Reading in London: 7 Poets for Oxfam Autumn Fundraiser

I will be reading some very short prose pieces at Back To School: 7 Poets for Oxfam Autumn 2010 Fundraiser, Wednesday, 29 September, 2010 – 7 pm, at Oxfam Books and Music shop, 91 Marylebone High Street, London W1 (10 minutes walk from Baker Street tube station).

The evening will feature seven poets, from Canada, Britain, Ireland, and New Zealand:

Carole Baldock – British poet and editor-publisher of Kudos and Orbis magazines

Charles Boyle – Faber poet, publisher and novelist, shortlisted for TS Eliot Prize

JR Carpenter – Prize-winning Quebec writer, poet and performance artist

CL Dallat – Irish poet, writer and musician of significance

Helen Oswald – shortlisted for the current Forward Prize for Best First Collection

Anna Smaill – a leading younger poet from New Zealand

Anthony Thwaite – legendary poet-critic, and editor of Larkin’s Collected Poems and Selected Letters

This event is supported by Kingston University and hosted by Todd Swift.

Please reserve seats for these events by contacting shop manager Martin Penny by email or phone 020 7487 3570 or oxfammarylebone [at] hotmail [dot] com

Admission free. All money raised goes to Oxfam, a registered charity.

For more information, please visit the Eyeware blog.

JRC PhD

I’m going back to school this week, for the first time in a very long time. I’m excited. What took me so long? I graduated with a BFA in Studio Art from Concordia University in Montreal in 1995, the year Netscape came out. Remember Netscape? No? Well it was a really big deal at the time. It changed my life, anyway. I have been using the internet as a medium for the creation and dissemination of non-linear inter-textual hyper-media narratives ever since.

I never got around to doing a masters degree, mostly because I could never figure out what on earth to do one in. It seemed silly to go get another degree in the same subject I just got a degree in. But the more work I did in areas I had never studied the less qualified I seemed to be to pursue those subjects academically. Yes, Creative Writing MA, I’m talking to you. Categories confuse me, as do departments and disciplines. Some of my best friends are academics. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. I just never met the write, I mean right M(F)A for me. Besides, I’ve been busy. The past fifteen years have been full of thinking and making and teaching and showing and writing and trying all kinds of things in all kinds of forms and forums, by writing into them, learning from them and watching them shift and change.

Things have changed muchly lately. For one thing, the non-linear inter-textual hyper-media narrative thing I’ve been slogging away at for so long is now an actual real thing. The electronic literature community has been incredibly good to me. And much of the electronic literature community’s activity is academically based. Increasingly, the opportunities, communities and collaborations I engage in are aided and abetted by academic institutions in some way. I’m cool with that. I like research. I like conferences. I especially like going to conferences and meeting fascinating people who have research labs in fascinating places which then sometimes invite me to and if I can go I get to meet even more neat new people and all the while I’m hearing about new work and talking about my work and selling everybody zines. No really, sometimes it really happens that way.

In May 2009 I went to an E-Poetry conference in Barcelona and met someone from the Performance Writing area at Dartington College of Art in the UK. Within a few months I was teaching an electronic literature workshop in the Performance Writing area at Dartington and thinking: Wow, electronic literature basically IS Performance Writing. And damn, if I had heard of the MA in Performance Writing at Dartington I would have done it years ago. But I am really glad I didn’t. Because now Dartington College of Art has merged with University College Falmouth in Cornwall, and I have been awarded a studentship to do a three-year practice-led PhD research degree at University College Falmouth in partnership with University of the Arts London. I will live in South West England, where it hardly ever snows, travel here and there, use the heck out of the nation’s libraries, meet lots of new people, try and sell them all zines and keep on doing the thinking, making, teaching, showing, writing and trying all kinds of things that I’ve been doing all along, only with funding, structure and support.

Now seems a fine time to go back to school.

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

Introducing the Adventures of WEBGIRL

Introducing the adventures of WEBGIRL, an original comic drawn entirely by girl genius Aphra Kennedy Fletcher, in which it is revealed that J. R. is actually the secret cover of the electrically charged superhero WEBGIRL… not to be confused with Spiderwoman.

WEBGIRL

In this episode, I travel by fibre optic route to fight viral villain MEGABYTE. And I win!!!!!

Check out Aphra’s Film Factory on YouTube.

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/

txt/performance/net at MACHFELD, Vienna, June 26

I’m doing a digital text installation and performance at MCACHFELD in Vienna Saturday, June 26, thanks to the generosity and super organizational prowess of Vienna-based digital sound visual interactive poet, member of the institute for transacoustic research and member of the vegetable orchestra Jörg Piringer, who set the whole thing up.

MACHFELD (Michael Mastrototaro & Sabine Maier) was founded 1999 in Vienna. Based on Mastrototaro’s cyber-novel of the same name, MACHFELD developed an art-label focused on: web-art, short- and experimental films, streaming-projects, interactive installations as well as works for the public space. Since 2004 MACHFELD has run an interdisciplinary Medialab in Vienna, with projects, exhibitions and installations / screenings in Africa, Europe, Central- and North-America.

If you happen to be in Vienna Saturday, 26 June, come by MCACHFELD for an evening with txt/net-installations & -performances by:

j.r. carpenter
http://luckysoap.com/

peter moosgaard
http://duebomba.blogs.sonance.net/

jörg piringer
http://joerg.piringer.net/

with a guest appearance by decadent chef Durain Gray.

machfeld invitation

Saturday, 26 June 2010 at 20:00
machfeld | studio
2., max winter platz 21/1
Vienna, Austria

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.

Two New Stories Added to In Absentia

I just added two new stories to in absentia, a site-specific web-based project about gentrification and its erasures in the Mile End neighbourhood of Montreal, an intimate and intensely personal investigation of a neighbourhood I lived and worked in for 17 years. in absentia was presented within Dare-Dare‘s Dis/location: projet d’articulation urbaine in 2008. Two weeks after the commencement of the project, Dare-Dare‘s mobile office was evicted from the parc sans nom, the Mile End vacant lot that had been its home for 2 years. A month after the completion of the project I was evicted from the Mile End apartment I lived in for 11 years, effectively forcing me out of the neighbourhood I lived in for 17 years and contributing to my decision to leave Montreal all together, after 19 years.

J. R. Carpenter || in absentiaIronically, and somewhat painfully, dislocation from the locus of this work resulted in many opportunities to present the work around the world. The Mile End represented in in absentia has been exhibited, presented, performed and taught by myself and by others in Montreal, Toronto, Ottawa, Calgary, Banff, New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Providence, Finland, Sweden, Barcelona, Bristol, and other places I am unaware of. In each retelling of in absentia I am re-confronted with the questions that led me to creating the piece in the first place: What traces to people leave behind when they leave a place? What stories spring from absence?

Recently, I was invited to write about in absentia for Dislocation volet II de Dare-Dare, a publication celebrating projects supported by Dare-Dare during the two years they were located in Mile End. The publication project coordinator encouraged me to build on the stories in in absentia and/or write new ones. I other circumstance I would welcome the opportunity to creatively revisit a work in such a way. But in this case, I could not even begin to think about in absentia from the point of view of the person I was when I created the project. I am no longer that person. So much has changed.

The Dislocation volet II de Dare-Dare deadline is looming. I have been fretting. And then today, for whatever reason, two stories came to me – one, two, just like that. Like so many of the things I write, I had already written them, only I hadn’t noticed at the time. One comes from a series of facebook status updates I wrote whilst apartment hunting in Montreal last spring, phrased in the form of a game called: Which would you rather?

Let’s play where would you rather live: A) a god-forsaken place, or B) a dog-forsaken place? Trick question. I can live without god, not with out dog.

The full story can be read by clicking on the A Louer icon in the top left corner of the map on this page: http://luckysoap.com/inabsentia/alouer.html

The other comes from a blog post I wrote at the end of last year, reflecting on Reading Interrupted:

My suitcases and I spent the summer living out of other people’s bookshelves. It turns out that a friend close enough to put you up in a time of need tends to have a book collection close enough to your own to make you and your suitcases feel at home without a home.

The full story can be read by clicking on the books icon on the left side of the map on this page: http://luckysoap.com/inabsentia/perdu.html

I don’t know why the sudden arrival of these new stories from a place now past comes as a surprise to me. I have written of in absentia as a web “site” haunted by the stories of former residents of Mile End, a slightly fantastical world that is already lost but at the same time is still fully known by its inhabitants: a shared memory of the neighbourhood as it never really was but could have been. I am a former resident now, and these stories spring from that absence.

CityFish Beta Launch at AI_ELO June 3-6, 2010

For the past six months I’ve been working on a massive new web-based hypermedia narrative called CityFish. A beta version will be on display at Archive & Innovate, The 4th International Conference & Festival of the Electronic Literature Organization, taking place at Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island, USA, June 3-6, 2010.

A portion of CityFish was presented as a work-in-progress at Interventions: Literary Practice at the Edge: A Gathering, at The Banff Centre, Banff, Alberta, Canada, February 18, 2010. Some of the videos in CityFish were edited during the Bable Babble Rabble: On Language and Art thematic residency at The Banff Centre in 2006. A very, very, very early web-based version of CityFish was presented in an exhibition called ISWAS, at the Bavarian American Hotel in Nuremberg, Germany, July 1998. That version was based on a very short story written the year previous, which was based on a drawing I have no recollection of drawing, which I had made into a rubber stamp at least fifteen years ago now. The title, CityFish, refers to the City Mouse, Country Mouse fable written by Aesop in the mid-sixth century BC in ancient Greece. I had hoped to have CityFish finished in time to present it at AI_ELO in full and in person, but having been in the works for twenty-seven centuries already, it may take a few more months to complete.

CityFish || J. R. Carpenter

Part parable, part picture book, CityFish combines contemporary short fiction and hypermedia storytelling forms. A girl named Lynne spends her winters living with her mother in a small fishing village called Brooklyn, Nova Scotia, and her summers visiting her mother’s family in Queens, New York.

Lynne and her mother lived in half a clapboard house that had long ago staggered, stooped and settled where it fell, alongside a salt-parched road that backed up a hill and away from a fishing village called Brooklyn. Not the real Brooklyn; Brooklyn, Nova Scotia. No one fished from the wharf at Brooklyn anymore. No one lived in the other half of the clapboard house. No one Lynne knew had ever been anywhere.
J. R. Carpenter, CityFish [beta]

Also launching at AI_ELO, Electronic Literature Collection Volume Two, edited by Rita Raley, Talan Memmott, Brian Kim Stefans and Laura Borràs Castanyer. I have two works in this collection: Entre Ville, and in absentia, and one work in its predecessor, Electronic Literature Collection Volume One, edited by N. Katherine Hayles, Nick Montfort, Scott Rettberg and Stephanie Strickland.

Gorge

A gorge is a steep-sided canyon, a passage, a gullet. To gorge is to stuff with food, to devour greedily. Gorge is a new poetry generator by J. R. Carpenter. This never-ending tract spews verse approximations, poetic paroxysms on food, consumption, decadence and desire.

The source code for Gorge is a hack of Montfort’s elegant poetry generator Taroko Gorge, which has also been remixed by Scott Rettberg, as Tokyo Garage.

Of Gorge, Nick Montfort advises:

“See if you can stomach it, and for how long.”

Nick Montfort, Post Position, Once More into the Gorge
http://nickm.com/post/2010/05/once-more-into-the-gorge/

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