Slip into the Text-Fed Stream

I've officially started posting to Tributaries & Text-Fed Streams: A Feed-Reading of The Capilano Review. What the heck is a Feed-Reading? What on earth is a Text-Fed Stream? I'm so glad you asked!

Tributaries & Text-Fed Streams: A Feed-Reading of The Capilano Review is a personal, experimental and playful re-reading of and response to thirteen essays published in a recent issue of The Capilano Review that was dedicated to new writing and new technologies. In this work I am exploring the formal and functional properties of RSS, using blogging, tagging and other Web 2.0 tools to mark-up and interlink these essays and to insert additional meta-layers of commentary in order to play with, expose, expand upon, and subvert formal structures of writing, literature, and literary criticism.

For the next four-months I will be reading and re-reading the essays and parsing them into fragments, which I will then annotate, mark-up, tag and post. Fed into an RSS stream, the fragments will be re-read, reordered, and reblogged in an iterative process of distribution intended to open up new readings of the essays and reveal new interrelationships between them.

Streams are both literally and metaphorically the central image of the work. Streams of consciousness, data, and rivers flow through the interface and through the texts. Through this process of re-reading and responding, this textual tributary will feed a larger stream while paying tribute to the original source.

The result of this process-based approach will be a web site that is part blog and part archive – an online repository for the artifacts of re-reading as well as a stage for the performance of live archiving. The final version of Tributaries & Text-Fed Streams: A Feed-Reading of The Capilano Review will launch simultaneously on The Capilano Review website (Vancouver) and on Turbulence.org (New York) in May 2008.

But why wait until then? You can slip into this text-fed stream at any time via the web site, where you can post comments: http://tributaries.thecapilanoreview.ca and/or you can subscribe to the RSS feed and have the posts come to you: http://tributaries.thecapilanoreview.ca/feed/.

There's also a facebook group: Tributaries & Text-Fed Streams. I've started a collection of literary quotations referring to rivers, streams, writing and the flow of information. If you have any to share, please send them along via a comment to this post, or to a post on http://tributaries.thecapilanoreview.ca, or on the facebook group's wall. Hope to see you somewhere down river soon ...



Tributaries & Text-Fed Streams is curated by Vancouver-based artist and writer Kate Armstrong and commissioned by The Capliano Review - a literary journal based in North Vancouver with a long history of publishing new and established Canadian and international writers and artists who are experimenting with or expanding the boundaries of conventional forms and contexts. Now in its 35th year, the magazine continues to favour the risky, the provocative, the innovative, and the dissident. TCR 2-50 "Artifice & Intelligence" was guest-edited by Andrew Klobucar and included essays by: Andrew Klobucar, Global Telelanguage Resources, Sandra Seekins, Kate Armstrong, David Jhave Johnston, Laura U. Marks, Sharla Sava, Kevin Magee, Jim Andrews, Gordon Winiemko, Nancy Patterson and Darren Wershler-Henry.

Tributaries & Text-Fed Streams: http://tributaries.thecapilanoreview.ca
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Lapsus Linguae in a+b=ba?

a+b=ba? [art+blog=blogart?] a showcase of blog art curated by Wilfried Agricola de Cologne, launched this week on JavaMuseum, a Forum for Internet Technology in Contemporary Art based in Cologne, Germany as part of NewMediaFest 2007 a festival of The Network [NewMediaArtProjectNetwork]:||cologne.

a+b=ba? includes this blog, Lapsus Linguae:

Lapsus Linguae is a Latin phrase, meaning a ‘slip of the tongue’. I have a lot of those. Some of my favourite works starts with that spark that happens when saying the wrong thing comes out just the right way. Lapsus Linguae began as writing exercise of sorts, an attempt to note these slips of the tongue. Then, as I began thinking of the bolg as place to publish, I would force myself to act on these seemingly small ideas while they were still fresh in my mind. Generally I work very slowly. Lapsus Linguae has helped me generate a massive amount of new writing on a wide variety of topics, and to get it into a state finished enough to post in a short amount of time. I have become more alert to the stories lurking in the every day. I used to use Lapsus Linguae to post information about my publications and events, but increasingly I find other people so much more interesting to write about. On occasion I also post responses to things happening in the news. The blog is turning me into a social archivist. See, it looks like I mean to say social activist, but really I mean social archivist. A slip of the tongue indeed.

Also launching during NewMediaFest 2007, JIP – Javamuseum Interview Project, now featuring more than 85 interviews (including one with me) and AND - Artists Network Database. AND was initially set up for internal use as a central place for organizing the data related to the artists who are participating in The Network, like JavaMuseum, VideoChannel, SoundLAB, Cinematheque and many others. AND is now open with free access to all users, allowing direct access to and information about these artists, their works and the connected project environments.

LINKS:
a+b=ba?: http://www.javamuseum.org/2007/a_and_b/
JavaMuseum: http://www.javamuseum.org/
NewMediaFest 2007: http://www.newmediafest.org/
AND - Artists Network Database: http://www.nmartproject.net/artists/
JIP – Javamuseum Interview Project: http://jip.javamuseum.org/jipblog/
The Network [NewMediaArtProjectNetwork]:||cologne
http://www.nmartproject.net
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Tributaries and Text-fed Streams

a feed-reading of The Capliano Review
a new work of electronic literature by J. R. Carpenter
curated by Kate Armstrong

The Capilano Review, a literary journal based in North Vancouver, has commissioned me to create a new work of electronic literature based on a recent issue dedicated to new writing and new technologies. TCR 2-50 "Artifice & Intelligence," guest-edited by Andrew Klobucar, included essays by: Andrew Klobucar, Global Telelanguage Resources, Sandra Seekins, Kate Armstrong, David Jhave Johnston, Laura U. Marks, Sharla Sava, Kevin Magee, Jim Andrews, Gordon Winiemko, Nancy Patterson and Darren Wershler-Henry.

Tributaries & Text-fed Streams will be a personal, experimental and playful rereading of and response to these essays. I will explore the formal and functional properties of RSS, using blogging, tagging and other Web 2.0 tools to mark-up and interlink essays and to insert additional meta-layers of commentary in order to play with, expose, expand upon, and subvert formal structures of writing, literature, and literary criticism.

Over a four-month period I will read and re-read the essays, parsing them into fragments, which I will then annotate, mark-up, tag and post. Fed into an RSS stream, the fragments will be re-read, reordered, and reblogged in an iterative process of distribution that will open up new readings of the essays and reveal new interrelationships between them. The result of this process-based approach will be a blogchive – part blog, part archive – at once an online repository for the artefacts of re-reading and a stage for the performance of live archiving.

Streams are both literally and metaphorically the central image of the work. Streams of consciousness, data, and rivers flow through the interface and through the texts. Through this process of re-reading and responding, this textual tributary will feed a larger stream while paying tribute to the original source.


Tributaries & Text-fed Streams: A Feed-Reading of The Capilano Review will launch simultaneously on thecapilanoreview.ca (Vancouver) and turbulence.org (New York) in the spring of 2008.
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a+b=ba? [blog+art=artblog?]

JavaMuseum is a Forum for Internet Technology in Contemporary Art Founded in 2000 by Agricola de Cologne as a virtual museum focusing on net based art. Over the summer, the JavaMuseum invited artists to submit art projects using blogging technology to a show called a+b=ba? [blog+art=artblog?]. The results are in and this blog, Lapsus Linguae, is among the selected works. Here’s the full list of artists selected for a+b=ba?

Babel (UK)
Tauvydas Bajarkevicius (Lithuania)
Raheema Beegum (India)
Hans Bernhard (Austria)
J. R. Carpenter (Canada)
Antony Carriere (USA)
Dylan Davis (Australia)
Ryan Gallagher (USA)
Fabian Giles (Mexico)
Ellie Harrison (USA)
Gita Hashemi (Canada)
Jeremy Hight (USA)
Aleksandar Janicijevic (Canada)
Richard Jochum (USA)
Seth Keen (Australia)
Kyon (Germany)
Yvonne Martinsson (Sweden)
Vytautas Michelkevicius (Lithuania)
Alex Perl (USA)
Karla Schuch Brunet (Brazil)
Robert Sloon (South Africa)
Michael Szpakowski (UK)
Andres Torres (Chile)
Matthew Williamson; (Canada)
Salvatore Iaconesi (Italy)
Juan Patino (Argentina)

The show a+b=ba? is curated by Elena Julia Rossi (Rome/Italy). It will launch in November during NewMediaFest 2007 in partnership with the 3rd Digital Art Festival Rosario/Argentina.

JavaMuseum is part of [NewMediaArtProjectNetwork]:||cologne
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life is a cabaret my friends

Way back in February I was sitting in an East Village bar with a fiction writer and an ex-Marine. Now he’s a history major. What did you do for New Year’s Eve, they asked. Went to a party some cabaret friends, I said. You have cabaret friends? Yeah. They perform at our friendly neighbourhood cabaret. We have cabaret friends too, don’t we honey? The ex-Marine is a regular comedian. Yes, that’s right, of course we do, the fiction writer picked up the thread. You know, those cabaret friends we hired to be our cabaret friends so we could say we have cabaret friends. Sure, we hang out at the cabaret all the time.

Our friendly neighbourhood cabaret is, of course, Kiss My Cabaret, hosted by Danette MacKay. And it’s on tonight!

On the bill, the crème de la crème of Montréal performers: Alexis O’Hara, Skidmore, Désirée D’Amour, Madame et Matante, Church of Harvey Christ – and very special SURPRISE out-of-town guests! By request, Gigi et Pipi will close the show with their stirring Battle Hymn – lollipops all around!

Speaking of Gigi et Pipi, the other night we dined with half the afore mentioned cabaret crème de la crème and then swooped downtown descending en masse upon the École Bourget for the opening of La Biennale de Montréal. We went to see Gigi and Pipi, and wound up running into everyone else we’d ever known in our lives along the way. We wove through the crowd on the lawn, squeezed up the front steps, and were pleased for once to have to pass the absurd bullet-proof security cubicle. Inside, Carol Pope slouched - all skinny, shiny-baddged and sinister in navy. Performing the squinty eyes of suspicious security guard boredom, she stared all the art hounds down.

Working our way through a social obstacle course of countless quick waves, big hugs, awkward exits, emotional reunions, forgotten names and about-time introductions we found and lost each other repeatedly in the hot and sweaty hallways, eventually all making our way to the hidden wonders of the easy-to-miss but not-to-be-missed tiny closed-door closet space allotted to, taken over and utterly transformed by our 2byoys, Stephen Lawson and Aaron Pollard, Gigi L'Amour and Pipi Douleur. We waited – the most fun I’ve ever had on a line up - with old and new and long-lost out-of-town friends, co-workers, colleagues and random art-world hangers-on and heavy-hitters. Of the later, I’d be hard pressed to say which was which. We passed the time drinking beer, taking photos of our selves and text messaging each other like a bunch of twelve year olds. And just when we were on the verge of becoming unruly, Pipi Douleur ushered into Phobophilia.

It’s a closet, a cloakroom. It’s a theatre, it’s a play, a spectacle, and a stage; it’s a dressing room, a powder room, a vanity, a secret. It’s a cramped space behind-the-scenes to be alone in when you’ve got your guard-down after-the-show. Gigi et Pipi invite us into the part of the performance we’re not supposed to see. We enter, all drab in our sweat and street clothes, and Gigi L’Amour starts in on us. With chatter and wink, flatter and suggestion, Gigi starts convincing us that we’re somewhere else, a place where disbelief is suspended, where the mundane is upended, where her eyelashes are real. Only then are we invited to climb up into the theatre in the rear. We perch on steep step seats – a jumbled audience of heads, legs and breath. We are a miniature audience; we are gigantic. And in an instant we are lost. Wandered off from the cramped attic theatre crawl space, into the fantasies of film-noir. We are specks on snowy landscapes; we chase our own ghosts, we leap and plié into the spotlight – alone at last – on our very own silver-screen-in-a-suitcase stage.



La Biennale de Montréal: http://www.ciac.ca/

Kiss My Cabaret: http://kissmycabaret.com
La Sala Rossa, 4848 boul. St. Laurent, tonight at 8PM
. . . . .

poisson d'avril

March came in lamb-coloured at least, on curly white snow feet.

And went out like a liar, savannah bright sun looking lion roaring heat.

Tripping cold feet, tricking me into scarf and sweater instead of jacket leather.

April’s first folly finds me in bed with a hot head cold.

Mais, en français, avril premiers with a fish not a fool.

I guess the poisson’s on me.
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Accordion Times

Saturday night we set out. Even though we were tired and some of us were cranky and we didn’t really know what to expect. Up a down-way street. Heads lowered, we leaned into the nickel and dime sized March wet snow. Down under the CN overpass, a right onto Bellechasse, and then east, east, east.

The best place for a Nova Scotia kitchen party in Montreal is the Petit Patrie. A dog, a trumpet and a piano. Two fiddles, a mandolin and a drum. Three accordions. Four small children. As far as I could tell… they were all moving so quickly.

I’m a big fan of dogs, fiddles and accordions. Less so of small children. But these were free-range kids, with little or no interest in adults and their goings on. They had their own party plans. They climbed the couch mountain. Waved their painted paper batons. Spun like tops, crouched like dogs, played dead on the floor. For twenty seconds or more. Then sprang up quite alive again to hunt down two-part piano harmonies and/or wheat-free cookies.

We random grown-ups were left to our own devices. We sat on the floor. Drank French wine from Beartrix Potter mugs. Read a How To Train Your Dog book. It’s too late, S. said. Our dog’s nine. Tunes unfolded. Keys were negotiated. Fifths were found.

Two smallish girls, aged five or six or so, discovered the hostess’s necklace collection hanging from a pegboard. I was enlisted. Because I was sitting right there. But soon turned double agent. For the hostess, supervising. For the girls, reaching, untangling and admiring. It’s hard to say what language we were speaking. French, English, Polish, Hand Gestures. A translator was brought in to invite me run up and down the hall with them. Someone, somebody’s mother perhaps, explained: She’s a big person, she might not want too. So they brought me the last wheat-free cookie instead. And later one of them hid behind me in a game of hide-and-seek. Surely, in little girl land, this is a huge complement. A great honour.


. . . . .

what's that smell?

Spring is in the air:
A dubious proclamation to make mid-March in Montreal.
One must interpret the signs creatively.

I lost my winter gloves.
That may mean another cold snap’s on the way.
And I lost my travel umbrella
So maybe there’s a voyage in my near future.
The jury’s still out on that one…
Fall grant results are in and spring deadlines loom.
Daylight savings time came into effect early this year.
But I keep sleeping though that extra hour.
Tax time is also in effect; my office floor is a sea of receipts.
The federal budget came down stinking of electioneering.
The provincial election campaign stinks of provincialism.
Is this a three-way race or a three-legged race?
Canvassers ring our door-to-door bell in record numbers.
Mild weather helping to get the vote out.



The annual Saint Patrick’s Day snow has all but melted.
There’s not much green, no buds, no leaves, no sun, no flowers.
But at long last an English bookstore has sprouted up in Mile End.
Perhaps that’s not a sign of spring, but surely it’s a sign of something.
Welcome S. W. Welch. By the time the fresh paint smell fades
the neighbourhood will be in full bloom.
. . . . .

home... makes sense.

I wrote in a short story once about a character who: The more he travels the more home makes no sense to him. That was fiction. I’ve been away a lot lately. I’m back now. And home is making good sense to me. Here, I can cook whatever I want for dinner. And I have so many more clothes and coats and shoes to choose from than I do on the road. This makes the weather so much easier to deal with. In my hometown, I run into people I know and we chat right there on the street – what a good system. Yesterday I ran into an old friend in the dépanneur. Home is where other people know what a dépanneur is. It was mild out, for Montréal in March, so I walked down to The Word. Home is The Word. In Montréal I walk everywhere, because I can. Makes sense. Walking the dog, I ran into another old friend on Fairmount Street. Home is walking the dog. I’m so happy to be back in town I don’t even mind that spring is taking so long. No buds on the trees yet. But the traffic lights are almost ripe. Excessive nonsensical signage always reminds me of Montréal, so somehow even this sight made sense to me yesterday:



Perhaps because, as Montreal poet Anne Carson writes in The Life of Towns: "Towns are the illusion that things hang together somehow..."

She goes on to say: "There are regular towns and irregular towns, there are wounded towns and sober towns and fiercely remembered towns, there are useless but passionate towns that battle on, there are towns where the snow slides from the roofs of the houses with such force that victims are killed, but there are no empty towns (just empty scholars) and there is no regret. Now move along."

Montreal may be all or none of these towns, I don't know. I'm just happy to be here.
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