lapsus linguae

A Book-ish Novel: Transmediation in Words the Dog Knows at MiT6, April 24, 2009

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 IRQ

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

. . . . .

Interrupt Festival at Brown – October 17-19, 2008

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.
. . . . .

Visionary Landscapes, Vancouver WA

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
. . . . .

MiT5 Endnotes

MiT5 whizzed by in a drizzly blur. As one panellist noted: The weather in New England is a lot like the weather in Old England. Water logged lab rats, we scurried through MIT’s campus maze, almost but not quite able to get where we were going without going outside. The conference theme: “creativity, ownership and collaboration in the digital age.” There was less talk of ownership than of appropriation. Sadly no amount of creativity or collaboration could rid the digital age of rain.

Speaking of ownership, last month I lost my travel umbrella. Last week I replaced it with a used and improved one, liberated from the Lost and Found of the bar where a friend works. This semi-ill-gotten umbrella dripping at my feet, I squirmed uneasily through more than one academic paper cavalierly condoning remix culture’s five-fingered appropriation of other people’s images texts structures and ideas. The Colbert report got high marks for opening itself up to user editing. Nice advertising for Colbert. Hip-hop was idealized for it’s sampling and remixing of culture. Great for the producers, great for the moguls, but not so hot if you’re an up and comer being told what to sample so it sells, or if you’re an indi-artist getting your beats ripped, or if you’re a consumer tired of the radio play list mix. MiT5 did not seem to be critical of what was being sampled. No place to say: no more songs about guns, bitches and hos.

Me: What nobody’s talking about here is money. Academic: Oh, there are plenty of other environments to talk about money in. Give me a break. Though this view appeared to be the prevalent one, I don’t buy it (no pun intended). I worked in the software industry for so long, my critique is tinged with scepticism. After sifting through executive staff rhetoric, world wide sales projection optimism and the codified concerns of corporate lawyers, the stated themes of MiT5 sounded naïve at times, trite even, when divorced from any economic consideration.

There are economics at play in who gets to attend a conference. Not every panellist was an academic and not every academic was staying in a hotel paid for by his university. One professor told me that as an educator he felt he had to stay to hear that evening’s plenary, but as a human being he couldn’t bear it, and besides, he had a three-hour drive home. Another didn’t have his laptop with him because he was staying at a youth hostel. Instead he spent his evenings reading poetry and walking the streets of Cambridge. Nice. Yet another professor was staying in Allston. Actually, he was a research fellow. But still. He had my respect. Allston, that’s keeping it real.

I remain impressed by and grateful to MIT for keeping the Media in Transition conference series free of charge and open to an incredibly broad spectrum of presenters. That can’t be easy. I was especially pleased to see how many more artists presented at MiT5 than at MiT4. I wish I’d made it to more presentations. 25 people speak at once. Far too often there are four people to a panel. If even one paper runs long – the height of unprofessional rudeness, but sadly the norm – the rest get squeezed, leaving no time for discussion.

Like most of the artists I spoke to, the only way I could afford to attend this conference was by taking the Greyhound down and staying with a friend. At the end of each day, the #1 Bus shuttled me from the pillars and porticos of MIT to cracked-out Roxbury, where my friend Lana lives in a loft next door to a boarded up drug store. She says people used to smoke crack underneath the DRUGS sign, until someone stole the sign. They still smoke crack there but now it’s less ironic.

One morning, a woman with drug-rotten teeth tried to get me to take her kids on the bus for her, to save her the fare. Just picture me and two crack babies busting in on some gamer theory session broadcast live on Second Life.

Sometimes real life, Second Life and conference life just don’t synch up. I missed some early sessions because my hostess doesn’t sleep. One night we stayed up late rewriting all her artist’s statements – not exactly collaboration, but after all the conference talk about authorship and overwiting, I felt it my duty as a guest to earn my keep by translating her garbled visual art speak into actual English. Another night we stayed up late making a movie. She tried to hold the camera steady, tried not to laugh, while I told a long story about how I happened to have two dramatically different maps in my notebook, drawn by two dramatically different girls, both giving directions to a notorious party spot in Banff known as The House of Sin.

The notebook as interface, the non-linear story as tangent engine. Just like Entre Ville, we realized in the morning. http://luckysoap.com/entreville

I like conferences, despite their occasionally glaring disconnection from real life. And I like real life, despite its occasionally disheartening disconnection from how life ought to work in theory. I especially like the occasional blurring of the two. Most of the breakout sessions were held in classrooms. Artists and academics projected web and PowerPoint presentations onto white screens bracketed by black blackboards covered with mathematical equations surely few if any of us could understand. Conference attendees mingled with students in the hall. I got a student discount on lunch one day!

In the Bartos Media Lab audience members watched the conference unfolding in real-time on stage. Some doubled up on the real by following along on their laptops the plenary sessions broadcast live on Second Life. The sound of typing surged whenever something clever was said. Someone stepped up to the mike to comment on our cultural condition of constant divided attention. A flurry of typing followed. A rainfall of fingers keyboard tapping, I wrote in my notebook.

It rained all weekend, typing and the wet stuff. Thanks MIT, for mixing up art and academics, theory and practice, for offering up so much information to such a broad audience in such a short period of time. A lot to soak up. And only time for tip of the iceburg comments here. I’ll be sorting though my notes for a long time.
. . . . .

Post-Inter-Hyper-Active

Back in Montreal. After a week of wall to wall presentations, performances, pitches and heated discussions in the chill windowlessness of the RICE Television Studio.

Saw every imaginable kind of work (and some unimaginable kinds of work) that works on screens of every size from 800 x 640 to HD to mobile phone. Sold photocopied mini-books to the most digital people. Got pre-cursive with Daniel Canty. And navigated all kinds of interactions, digital and social and nature-related. Hiked the Hoodo trail without the aide of GPS. Bought a touque and stumbled through a string of glittering cold nights. Mingling of new friends and old at sunset BBQs by glacier-fed rivers (two in total), dance parities (impromptu or otherwise), with djs (Mama Fatou or otherwise), live cinema performance from SOLU (Finland via Barcelona), Notsosimpleton Flash art whisked from the wall, Props Pub shenanigans, and whisky in the Leighton Studios. Made it to breakfast all of once, which is one time more than in all of the seven weeks of Babel Babble Rabble, and the construction site outside Lloyd Hall 119 brought new meaning to The Loudest Room.

Clutching a bundle of business cards collected from a cross-country cross-section of business and art world sheer raw talent, and a DVD from the super solid Randy Knott, I left the high sky and hay fever sun sometime yesterday afternoon, in a muddle of loose-end packing, all-at-once good-byes and off campus brunching. Drove to Calgary in a carful (a word like careful, but moving faster down the highway) of some of the best people I know, who I was loath to leave, my dear friends: Girl at Work Sandra Dametto, that Monkey Michael Boyce and Alexis O’Hara of Filthy Lies and movie star eyes. And brand new friend the mad and mighty Clauda, whose name probably isn’t spelled that way at all. Flew through a few time-zones with the irrepressible Matt Donnelly for entertainment. Happy to return to rainy Montreal late last night. Stepped out of the mountains into the heat and humid and wet. And slept, and slept, and slept well for the first time in a week.

photo by alexis o'hara
The Three Wicked Witches of JPL

photo by alexis o'hara
Feeling the Love, and the dancehall, from Mama Fatou

[both photos from the kooky kamera of Alexis O’Hara]
. . . . .

Interactive Active

It’s strange and wonderful to be back at Banff so soon after the Babel Babble Rabble residency. So many memories of so many people in so many unexpected places. I’m am eternally grateful to Emily Page and the BNMI for this opportunity. There are amazing people presenting and performing all day and night and I have to shake my head sometimes to make sure I’m not dreaming, but too hard because a) I don’t want any of this stuff I’m learning to fall out, and b) I’m extremely hung over.

Here are some Interactive Screen and other BNMI URLs:

The Banff new Media Institute
http://www.banffcentre.ca/bnmi/

Interactive Screen O.6 Wiki (scroll to bottom for ongoing list of URLs referenced in the conference)
http://iascreen06.wikispaces.com/

Anne Galloway’s very up-to-date blog on the event
http://www.purselipsquarejaw.org/

PRE-CURSOR (my presentation)
http://luckysoap.com/is06/

photo by SOLU: http://www.solu.org
. . . . .

PRE-CURSOR

It’s great to be back at Banff. It feels like I never left, only managed to not eat at the dining hall for a few weeks. Interactive Screen 0.6 – Media: Margins: Migrations is well underway. Saturday evening we meeted and greeted in the bracing mountain air. So many amazing people here. Yesterday was our first full day of think tanking. Yesterday evening I went into town to buy a touque because it’s so cold here at night. I presented this AM and am now free to listen, learn and roam. More information on the presentation I just gave and on the conference/think tank in general: http://www.luckysoap.com/is06/
. . . . .

IS 0.6 Abstract

Interactive Screen 0.6 is fast-approaching. The agenda is firming up and abstracts will soon become less so. I present on Monday, August 14, 2006 at 10AM along with Vancouver/New York based artist Kate Armstrong in a session called Creative Commons: Art, Activism, and the Database. Here’s the abstract I sent in moments before yesterday’s deadline:

Pre-Cursor: A discussion of political and pragmatic aspects of independent production, online publication, fabricating fiction and recycling code. J. R. Carpenter will chase narrative threads across media and trace technological continuities between her hypertext fictions and their precursive forms, which include: the book, the zine, the lab report, the slide show, the guide book, the bulletin board and graffiti.

Sound abstract? Here are some specific examples:

The Zine: Fishes & Flying Things

In 1995 I tried to start making zines with a computer instead of a photocopier and wound up making my first website instead. I still make zines with a photocopier.

The Slide Show: Send More Than Words… EVERYBODY LOVES PICTURES

In 2003 I found this sequence of captioned photos that my uncle took and sent to my grandmother 40 years ago and the forgot about. A borrowed slide-show script brought them back to life.

The Lab Report: The Cape

The images, diagrams and maps in The Cape are culled from a hard copy of an Environmental Geologic Guide to Cape Cod National Seashore published in 1979, which happens to be when the story is set.

The Guide Book: How I Loved the Broken Things of Rome

The cluttered interface of How I Loved the Broken Things of Rome is inspired by the pedagogical style of the modern guide book and a 500 year history of travel writing.

Graffiti: Entre Ville

Entre Ville is an amalgam of the graffiti tags, gardens, garbage and gossip of my back alleyway… You can’t make this stuff up.

. . . . .

Interactive Screen

By my calculations I’ve yet to be back from Banff for as long as I was away at Banff for the Babel, Babble, Rabble: On Language and Art residency. And now, thanks to some strange twists of fate, some hustle, and some just plain good fortune, The Banff New Media Institute has invited me to return to participate as a Senior Artist in Interactive Screen, August 13-18, 2006.

Interactive Screen is a new media development think tank now in its 11th year, which is long, in Internet years. Canadian and international new media types converge at Banff each summer to ponder, study, workshop, present, perform, mentor, share, discuss, collaborate and reflect on the current state of new media art and the shape of things to come.

A think tank is not a think tank without a subtitle. This year’s is: Interactive Screen – Margins: Media: Migrations. “Margins can be taken to mean ‘profit.’ They also point the way to the ‘outside’. These terms provide us with a means to turn and twist the meaning of media. Media forms have the power to migrate through the boundaries that define our experience – turning them inside out, and outside in. At the interface, it becomes possible to make ‘profit’ share in the values that we choose to make ours.”

For more official-sounding writing like this please visit the official-looking website: http://www.banffcentre.ca/bnmi/programs/interactive_screen06/

And a think tank needs to be stocked with every size fish. As an independent producer of mostly free art, I fall within the “outside” meaning of “margin” rather than the “profit” meaning. I am extremely grateful to BNMI and the Banff Centre for inviting me anyway, and for paying my airfare, because otherwise I would never in a million years be able to attend, benefit from, or contribute to such an awesome event.

One of the things I was reminded of during the Babel Babble Residency at Banff is that I make really low tech high tech art, and I persist in doing this for some pretty stubborn yet specific reasons. So at Interactive Screen I’ll attempt to address their general theme: High Tech/Low Tech/New Tech/No Tech: innovating, recycling and sharing technologies in a culture of wealth and waste. I’ll talk about artists and independent orginizations and producers near and dear to my heart; indi-publishing and zine culture; how and why I re-use and recycle found images, found texts, and found code; and how I’ve used the web to remain independent and sometimes circumvent certain cumbersome institutions.

I’ll post more as I sort through the ideas and issues of this theme. In the meantime, here are some of my other Internet Writings on related themes:

“Responsa Literature: Partial Replies to Scattered Questions”
“Ingrid Bachmann: Digital Crustaceans v.0.2: Homesteading on the Web”
“A brief history of the Internet as I know it so far”
“A Little Talk about Reproduction”

. . . . .