lapsus linguae

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.
. . . . .

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.

The Three Wicked Witches of JPL

Feeling the Love, and the dancehall, from Mama Fatou

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

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
. . . . .

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/
. . . . .

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.

. . . . .

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”

. . . . .

Responsa Literature: partial replies to scattered letters
http://luckysoap.com/responsa/

Introduction: confessions of an avid letter writer

Why is it that everyone I know lives in New York?

Part I: Writing is Hard

“Irene left a note on his kitchen table. The spelling was weak and Irene, examining her note, marvelled at how difficult writing things down was compared to saying them. Saying something was as easy as laughing; writing caused you grief, as though you were mourning somebody who had abandoned you too soon.”
Rose Tremaine, Sacred Country

Part II: Writing from Exile

“Is the place any token of the author?”
“indicat auctorem locus?”
Ovid, EX PONTO, I. VII.

Part III: Responsa

“What conditions precipitate the writing of a letter? A physical distance separates the writer from the reader and we write to cover that distance. Wherever we are, when we write, we write from a local position. Time passes between the writing of the letter and the reading of it; more time passes between the reading and the reply. ‘Between the too warm flesh of the literal event and the cold skin of the concept runs meaning.’ [Derrida] From his exile at the edge of the Empire, Ovid writes: ‘“In so long a time why has not they hand done its duty and completed even a few lines?’ The reply embodies another question. ‘Is not the writing of the question, by it’s decision, by its resolution, the beginning of repose and response?’ [Derrida]“
J. R. Carpenter, Responsa

Part IV: Network Communication

Me: Hey, how come this anonmous ftp thing doesn’t work?

Tech: You spelled anonymous wrong.

Me: Again.

Me: I heard about this thing called pine for reading email.
Do you know about that?

Tech: Yeah.

Me: Well, how do I get it?

Tech: Pine is for weenies.

Me: I’m a weenie.

Tech: vi editor rules.

Me: I want pine.

an escerpt from the essay:
“A brief history of the Internet as I know it so far”
J. R. Carpenter 2003.

Part V: Location, Location, Location

When we write, we write from a local position.

“My dear Herr Kappus: I have left a letter of yours long unanswered, not that I had forgotten it – on the contrary: it was of the kind that one reads again when one finds it among other letters, and I recognized you in it as if you were close at hand. It was the letter of May 2nd, and you doubtless remember it. When I read it, as I do now, in the great stillness of this faraway place, your beautiful concern for life moves me even more than I experienced it in Paris, where everything has a different ring and dies away by reason of the monstrous noise that makes all things tremble. Here, where a vast countryside is around me, over which the winds come in from the seas, here I feel that there is nowhere a human being who can answer you those question and feelings which have a life of their own within their depths; for even the best men go astray with words, where these are to express something very gentle and almost unutterable.”
Rainer Maria Rilke, written from ‘Temporarily at Worpswede near Bremen, July 16th, 1903. Letters to a Young Poet

Part VI: Optimism

“Router level Interconnectivity of the Internet looks like a giant, blood-shot eyeball.” from “Digital Crustaceans v.0.2: Homesteading on the Web” and art review by J. R. Carpenter of a show
Ingrid Bachmann at Gallery Articule, Montréal, Québec, April 4 – May 4 2003.

“Pookie” – a biological, digital, quasi-fictional manifestation of Ingrid Bachmann’s imagination – explores a fascinating corner of the web at www.digitalhermit.ca

In Closing:

“Nothing is more occult than the way letters, under the auspices of unimaginable carriers, circulate through the weird mess of civil wars; but whenever, owing to that mess, there was some break in our correspondence, Tamara would act as if she ranked deliveries with ordinary natural phenomena such as the weather or tides, which human affairs could not affect, and she would accuse me of not answering her, when if fact I did nothing by write to her and think of her during those months – despite my many betrayals.”
Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory

Related Links:

Nomad Web: Sleeping beauty awakes, by Ingrid Bachmann
http://www.research.umbc.edu/~lmoren/nomadweb.htm

the electronic version of The Virtual Community, by Howard Rheingold
http://www.rheingold.com/vc/book/intro.html

A Vernacular Web, by Olia Lialina
http://art.teleportacia.org/observation/vernacular/

A little Talk About Reproduction, by J. R. Carpenter
http://luckysoap.com/reproduction/

All this with pictures:
http://luckysoap.com/responsa/

. . . . .

Responsa Literature: partial replies to scattered letters
J. R. Carpenter
Abstract: The term “responsa literature” refers to all written rulings made by rabbis under Jewish law, in response to questions submitted to them in writing, throughout the post-Talmudic period. Initially, the great distances that separated Diaspora Jewry from the scholars of Babylon necessitated this type of question and response law making. Montréal poet Anne Carson has written: “People in exile write so many letters.” She speaks of Ovid who, nightly, “puts on sadness like a garment and goes on writing.” I was, in effect, born in exile. A first generation Canadian, I spent much of my early life writing letters to my grandmother, trying to piece together a story for her of who I was and to elicit from her some idea of where I had come from. She rarely wrote back. When she died I found that she had saved my letters, stuffed in no apparent order, into books and piles and drawers. I have since become fascinated with collections of letters. In this paper, I will draw on letters, literature and historical sources to discuss ways in which contemporary forms of diaspora, as may result from divorce, emigration, or economic migration, alter family narratives. I will explore some of the ways in which media and communication technologies have forever altered the responsa form. Letter writing has re-emerged, in the form of email. Does the immediacy of this question and response mode of communicating bring us any closer to piecing together an idea of who we are and where we come from?

Presentation Friday May 6, 2005
Call Session 2, 5 – 6:30
Room 56-167, MIT
. . . . .

The fourth Media in Transition conference explored storytelling as a cultural practice, a social and political activity as well as an art form.
May 6-8, 2005 at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Cambridge, MA, USA
http://web.mit.edu/comm-forum/mit4/
. . . . .