The Pleasure of The Coast: A Hydro-graphic Novel

I’m delighted to announce the launch of a new bilingual web-based work of digital literature today, Bastille Day. In English the work is called The Pleasure of The Coast: A Hydro-graphic Novel. In French, Le plaisir de la côte : une bande dessinée. It’s a story of the western mapping of the South Pacific, rather too big for most phones. Best viewed on a laptop or tablet. It’s available here: http://luckysoap.com/pleasurecoast

The Pleasure of the Coast || J. R. Carpenter, 2019
The Pleasure of the Coast || J. R. Carpenter, 2019

This work was commissioned by the « Mondes, interfaces et environnements à l’ère du numérique » research group at Uinversité Paris 8, supported by Labex Arts-H2H (now merged with ArTeC), in partnership with the Archives Nationales in Paris. It was presented as a work in progress at « Des machines imaginantes médiatrices de fiction ? » 11-13 décembre 2018 à l’Université Paris 8. The (more or less) completed work will officially launch at Electronic Literature Organization Conference & Media Arts Festival 15-17 July 2019 at University Collage Cork in Ireland.

An ocean of thanks to Arnaud Regnauld and Pierre Cassou-Nogues at Université Paris 8; to Françoise Lemaire, Nadine Gastaldi, and Clothilde Roullier at the Archives nationales; and to Robert Sheldon and Stelios Sardelas for ground support in Paris.

larecherche2

For anyone unfamiliar with French naval history, some background information may be useful. In 1785 King Louis XVI appointed Lapérouse to lead an expedition around the world. The aim of this voyage was to complete the discoveries made by Cook on his three earlier voyages to the Pacific.

On the 1st of August 1785, Lapérouse departed Brest with no less than ten scientists aboard. On the 10th of March 1788, Lapérouse departed the English Colony at new South Wales, Australia. He was never seen by European eyes again.

To the English ear, the name Lapérouse sounds a lot like the verb ‘to peruse’ — to scan or browse, to read through with thoroughness, to survey or examine in detail. The dictionary cautions, the word ‘peruse’ can be confused with the verb ‘to pursue’ — to follow in order to overtake, to strive to gain, to seek to attain, to proceed in accordance with a method, to carry on or continue. The English word ‘pursue’ sound a bit like the French word ‘perdu’ — disposable, ruined, lost.

On 25 September 1791, Entrecasteaux departed from Brest in search of the lost Lapérouse. One of his two 500-ton frigates was named La Recherche. On board was a young hydrographer, Charles-François Beautemps-Beaupré (1766-1854), a close contemporary of the English hydrographer Francis Beaufort (1774-1857). Beaufort is perhaps most famous for the wind scale named after him, for measuring the force of the wind. Beautemps is an auspicious name for an ocean-going person, in need of fair winds. Once at sea, however, beau pré are few and far between.

Finished sea charts are designed to be uniform in appearance, as precise as possible. The Archives nationales in Paris holds hundreds of sheets of drafts of charts made by Beautemps-Beaupré aboard La Recherche, and boxes of sketchbooks. A mix of drawing, writing, and numbers. The active marks of a practicing hand. Oak gall ink on rough paper. Liquid lines of inquiry. Drawn onwards by a moving ship.

The title and much of the text in this work borrows from Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text (1973). The word ‘text’ has been replaced with the word ‘coast’. This détourned philosophy is intermingled with excerpts from Beautemps-Beaupré’s Introduction to the Practice of Nautical Surveying and the Construction of Sea-Charts (1808). Artistry, philosophy, hydrography — what’s missing. Ah, yes, fiction. And women. This gap is filled by Suzanne, the first-person narrator of Suzanne et le Pacific. In this early novel by Jean Giraudoux, published in 1921, a young French woman wins a trip around the world. She becomes shipwrecked, and survives alone on a Pacific island in roughly the same region surveyed by Beautemps-Beaupré.

I have appropriated, exaggerated, détourned, corrected, and corrupted both the original French and the English translations of these texts. Who, then, is the author of this work? The author is not dead. The author is multiple: multimedia, multilingual, poly-vocal. “Which body?” Barthes asks, “We have several.” Imagine if Barthes were the bastard love child of Giraudoux but grew up to be a hydrographer instead of a philosopher. Or if Beautemps-Beaupré had secretly written a symbolist novel from the point of view of a female castaway. But for the web…

The Pleasure of the Coast || J. R. Carpenter
The Pleasure of the Coast || J. R. Carpenter, 2019

In French, the term ‘bande dessinée’ refers to the drawn strip. What better term to describe the hydrographic practice of drawing views of the coast from the ship? In English, the term for ‘bande dessinée’ is ‘graphic novel’. I’m calling this work a hydro-graphic novel.

The images in this work are a combination of my own photographs and digitisations generously made for me by the Archives nationales. More information on the text sources can be found within the work itself. Finally, I would note that this work is imperfectly bilingual. All errors in translation, transcription, and interpretation are my own.

http://luckysoap.com/pleasurecoast

This is a Picture of Wind

I’m thrilled to announce the launch of a new, web-based work called This is a Picture of Wind. This work expands upon a series of short texts written in response to the winter storms which battered South West England in early 2014, resulting in catastrophic flooding in Somerset and the destruction of the seawall and rail line at Dawlish in Devon. Following the news in the months after these storms, I was struck by the paradox presented by attempts to evoke through the materiality of language a force such as wind which we can only see indirectly through its affect. I began to explore weather in all its written forms.

Part poetic almanac, part private weather diary, and part live wind report for the South West of England, this work attempts to call attention to climate change by picturing through variations in language the disturbances and sudden absences left in the wake of wind.

This is a Picture of Wind || J. R. Carpenter
This is a Picture of Wind || J. R. Carpenter
This work is designed to be read on phones. It calls on live wind data. A new text will be added for each month of 2018. A text about this work written by Johanna Drucker will be published in March 2018.

This is a Picture of Wind was commissioned by IOTA: DATA, with the support of the Canada Council for the Arts. Initial research for this project was made possible by a Dot Award for Digital Literature, from if:book and the New Media Writing Prize.

Many thanks to Mireille Bourgeois, Chris Meade, Kay Lovelace, Johanna Drucker, Michael Saunby, Peter Dickinson, and Jerome Fletcher for walking into the wind with me.

The Gathering Cloud

The Gathering Cloud is a new hybrid print and web-based work by J. R. Carpenter commissioned by NEoN Digital Arts Festival, which takes place in Dundee, UK, 9-13 November 2016.

This work aims to address the environmental impact of so-called ‘cloud’ computing through the oblique strategy of calling attention to the materiality of the clouds in the sky. Both are commonly perceived to be infinite resources, at once vast and immaterial; both, decidedly, are not.

Fragments from Luke Howard’s classic “Essay on the Modifications of Clouds” (1803) as well as more recent online articles and books on media and the environment are pared down into hyptertextual hendecasyllabic verses. These are situated within surreal animated gif collages composed of images materially appropriated from publicly accessible cloud storage services.

The Gathering Cloud
The Gathering Cloud – a new hybrid print and web-based work by J. R. Carpenter

The cognitive dissonance between the cultural fantasy of cloud storage and the hard facts of its environmental impact is bridged, in part, through the constant evocation of animals: A cumulus cloud weighs one hundred elephants. A USB fish swims through a cloud of cables. Four million cute cat pics are shared each day. A small print iteration of “The Gathering Cloud” shared through gift, trade, mail art, and small press economies further confuses boundaries between physical and digital, scarcity and waste.

The Gathering Cloud
The print iteration of The Gathering Cloud

The Gathering Cloud was commissioned by NEoN Digital Arts Festival, Dundee, UK, 9-13 November 2016. Many thanks to the curators Sarah Cook and Donna Holford-Lovell. Portions of this text were first performed at the Bath Royal Literary and Scientific Institution during the South West Poetry Tour, 1-8 August 2016. Thanks and curses to Annabel Banks for sugesting the hendecasyllabic constraint. Thanks to Kay Lovelace, Rachel McCarthy, Michael Saunby, and the fine folks at the Informatics Lab at the Met Office for tips, tricks, and discussions on code and the weather. And thanks to Jerome Fletcher for everything else.

Further reading: NEoN speaks with JR Carpenter

View the work online here: The Gathering Cloud

Etheric Ocean – an underwater web art audio writing noise work commissioned by Electronic Voice Phenomena

Announcing Etheric Ocean – an underwater web art writing noise work by J. R. Carpenter commissioned by Electronic Voice Pheneomena, an experimental literature and new media project exploring contemporary approaches to sound, voice, technology and writing, brought to you by Mercy and Penned in the Margins.

Etheric Ocean || J. R. Carpenter

Ether is a hypothetical medium – supposed by the ancients to fill the heavens, proposed by scientist to account for the propagation of electromagnetic radiation through space. The notion of ‘ocean’ was once as vague. Aristotle perceived of the world as a small place, bounded by a narrow river. Columbus believed the Atlantic was a much shorter distance across than we now know it to be. Even as early electromagnetic telegraphic and wireless transmissions propagating over, under, and through oceans collapsed distances between ships and shores, they revealed vast new oceans – oceans of static, oceans of noise.

Etheric Ocean is an imprecise survey of sounds both animal and mechanical, and of signs both real and imaginary, of distortions born of the difficulty of communicating through the medium of deep dense dark ocean. Like stations dotting a radio dial, murky diagrams, shifting definitions, appropriated texts, nautical associations, and wonky word plays are strung along a very long, horizontally scrolling browser window. This is a world of inversions. Sounds are deep harbours, or are they depths? Sounds purposefully unfold. Out of its element, uncannily airborne, a flying jellyfish drone wobbles about. Noises are made. Islands are Heard.

For more information about Etheric Ocean, see the Electronic Voice Pheneomena website, and follow @jr_carpneter @_EVP and search for #ethericocean on Twitter.

Many thanks to Nathan Jones, Lisa Robertson, and all the other authors, audio artists, oceanographers, and mad inventors whose words and sounds I borrowed. A link to a fuller list of sources can be found within the work:

Etheric Ocean, J. R. Carpenter, 2014.

#ethericocean

STRUTS – new digital literature commissioned by SFMoMA

STRUTS is a new work of digital literature commissioned for the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. This commission is the latest in a series of new works featured on SFMoMA’s Open Space blog, in an excellent column on digital literature by Brian Stefans called: Third Hand Plays. Since the start of the series in July 2011, works have been commissioned from Daniel C. Howe, Alan Bigelow, joerg piringer, Alison Clifford, Erik Loyer, Benjamin Moreno Ortiz, Jhave, Christine Wilks and Jason Nelson. Forthcoming are new works from David Clark and Brian Stefans. I’m thrilled to keep such fantastic company. STRUTS launched on September 15, 2011. Posts to Third Hand Plays will wrap up at the end of September but I suspect the column with enjoy a long afterlife as an accessible, resource-full and fully engaged set of commentaries, concepts and links and resources of interest to digital literature practitioners and newcomers alike.

STRUTS || J. R. Carpenter

STRUTS is an algorithmic collage created from a collection of fragments of facts and fictions pertaining to a place and its people, history, geography and storm events. Narrative resonates in the spaces between the texts horizontally scrolling across the screen, the flickering updating of monthly tide gauge averages, the occasional appearance of live weather weather warnings pulled in by RSS feed and the animated set of photographs of the ends of the struts that support the seawall that protects the foreshore in front of Linda Rae Dornan’s cottage from the rising tides of the Northumberland Strait. The photographs were taken on May 23, 2011 the second day of a five-week stint as Open Studio Artist in Residence at Struts Gallery and Faucet Media Lab, Sackville, New Brunswick, Canada, May 22 – June 26, 2011.

STRUTS. STRUCTURAL MEMBERS, AS IN TRUSSES, PRIMARILY INTENDED TO RESIST LONGITUDINAL COMPRESSION. EMBANKMENTS MEANT TO PREVENT EROSION OF SHORELINES. BRACE OR SUPPORT BY MEANS OF STRUTS OR SPURS. SPURS. OBLIQUE REINFORCING PROPS OR STAYS OF TIMBER OR MASONRY. ON THE SPUR OF THE MOMENT. ON IMPULSE. SPURS TO ACTION. STRUTS. WALKS WITH HEAD ERECT AND CHEST THROWN OUT, AS IF EXPECTING TO IMPRESS OBSERVERS. WITH PROUD BEARING. PARADES, FLOURISHES. STRUTS AND SWAGGERS. STRUTS GALLERY. SUPPORTS BY MEANS OF STRUTS. STRUCTURAL MEMBERS SPUR STRUTS TO ART ACTION. WALKS WITH HEAD ERECT ALONG LONGITUDINAL EMBANKMENTS. SEAWALLS BRACED BY SPURS. STAYS. PREVENT EROSION. OF MOMENTS. OBLIQUELY.

[an excerpt from STRUTS, by J. R. Carpenter, commissioned for SFMoMA, launched September 15, 2011.]

<< 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
. . . . .

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 HeatSaint-Urbain Street Heat

. . . . .