways for beginners to approach the web medium for the creation and dissemination of texts. In particular, we will look at ways to use existing Web 2.0 structures to create distributive literary works. Writing exercises will include: writing 140-character stories in Twitter and writing postcard stories in Google Maps. There will be some technical discussion of how these works function, but prior knowledge of web programming is not required.

If participants have electronic literature projects in mind, we can discuss strategies for creating these works. Visual and new media artists who use are using text in their work and wish to learn more about the literary aspects of digital writing will also find this workshop useful, as will avid readers of experimental literature from Calvino to Borges, and anyone interested in audio/video mashup, performance, remix culture, etc., who wishes to learn about this exciting new hybrid, hypermedia genre.

A list of links to online resources, further technical resources and venues for reading and submitting electronic literature will be provided. For registration information, please visit: http://www.qwf.org/workshops/spring2009/carpenter.html.

J. R. Carpenter is winner of the QWF’s 2008 Carte Blanche Quebec Prize and the 2003 & 2005 CBC Quebec Short Story Competition. Her electronic literature has been presented at Jyväskylä Art Museum (Finland), Musée des beaux-arts de Montréal, Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art (Toronto), Electronic Literature Collection Volume One Web Biennial 2007 (Istanbul), Rhizome.org and Turbulence.org. Her short fiction has been anthologized and published widely. Her first novel, Words the Dog Knows, was published by Conundrum Press (Montreal, 2008). She serves as President of the Board of Directors of OBORO New Media Lab in Montreal.
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Electronic Literature Workshops Online

This winter I’ll be giving five electronic literature workshops through Blue Metropolis’s Teleliterature Program. This series of on-line writing workshops is aimed at helping to develop students’ literary interests and creativity, to enrich the educational and cultural life of students in remote regions and to promote Quebec literature. Many well-known Québec authors have participated over the past five years. This will be the program’s first foray into the realm of electronic literature. It’s an exciting twist to this already Internet-based program. What better way to introduce students to electronic literature than via the Internet?

Each workshop lasts an hour. The teachers are asked to introduce the author, the pedagogical guide and to try some exercises before the session, so this week I’ve been writing lesson plans. Here kids, try this at home:

Introduction to Electronic Literature: Putting Your Postcard Stories On the Map

This one-hour workshop will introduce students to electronic literature, a genre of web-based writing that combines literary and new media practices. The workshop objectives are two-fold: to engage students in reading new and experimental literature online, and to encourage them to experiment with creating and sharing their own stories online.

Using examples from my own work, I will introduce possibilities for using the web creatively to tell stories, and discuss ways to use the web to reach a broad audience. Many of my web-based works combine short fiction with photography and maps to tell stories about places that are important to me. In one recent project, Entre Ville, I use poetry, photography and Quicktime video to tell stories about my back alleyway. In my most recent work, Les huit quartiers du sommeil, I use Google Maps to tell stories about the eight different Montreal neighbourhoods I’ve lived in.

I will invite the students to participate in the workshop by asking them bring with them to class a very short, 250-words or less, “postcard” story about a place that’s important to them. I will demonstrate how to use Google Maps “My Maps” to literally put their stories on the map. The students may choose to continue to experiment with Google Maps once the workshop is done. For example, they might create one map containing all their stories, and/or they might like to add photos to their maps. I will also provide links to many other works of electronic literature for the students to read/view.

For those of you following along at home, here are a few of the recommended readings:

Electronic Literature Organization
The Electronic Literature Organization was established in 1999 to promote and facilitate the writing, publishing, and reading of electronic literature. The ELO works to assist writers and publishers in bringing their literary works to a wider, global readership and to provide them with the infrastructure necessary to reach one another.

Electronic Literature Collection Volume One
The Electronic Literature Collection Volume One, published on the web and on CD-ROM, is intended to provide for reading, classroom use, sharing, and reference on and off the network. Anyone can request a free CD-ROM from: Electronic Literature Organization / Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH) / B0131 McKeldin Library / University of Maryland / College Park, MD 20742.

Electronic Literature: What is it? By N. Katherine Hayles
This essay surveys the development and current state of electronic literature, from the popularity of hypertext fiction in the 1980’s to the present, focusing primarily on hypertext fiction, network fiction, interactive fiction, locative narratives, installation pieces, “codework,” generative art and the Flash poem.

Drunken Boat – Online Journal
Issue 8 contains the Drunken Boat Panliterary Awards & links to other online journals.

Born Magazine
An experimental venue marrying literary arts and interactive media. Original projects brought to life through creative collaboration between writers and artists.
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