lapsus linguae

I am gearing up to present a paper on my most recent work of electronic literature – CityFish – at the OLE Officinia di Letteratura Electtronica Festival / Conference taking place in Naples 20-21 January 2011. The very full program boasts an impressive roster of speakers. I am looking forward to seeing old friends and new work. I especially love how, in a sea of big names and long conference paper titles written in Italian, Spanish, French and English, shot through with colons, semi-colons, dashes and all manner of accentuation, my title is written just like this – “CityFish” – one word, written in its own made-up language, buoyed by quotation marks, impossible to translate, and anyway, there is no reason to. The rest of the paper will be translated, however. All of the papers presented at OLE Officinia di Letteratura Electtronica will appear in Italian translation in a book published by Feltrinelli in Italy. I have the greatest of sympathy for the translators of this odd-ball essay about this quirky work about this talking dead fish.

CityFish is a hybrid word, title of a hybrid work, tale of a hybrid creature. A big fish story swallowing a small tale’s tail. A rhizome, a fable, an urban legend. Like an old wives’ tale, it’s long been told but is never quite finished. In its latest incarnation, CityFish is a web-based hypermedia panoramic narrative. Completed in November 2010, with the support of a new media creation grant from the Canada Council for the Arts, CityFish was presented in Beta at Archive & Innovate, The 4th International Conference & Festival of the Electronic Literature Organization, at Brown University, in Providence, Rhode Island, USA, June 3-6, 2010. CityFish was also presented as a work-in-progress at Interventions: Literary Practice at the Edge: A Gathering, at The Banff Centre, in Banff, Alberta, Canada, February 18, 2010. The Coney Island videos were shot on location in 2005 and edited during the Babel Babble Rabble: On Language and Art thematic residency at The Banff Centre in 2006. A very, very, very early web-based iteration of CityFish was presented in an exhibition called IßWAS, at the Bavarian American Hotel in Nuremberg, Germany, July 1998. That iteration incorporated a series of photographs shot on 35mm film in Chinatown, Toronto, circa 1996; a line drawing of a fish with a tall building for a tail, drawn at around the same time; and a very short story of the same name written in 1995 from the first-person point of view of a fish.

CityFish is a simple story told by a simple fish, most unhappy about being caught, killed and offered up for sale, piled unceremoniously in a heap on a sidewalk fishmonger’s stall on a hot summer day, on a narrow, crowded street in Chinatown, New York City. “What a fish, once was I,” the fish reminisces. “A fish’s fish, with fish’s thoughts inside my head.” Fish are far from us. Their stories breathe with gills, swim in deep cold water and are never still. They cannot help but seem strange to us. As Henry David Thoreau noted in Cape Cod, a book named after a piece of land named after a fish:

All that is told of the sea has a fabulous sound to an inhabitant of the land, and all its products have a certain fabulous quality, as if they belonged to another planet, from sea-weed to a sailor’s yarn, or a fish-story. In this element the animal and vegetable kingdoms meet and are strangely mingled.

CityFish will be exhibited at PAN Palazzo Arti Napoli for a month after OLE Officinia di Letteratura Electtronica, and may be viewed anytime from anywhere online here: http://luckysoap.com/cityfish

PAN Palazzo Arti Napoli
via dei mille 60, napoli
tel. +39.081.7958604-05
fax. +39.081.7958660
info@palazzoartinapoli.net
www.palazzoartinapoli.net

An article about OLE Officinia di Letteratura Electtronica appeared in the Italian newspaper Il Corriere della Sera 8 January 2011: Arriva la letteratura elettronica

Sunday 31st October 2010, 7.30 pm, the third International Conference on Interactive Digital Storytelling and New Media Scotland will present an evening of language in digital performance with works by Martin John Callanan, J.R. Carpenter, Jerome Fletcher, Donna Leishman, Maria Mencia, Netwurker Mez, Stanza and Christine Wilks. The performance event will be held on Halloween. There will be a haunted theme.

48 hours | Inspace… no one can hear you scream.

Sunday 31st October 2010, 7.30 for 8pm.

Inspace, 1 Crichton Street, Edinburgh EH8 9AB

ICIDS Conference Program

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.

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.

In(ter)ventions — Literary Practice At The Edge: A Gathering is a conference unlike any held previously in Canada. Over the course of four days, thirty six forward-thinking literary artists will create a context for the demonstration and discussion of cutting-edge literary practice. In a mixture of panels, papers, readings, performances, and more, participants will explore digital literature, interactivity, collaboration, cross-disciplinary work, formal innovation, “uncreative” writing, new modes of dissemination, and literary pedagogy.

Within the rapidly changing landscape of literary practice and dissemination, technology has rocketed forward, putting more power into the hands of writers and other artists. New literary modes have appeared and continue to develop, and the ability to share information rapidly across disciplines has resulted in exciting and challenging cross-pollination. In(ter)ventions will explore the edges of literature, where technology, innovation, and literary practice meet.

This conference is open to writers, new media artists, students, critics, educators, and others who want to contribute to, or listen in on, the conversation taking place with regards to innovative modes of literature. Participants will come away from this cutting-edge conference with a better understanding of the future of literary practice and inspiration to further explore emerging trends in the discipline.

In(ter)ventions: Literary Practice At The Edge: A Gathering
The Banff Centre, Banff, Alberta, Canada
February 18, 2010 – February 21, 2010

Director: Steven Ross Smith
Presenters: Charles Bernstein, Jen Bervin, Christian Bök, J.R. Carpenter, Maria Damon, Ram Devineni, Craig Dworkin, Al Filreis, Christopher Funkhouser, Kenneth Goldsmith, D. Kimm, Larissa Lai, Daphne Marlatt, Nick Montfort, Erin Moure, Lance Olsen, Stephen Osborne, Marjorie Perloff, Kate Pullinger, Stephanie Strickland, Steve Tomasula, Fred Wah

Further information || Agenda (PDF)
. . . . .

J. R. Carpenter will present Tributaries & Text-Fed Streams: A Feed-Reading of The Capilano Review at The Network as a Space and Medium for Collaborative Interdisciplinary Art Practice in Bergen, Norway, November 8-10, 2009.

This conference will focus on the increasing use of the network as a space and medium for collaborative interdisciplinary art practices including electronic literature and other network based art forms. Researchers will present papers exploring new network-based creative practices that involve the cooperation of small to large-scale groups of writers, artists, performers, and programmers to create online projects that defy simple generic definitions and disciplinary boundaries. Topics might include online collective narratives, durational performances, evolving networked publication models, creative commons and open source art, remixes, and mashups. The seminar will be organized by the LLE Digital Culture group and will invite contributions from about 20 international researchers and artists. In addition to the scholarly seminar Nov. 9th and 10th at the University of Bergen, two evening programs will take place Nov. 8th and 9th at Landmark Café at Bergen Kunsthall, to showcase innovative work and will be open to the public.

Tributaries & Text-Fed Streams: A Feed-Reading of The Capilano Review explores 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. In February 2007 The Capilano Review, a literary journal based in North Vancouver, published an issue dedicated to new writing and new technologies. 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 Paterson and Darren Wershler-Henry. Tributaries & Text-fed Streams: A Feed-Reading of The Capilano Review is a personal, experimental and playful rereading of and response to these essays by Montreal-based writer and web artist J.R. Carpenter, commissioned by The Capilano Review and curated by Kate Armstrong.

. . . . .

Next week I will present in absentia at the 5th edition of the E-Poetry Festival, which will take place in Barcelona May 24th-27, 2009. Artistic and academic events will take place at key Barcelona venues such as the the University of Barcelona, the Barcelona Center for Contemporary Culture (CCCB) and the Caixaforum, providing authors the opportunity to present their works to a public curious about new poetry and artistic trends employing technology and communication during the Setmana de la Poesia.

The event is organized by UOC’s research group Hermeneia, with the collaboration of Electronic Poetry Center (University of Buffalo) and the Laboratoire Paragraph (Univ. Paris VIII). Keynote speakers will include Roberto Simanowski (Brown University) and Jean Clément (Université Paris 8).

E-Poetry is an international biennial conference and festival of digital poetry. It is the most significant digital literary gathering in the field, bringing together an impressive roster of Electronic Literature’s most influential practitioners from around the world. Authors and researchers will present the latest research and the newest, most important works of electronic literature will be presented. Presenting at E-Poetry will bring my work to the attention of an influential international audience of critics, academics, practitioners and the public.

For more information or to register, please visit: http://www.e-poetry2009.com/

in absentia is a web-based project that uses fiction, digital images, historical maps HTML, javascript and the Google Maps API to address issues of gentrification and its erasures in the Mile End neighbourhood of Montreal. The result is an interactive non-linear narrative map of interconnected “postcard” stories written from the point of view of former tenants of Mile End. In recent years many long-time low-income immigrant and elderly neighbours have been forced out of their homes by economic decisions made in their absence. The neighbourhood is haunted now, with their stories. Our stories. My building was sold during the production of in absentia. Faced with imminent eviction I began to write as if I was no longer here, about a Mile End that is no longer here. The Mile End depicted in in absentia is a slightly fantastical world, a shared memory of the neighbourhood as it never really was but as it could have been. The sterile and slightly sinister “developer’s-eye-view” of the neighbourhood offered by Google Maps satellite imaging has been populated with stories, interrupted with silhouette voids, intimate traces of the sudden disappearances of characters (fictional or otherwise) from the places (real or imagined) where they once lived.

At E-Poetry I will present the piece by giving a brief contextual overview of the work and then read aloud from a number of the stories contained in the work.
. . . . .

I will be presenting a paper called “A Book-ish Novel: Transmediation in Words the Dog Knows” at MiT6: Stone and Papyrus, Storage and Transmission, an international conference taking place at MIT April 23-27, 2009. In this paper I will trace the paths that select portions of my first novel, Words the Dog Knows, have traveled: from ear to eye to pen to paper to computer to printer to publisher to video to audio to web to eye to ear and back to pen again, with the novel’s precursive zines and web-based iterations as visual aides.

J. R. Carpenter, A Book-ish Novel: Transmediation in Words the Dog Knows
Friday, April 24, 2009, 2:30-4 room 66-168 (campus map).

MiT6: Stone and Papyrus, Storage and Transmission, MIT April 23-27, 2009.

In his seminal essay “The Bias of Communication” Harold Innis distinguishes between time-based and space-based media. Time-based media such as stone or clay, Innis agues, can be seen as durable, while space-based media such as paper or papyrus can be understood as portable, more fragile than stone but more powerful because capable of transmission, diffusion, connections across space.

Speculating on this distinction, Innis develops an account of civilization grounded in the ways in which media forms shape trade, religion, government, economic and social structures, and the arts. Our current era of prolonged and profound transition is surely as media-driven as the historical cultures Innis describes.

His division between the durable and the portable is perhaps problematic in the age of the computer, but similar tensions define our contemporary situation. Digital communications have increased exponentially the speed with which information circulates. Moore’s Law continues to hold, and with it a doubling of memory capacity every two years; we are poised to reach transmission speeds of 100 terabits per second, or something akin to transmitting the entire printed contents of the Library of Congress in under five seconds.

Such developments are simultaneously exhilarating and terrifying. They profoundly challenge efforts to maintain access to the vast printed and audio-visual inheritance of analog culture as well as efforts to understand and preserve the immense, enlarging universe of text, image and sound available in cyberspace. What are the implications of these trends for historians who seek to understand the place of media in our own culture?

What challenges confront librarians and archivists who must supervise the migration of print culture to digital formats and who must also find ways to preserve and catalogue the vast and increasing range of words and images generated by new technologies? How are shifts in distribution and circulation affecting the stories we tell, the art we produce, the social structures and policies we construct?

What are the implications of this tension between storage and transmission for education, for individual and national identities, for notions of what is public and what is private?

The first Media in Transition conference was held in 1999 and marked the launch of the MIT graduate program in Comparative Media Studies. Since then, four bi-annual conferences have been held, co-sponsored by CMS and the MIT Communications Forum, with each new conference generating a more internationally diverse audience than its predecessor.

I have presented at two previous Media in Transition conferences:

MiT4: the work of stories (2005)

MiT5: creativity, ownership and collaboration in the digital age (2007)
. . . . .

Interrupt is a festival celebrating writing and performance in digital media in Providence, Rhode Island, Friday October 17th – Sunday the 19th. Events are hosted by Brown University and Rhode Island School of Design. Participating artists will share work that in some way addresses the theme of the festival: Interrupt.

Why “Interrupt”? In computing, a hardware interrupt request or IRQ is used to prioritize the execution of certain processes over others. It is a command sent to the processor to get its attention, signaling the need to initiate a new operation. A series of IRQ roundtables will promote the maximum possible open discussion amongst all those attending. There will be a number of prominent, named critics, theorists, and artists who will have been asked to speak, but they will not give papers or even ‘panel-style’ presentations. Instead they will prepare an IRQ. I have been asked to speak. Being invited to interrupt is a rare opportunity. Here is my IRQ:

When I first heard the theme of the Interrupt festival I thought: Perfect! I’m a champion interrupter; everyone says so.

One of my earliest memories is of my mother telling me to stop interrupting. I remember standing next to her, waiting for it to be my turn to speak. There was never a break in the conversation. At first I thought this was because my mother was loquacious, from the Latin: loqu, to speak. But interlocution is speech between two or more persons, I reasoned. Surely, eventually, my turn would come.

An interlocutor is someone who takes part in a conversation. An interloper, in my experience, is someone who would like to take part in a conversation but who is unable to interpret the complex laws of interlocution.

Gradually I realized that my mother’s imperative that I stop interrupting arose from her disavowal of the interruption inherent in interlocution. The word “interlocution” is the past participle of interloqu.

inter + loqu = to interrupt + to speak.

My mother’s preferred modus loqui was the soliloquy.

solus + loqu = alone + to speak.

It was never going to be my turn to speak. So I learned to write instead.

My most recent electronic literature project, in absentia, hacks the Google Maps API to interrupt a sterile satellite view of my neighbourhood with short stories of displacement written from multiple points of view, by multiple authors, in multiple languages. In recent years many of my long-time, low-income neighbours have been forced out by gentrification. The neighbourhood is haunted now, with their stories. Our stories. Our building is for sale; we may be next. Faced with imminent eviction, and once again excluded from the official conversation, my only recourse is to interrupt. With silhouette voids, cryptic signage and quick glimpses. Some one has to say something. These small details of our daily lives are not visible from space and are all too soon to be erased.

Here is one excerpt from in absentia:

Our building is for sale. Our landlord has been making us crazy with renovations that we don’t want, superficial fixes that surely won’t fool anyone. Last weekend he decided he didn’t need to warn us in advance that he’d be replacing the front steps to our second-floor apartment because, technically, the repairs weren’t inside our apartment. Likewise, this week he didn’t warn us that he’d be painting the new steps, and the cast-iron fence out front, and all day we were trapped inside while the rust-proof-paint fumes wafted through our rooms. Yesterday morning he over-heard me calling him a fucking moron. I’m warning you, he shook his fist like a sitcom villain. This morning he affixed a NO BIKES sign to the freshly painted front fence in the exact same spot where I’ve been locking my bike for the past ten years. I guess he means business. I guess this means war.
J. R. Carpenter || in absentia

. . . . .

Early next week I’ll interrupt my Words the Dog Knows book tour before it’s even started by heading down to Providence, Rhode Island to participate in Interrupt at Brown.

Interrupt is a festival celebrating writing and performance in digital media, busting onto the scene in Providence from Friday October 17th through Sunday the 19th. Events are hosted by Brown University and Rhode Island School of Design. The festival is continuing in the tradition of Brown’s E-Fest, but is expanding/augmenting it, and also streamlining into Pixilerations.

Participating artists will share work that in some way addresses the theme of the festival: Interrupt. In computing, an interrupt is a command sent to the processor to get its attention, and indicates a need for change. We understand “interruption” as a useful metaphor for imagining the role of digital arts practices in contemporary society. The festival is being organized with the aim of showcasing arts practices hybridized not only by digital mediation, but by a spectrum of cultural practices including electronic poetry, information design, net art, video art, interactive music, and performance art.

On Friday October 17th at 1:30 pm in the McCormack Family Theatre, I’ll present in absentia – an electronic literature project that hacks the Google Maps API to haunt the Mile End neighbourhood of Montreal with postcard stories to and from tenants (past or present, fictional or otherwise) who have been effected by gentrification and it’s erasures.

On Friday October 17th at 4:30 pm in the McCormack Family Theatre, I’ll be one of four named speakers in an IRQ ROUNDTABLE. Here, in theory, is how the IRQ ROUNDTABLE sessions will work: At each roundtable session, four or five of the named speakers will have the right – using their IRQ – to interrupt the discussion, at any time, and hold the floor for a maximum of five minutes (no minimum). All attendant-participants will together choose one of the named speakers to either begin the roundtable discussions with an intervention – thus using up their IRQ – or to nominate another speaker to begin. Once a speaker has completed their interruption, discussion is open to all attendant-participants, including IRQs. Discussion will be strictly chaired: all interruptions of all kinds must pass through the CPU. The remaining speakers with IRQs are asked to attend carefully to the discussion and, rather in the manner of an old-school, no-ritual Quaker meeting, listen for the moment when their prepared IRQ would be most beneficial to the discussion processes. A named speaker will begin the roundtable discussions with an intervention, and so use up their IRQ. They will be chosen either by a straw-poll of all attendant-participants or by chance operation. If the chosen IRQ does not wish to begin discussions, they may nominate another IRQ.

Of Interrupt, one of the festival’s organizers, John Cayley, writes:

The Pounding neo-Beat of Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries and their Flash-languaged jazz world; Alan Sondheim’s misdirections of abject ‘second life’ languaging into the avatar dance of Foofwa d’Imobilité; Laetitia Sonami’s alternative controller sculpted music theatre; Eugenio Tisselli’s web-based hacks, cutting and pasting, plugging and hiding gobbets of real life and death into our glossy Facebooks; Marko Niemi coding Concrete for the screen. These are the initial provocations that we will interrupt and ask to interrupt us. Interrupt chooses to present digital art work that is, in some sense, language-driven. While in active cooperation with other disciplines — music, cultural studies, performance — Interrupt’s organization and curation emanates from Brown University’s Literary Arts Program. For some time now we have been confronted with questions of where ‘the literary’ will be found in practices of digital art. Now we ask, “Can we interrupt these practices in ways that will leave us with forms in which the literary can live and die? Can we create events to formally interrupt practices that we already value as art, and allow them to reveal their necessary forms, but do so without harm to new cultures that these practices offer?” We no longer want to bring them to book, but to see whether on not they hold out forms for a book to come.

After Interrupt, I’ll head down to New York City to launch Words the Dog Knows on Thursday, October 23, 2008 at KGB Bar, 85 East 4th Street, 7-9 pm (free). I’ll be joined on stage and possibly interrupted by my dear friends. Karen Russell, Nora Maynard and Corey Frost. For more information on this event, view the KGB Bar Calendar.
. . . . .

After five days in Vancouver BC I headed down to Vancouver WA for Visionary Landscapes: The Electronic Literature Organization Conference 2008. This Vancouver convergence was purely coincidental. It was convenient in so far as I doubt I would have made it to the conference were I not already out west, but visiting two Vancouvers in one trip made for some confusing conversations. For example, when I was going through customs in Vancouver they asked me where I was going: Vancouver, I said.

In Vancouver BC they refer to Vancouver WA as “the other Vancouver.” In Vancouver WA it is difficult not to refer to Vancouver BC as “the real Vancouver.” According to tourist propaganda found in the conference hotel, Vancouver WA was founded 30 years before Vancouver BC. The town has done little with this head start.

There seemed to be an inordinately high number of pawnshops per capita. Beauty parlours too. But when a few of us asked where the grocery store was we were laughed out of town. Literally – out of town. The hotel concierge informed us that the closest grocery store was across the bridge in Portland, Oregon. Picture it: Dutch, a Quebecois, a Norwegian and me, a kid from rural Nova Scotia walking across the state line to buy fruit and granola bars and other provisions to sustain us through the conference’s schedule of impossibly early mornings, late lunches, long days and dinners delayed some nights so late that it almost made more sense to skip ahead to straight up drinking.

Every morning at 7:30AM we were loaded onto two yellow school busses for transportation to the conference site, which was so far from the conference hotel in “downtown” Vancouver that the penalty for missing the school bus was a $25 taxi ride. The Washington State University Vancouver campus is beautiful and well-equipped, but oh so tiny. Or maybe it only appeared to be tiny because Mount Saint Helens loomed so large on the horizon.

On one hand it was kind of exciting to ride in a school bus full of the world’s leading experts in and practitioners of electronic literature. On the other hand, if either of these school buses had been in a horrible traffic accident it would have completely wiped out e.lit as a genre.

Electronic literature is a small but international community. The conference had a family reunion feel to it. We all know each other’s names but many of us had never met in person. I had two works in the Media Arts Show was held in conjunction with the conference: Entre Ville and The Cape. I was a little nervous about performing these works in front of such an august crowd, but afterward a surprising number of people came up and told me they’ve been teaching these works. For some reason it never occurred to me that people whose work I’d been admiring online for years might also be aware of my work.

Oh Internet, once again I under-estimate you.

More information on Visionary Landscapes: Electronic Literature Conference 2008: Visionary Landscapes

There was a write up on the Media Art Show a local paper, The Columbian:
Works of Art A Click Away
. . . . .