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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Guest Lecturer at de Montfort University, Leicester, UK

The week of November 3rd, 2008, I'll be a Guest Lecturer at de Montfort University. De Montfort is in Leicester, UK. But I'll be in my office in Montreal. And the students will be tuning in from the UK, Gambia, and Canada. How is this possible? De Montfort offers an online MA in Creative Writing and New Media.

The Online MA in Creative Writing and New Media is designed for writers interested in experimenting with new formats and exploring the potential of new technologies in their writing. This 95% distance learning course has a unique commitment to the connections between writing and new media and offers an excellent online experience combined with one week's intensive study at the De Montfort campus. The course is designed by Professor Sue Thomas, writer and former Artistic Director of the trAce Online Writing Centre, and Kate Pullinger, acclaimed novelist and new media writer. It has extensive links with important initiatives including DMU's Institute of Creative Technologies, research into digital narratives and new media writing, and the creative, digital and publishing industries.

This degree is informed by contemporary thinking on transliteracy, meaning the ability to read, write and interpret across a range of media from orality through print and film to networked environments. Creative Writing, indeed the very nature of text itself, is changing. No longer bound by print, there are many opportunities for writers to experiment with new kinds of media, different voices and experimental platforms, both independently and in collaboration with other writers or other fields and disciplines. Not only is writing evolving, but writers themselves are developing broader expectations and aspirations. Novelists are learning about the potential of hypertext and multimedia to change the ways in which a story can be told. Journalists are finding that blogs and wikis are radically affecting their relationships with their readers. Community artists are discovering powerful collaborative narratives. And the commercial world is finding new and creative ways to interact with its employees and customers in the fast-growing attention economy of the internet. While digital media have altered the way we disseminate and gather information, readers – both online and offline – still hunger for compelling narratives. As readers, we want to be told stories; we want complex and interesting ideas and characters; we want vivid pictures in our heads. As writers we want to communicate. We need good stories well-told, whatever our choice of delivery platform. The MA in Creative Writing and New Media provides an opportunity to focus on developing work at the cutting edge of the new technologies and enables new ways of thinking about narrative.

To visit the current students' course website and to see examples of the guest lecturers on the programme and successful applicant profiles visit: http://www.creativewritingandnewmedia.com

To read the lecture I've prepared for the MA in Creative Writing and New Media visit: Mapping a Web of Words.


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in absentia launch party under the Van Horne Viaduct

When Dare-Dare first accepted in absentia for their 2008 season, I was hoping it would launch sometime very late in the season. I had already committed to launching Tributaries & Text-Fed Streams in the spring and Words the Dog Knows in the fall so already 2008 was looking like a crazy year. But, as fate would have it, just as Dare-Dare was sending out notification that they’d accepted my project on gentrification in the Mile End, they received notification of their own eviction from the parc sans nom that has been their home in Mile End for the past few years. They had to be out by July 1st so it made sense to launch my project at the end of June as a farewell to the neighbourhood. When Dare-Dare proposed launching “in absentia” on June 24th, Saint-Jean Baptiste Day, I thought: What the hell – the national holiday thing will distract everyone if the work isn’t quite done.

Stéphane came home from work on Saturday and said: Hey, there are posters with your name on them all over the neighbourhood. Posters, I said. What a good idea. I had proofed a draft of a poster, but it hadn’t quite occurred to me that someone would then post the posters and that people would see them. Dare-Dare has been great to work with. By tacit mutual agreement, we don’t pester each other with details. They do their part and I do my part and somehow it all gets done. Stéphane said: Your event is being billed as the neighbourhood Saint-Jean Baptiste Day party. That’s a big deal, he assured me. One poster was in the exact location of one of the stories in absentia. Many dear friends of mine have lived in the building directly across the street over the years, and all have been evicted now.



Monday afternoon I took the long metro ride east to Pix IV for an interview on CIBL’s 4á6 show. CIBL is also a big deal, according to Stéphane – the last word in community radio in this town. Not only had I never heard of it, somehow I’d managed to live in Montréal for nearly 18 years without ever doing a live radio interview in French. How embarrassing. How terrifying. How did it go? Well, fine I think… but then how would I know? It was fun, at least. And there was a Village des Valeurs next door. After the interview went shopping for an outfit to wear to the launch party and with thrilled to find this four-dollar skirt.



Tuesday’s forecast called for 40% chance of showers. There were showers for 40% of the day. As I was leaving the apartment for tech set up at 2PM I said: It had better rain now and get it over with. It started to rain within seconds. After about twenty minutes it was over with and we had clear skies for the rest of the night.



Arriving at the sans nom the first thing I noticed was that a porto-pottie had been set up next to the Dare-Dare trailer. I was glad that they’d thought of it, I certainly hadn’t. I’ve never had a launch event large enough to require the procurement of a porto-pottie before. This career high was mediated somewhat by the realization that in absentia would be displayed throughout the launch event on two antique iMac computers. “They’re are already in the museum of 20th century design,” Dare-Dare director Jean-Pierre assured me as we set them up on a picnic table outside the Dare-Dare trailer. We had to run network cables out to them, because they were built before wireless networks existed. But the piece ran amazingly well on them, and really, what better computers to withstand nearly 12 hours outdoors in sun, wind, blowing grit and hundreds of beery users?



Hundreds did indeed show up. They came in waves, so at first I didn’t notice how the scale of the thing kept changing. I just drifted from one conversation to the next. The NT2 polka dot crew represented and team OBORO came out in force. “in absentia” guest authors Daniel Canty and Alexis O’Hara were present as were many other dear friends. Over all I only knew a fraction of the people there. The crowd was mixed: kids, dogs, punks, artists, friends, locals and a few friendly local mentally insane folks. I took their presence as a huge complement. If the local mentally insane know that your party is THE Saint-Jean Baptiste Day party to be at you have really made it in this town. Many people were unaware of what the party was for or about other than that it was about having a party, which was certainly one of the things this party was about. Other people were acutely aware of what the work that prompted the party was all about. Stories of evictions from Mile End abounded. Someone on the Dare-Dare selection committee told me that Dare-Dare hadn’t yet been evicted from the parc sans nom when they accepted “in absentia” but he and a number of the other Dare-Dare members had already been forced to move. One guy came up and told me he’d been at home packing when he’d heard about the project and the party on the radio and decided to come check it out. Wow.



The police came three times on account of noise complaints, which totally eclipsed the on-site porto-potties as my new career high. The bicycle cops have the shapeliest legs. The programming director of Dare-Dare gave "in absentia" postcards and I merrily introduced myself to each and every officer as "the artist" which confused the heck out of them. It’s pretty hard to argue with a Saint-Jean block party, especially considering it would be Dare-Dare’s last party every in the parc sans nom. I mean, what were the police going to do, evict us? Everybody remained peaceful, the police left us in peace and people went on dancing until 2AM.



The official cocktail of the evening was the mojito, which was also the official cocktail of my wedding. This was pure coincidence as I had so little to do with the party planning I didn’t even know there would be an official cocktail. All the bartenders were volunteers, as were all the dj's: Julie d, Tommy T, Rustic, Backdoor, Dirty Boots, papa dans maman, catherine lovecity, alakranx, cristal 45 et FSK1138 & jason j gillingham. FSK1138 & jason j gillingham did some kind of crazy live set using sounds extracted from the blue and red values of photo data taken from images of in absentia. The sound data was extracted using 'BeepMap' a flstudio image synth. A few days later FSK1138 dropped off a CD of these sounds in my mailbox. A few days later FSK1138 popped a CD of these sounds in my mailbox. Thank you guys, so much.

I’m blown away by the generosity of all these volunteers and mightily impressed by the hard work and dedication of the Dare-Dare community. All night the programming director of Dare-Dare worked crowd control with a super grounded zen like calm, negotiating with the police and the locals and the drunks and the crazies and me the artist and picking up empties and taking photos and restocking the bar with beer. At some point I said to someone, “Man, can you imagine being the guy in charge of all this?”



At some other point in the evening I was sitting with a group of friends watching the masses dancing, casting wild elongated shadows on the underside of the Van Horne Viaduct when it hit me that there were more people at this party than there had been in my entire elementary school. I tried to explain how overwhelming this was. Someone said: “What did you go to a Montessori school or something?” No, I just grew up in a place where there were that few people! When I was a kind in rural Nova Scotia most folks scoffed when I said I was going off the big city to study fine arts in university. When I started making art on the Internet most folks scoffed and said: “The Internet’s just a fad, it will never catch on.” So I found it beautiful that a web-based fiction project could bring so many real people together in a physical space.



At some very late point in the evening I was standing on the steps of the Dare-Dare trailer taking night photos each on more surreal than then next yet not quite able to capture the scene when artistic director Jean-Pierre passed by and asked me if I was enjoying my party. My party? “It’s bigger than all of us,” I said. One of the stated aims of in absentia is so “haunt” the neighbourhood with the stories of its former tenants (fictional or otherwise) who have been forced out by gentrification. If my night photos are any indication than yes, I think my plan is working.



in absentia is now online: http://luckysoap.com/inabsentia. I will continue to add new stories over the course of the summer until November 2008. It will take at least that long for all of the ramifications of this project to sink in. If you have stories of gentrification and its erasures in the Mile End feel free to add them as comments to this post or summit them via the comment box within the piece.
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HAVE YOUR DESTINATION IN MIND

One of my favourite books of all time is The Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Juster, illustrated by Jules Feiffer. I named one of my favourite cats off all time after the main character, Milo, who didn’t know what to do with himself – not just sometimes, but always. “Wherever he was he wished he were somewhere else, and when he got there he wondered why he’d bothered.” One day Milo comes home from school and finds an enormous package in his room containing the following items: One genuine turnpike tollbooth; three precautionary signs; assorted coins for use in paying tolls; one map, up to date and carefully drawn my master cartographers, depicting natural and man-made features; and one book of rules and traffic regulations, which many not be bent of broken. Having lots of time on his hands and nowhere better to be, Milo assembles the tollbooth, hops in a small electric automobile he just happened to have kicking around in his room, drives through the tollbooth and proceeds to have many clever and pun-filled adventures. He befriends a watchdog named Tock (tic-tock, tic-tock). Together they travel through Dictionopolis to Digitopolis and (I hope I’m not giving too much away) rescue Rhyme and Reason from the Mountains of Ignorance. No one told him it was impossible to do this until after he’d done it!

As a kid in rural Nova Scotia I pretty much always wished I were somewhere else. At school I wished I were home and at home I wished I were outside. Outside there was nothing to do. All school year I waited for summer. Every summer I went to New York City to visit family. New York was a filthy, hot and crime-ridden – and my family lived there! – so and almost as soon as I got there I couldn’t wait to leave.

One of the three precautionary signs that came with the Phantom Tollbooth advised: HAVE YOUR DESTINATION IN MIND. Milo consulted the map, also provided:

It was a beautiful map, in many colors, showing principal roads, rivers and sear, towns and cities, mountains and valleys, intersections and detours, and sites of outstanding interest beautiful and historic.
The only trouble was that Milo had never heard of any of the places it indicated, and even the names sounded most peculiar.
“I don’t thing there really is such a country,” he concluded after studying it carefully. “Well, it doesn’t matter anyway.” And he closed his eyes and poked a finger at the map.

When I was twelve years old decided to move to Montreal. I procured a map of the city and thumbtacked it above my bed. I left home the minute after high school. If you would have told me back then that I’d spend the next fifteen years in Montreal writing about rural Nova Scotia I would have said: Shoot me now! But that’s what happened. Check out this early electronic literature project, circa 1997 - the interface is a map of Nova Scotia: The Mythologies of Landforms and Little Girls

In 2006 I was commissioned by the OBORO New Media Lab to create a web project for the 50th anniversary of the Conseil des Arts de Montreal. The resulting work, Entre Ville, was my first big piece about Montreal. Finally! I had figured out how to write about where I actually live. So what did I do? I took Entre Ville on the road. I’ve become habituated to talking about where I live to people who live elsewhere – a side-effect, I suspect, of growing up in a different country than everyone I’m related too.

A year to the day after Entre Ville launched at the Musée des beaux-arts I presented it at a Media in Transition conference at MIT. There I met Jon Saklofske – an English professor at Acadia University. Acadia is in Wolfville, Nova Scotia – one of my old hometowns. I went to Wolfville Elementary School for grades four and five. Jon professed to be a fan of Entre Ville so I immediately started pestering him to wrangle me an invite to do an artist’s talk at Acadia. How perverse. After years of writing about Nova Scotia in Montreal I now all of a sudden I wanted to show my Montreal work in Nova Scotia? How very Milo, always wishing I were somewhere else.

The first thing Milo has to do when he drives through the Phantom Tollbooth is to get Beyond Expectations. Not to conflate my mission to get a free plane ticket out of an academic institution with Milo’s mission to rescue Rhyme and Reason from the Mountain of Ignorance, but a) I’m glad nobody told Jon or me that it was an impossible mission before we embarked on it, and b) I haven’t even got there yet and I’m already grateful to so many people met along the way. There were a few setbacks in the beginning and for a while there my expectations were running low. It was summer, for one thing. So no one was around for Jon to pester on his end. When the school year finally started up again the Acadia faculty went on strike, putting all plans on hold. Happily the strike ended happily. Things started to move more quickly after that. By mid-fall the travel funding was approved and a date was set so I started making inquiries about lining up other talks at other universities. These were immediately met with an outpouring of enthusiasm, generosity, support and offers of couches to sleep on. Thanks to Jon for starting the ball rolling. Get one good thing going and other good things will flock to it. Thanks Andrea Cooper for putting me in touch with Peter Dykhuis at the Dalhousie Art Gallery, Jessica Andrews for putting me back in touch with Trevor and Michele, Trevor for reminding me that Randy Knott taught at NSCAD, Randy for putting me in touch with David Clark at NSCAD and Michael-Andreas for enrolling in that lithography workshop at NSCAD way back when – I can’t wait to see you again old friend.

There is a very funny bit about two-thirds of the way through The Phantom Tollbooth with Milo, Tock and their friend the Humbug (yes, he’s a bug who hums). They’re driving along intent on their mission:

The shore line was peaceful and flat, and the calm sea bumped it playfully along the sandy beach. In the distance a beautiful island covered with palm trees and flowers beckoned invitingly from the sparkling water.
“Nothing can possibly go wrong now,” cried the Humbug happily, and as soon as he’d said it he leaped from the car, as if stuck by a pin, and sailed all the way to the little island.
“And we’ll have plenty of time,” answered Tock, who hadn’t noticed that the bug was missing – and he, too, suddenly leaped into the air and disappeared.
“It certainly couldn’t be a nicer day,” agreed Milo, who was too busy looking at the road to see that the others had gone. And in a split second he was gone also.

The beautiful island beckoningly invitingly was called Conclusions and Milo, Tock and the Humbug had all jumped to it.

I’m not sure what I was thinking when I first started pestering Jon. I haven’t been to Nova Scotia in eight years and I can’t remember the last time I was in Wolfville. When I presented Entre Ville at MIT I started with a map of Montreal and said: I live here. Did I think I was going to swoop down from Montreal and pull off a stunt like that in my old hometown? Fortunately Andrea Schwenke Wyile at Acadia saved me, though perhaps unwittingly, from jumping to Conclusions. She came up with the title for the talk I’ll give there: Mapping a Web of Words. I’ve used maps in many of my electronic literature projects – as images, interfaces and metaphors for long-ago places and pasts that could never be mine. Andrea’s title started me thinking about maps in more practical terms. Digging though my files I found photographic evidence of the large map of Montreal that hung on the cluttered walls of my bedroom throughout junior and senior high. No wonder I wound up in Montreal. For years I’ve had a Geology Map of Nova Scotia hanging on the cluttered wall of my Montreal office. No wonder I keep writing about Nova Scotia. The title, Mapping A Web of Words, underlined this mirror map inversion. The contrariness of it all reminded me immediately of The Phantom Tollbooth so I went to find the book on the shelf. Opening it for again for the first time in a few years I was confounded by the map inside the front cover. How could I have forgotten about this map?

The first time I read The Phantom Tollbooth I was nine years old. I was in the fourth grade at Wolfville Elementary School. I wrote a book report about it on single sheet of foolscap. It’s the only piece of schoolwork I still have from those years:

My book took place in an amaganary world witch you enter through the phantom tollbooth. Its realy like a world in a world.

On the back I drew a map of Milo’s route beyond Expectations, through the Doldrums, into Dictionopolis, past the Sea of Knowledge, onward to Digitopolis and upward into the Mountains of Ignorance to rescue Rhyme and Reason from the prison there. The map I drew in no way resembles the map in the front of the book.



HAVE YOUR DESTINATION IN MIND.

J. R. Carpenter: Mapping a Web of Words

Acadia University, KC Irving Auditorium (Wolfville, NS)
Wednesday, February 27, 2008 at 7pm

Dalhousie Art Gallery, (Halifax, NS)
Thursday, February 28, 2008 at 8pm

Noontime talk at NSCAD, (Halifax, NS)
Friday, February 29, 2008 at 12:15pm
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