lapsus linguae

CityFish to be presented at OLE Officinia di Letteratura Electtronica, exhibited at PAN Palazzo Arti Napoli

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

CityFish

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 and never quite finished. Part classical parable, part children’s picture book, part literary fiction, part collage, part web art, a brand new hypermedia incarnation of CityFish can now be found online at: http://luckysoap.com/cityfish
CityFish || J. R. Carpenter
CityFish is very loosely based Aesop’s Town Mouse Country Mouse fable. Winters, Lynne freezes in Celsius in the fishing village of Brooklyn, Nova Scotia (Canada), a few minutes walk from a white sandy beach. Summers, she suffers her city cousins sweltering in Fahrenheit in Queens, New York (USA). Lynne knows everyone knows it’s supposed to be the other way around. Lynne is a fish out of water. In the country, her knowledge of the city separates her from her school of friends. In the city, her foreignness marks her as exotic. Meanwhile, the real city fish lie in scaly heaps on long ice-packed tables in hot and narrow Chinatown streets.

CityFish represents asynchronous relationships between people, places, perspectives and times through a horizontally scrolling browser window, suggestive of a panorama, a diorama, a horizon line, a skyline, a timeline, a Torah scroll. The panorama and the diorama have traditionally been used in museums and landscape photography to establish hierarchies of value and meaning. CityFish interrupts a seemingly linear narrative with poetic texts, quotations, Quicktime videos, DHTML animations, Google Maps and a myriad of visual images. Combining contemporary short fiction and hypermedia storytelling forms creates a new hybrid, a lo-fi web collage cabinet of curiosities.

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, and was 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 version of CityFish was presented in an exhibition called IßWAS, at the Bavarian American Hotel in Nuremberg, Germany, July 1998. That version incorporated photographs shot on 35mm film in Chinatown, Toronto, circa 1996, a line drawing made 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 work of fiction, the fish and I swear. Any resemblance to any mothers, uncles, aunts or cousins anywhere may be attributed to the common craziness of all families everywhere.

In(ter)ventions: Literary Practice at the Edge: a residency program specializing in new writing practices at The Banff Centre

I am thrilled to announce, support, facilitate, encourage applications to and endorse in every way this ground-breaking new residency program offered by The Banff Centre. In(ter)ventions: Literary Practice at the Edge offers a rare opportunity to writers specializing in new writing practices, including digital literature, collaboration, hybridity and new narrative to meet each other, to exchange ideas and influences across genre boundaries and to research and develop new and ongoing work.

In(ter)ventions Residency

This residency emerges from and aims to build upon the many conversations, connections, debates, exchanges, challenges and questions raised at In(ter)ventions — Literary Practice At The Edge: A Gathering held at The Banff Centre in February 2010. I had the great good fortune to be involved in the planning of that event. In December 2008, Steven Ross Smith – Director of Literary Arts at The Banff Centre – invited Marjorie Perloff, Lance Olsen, Fred Wah and me to Banff for a three-day think tank on bringing new practices to the the Literary Arts program. The incredible diversity of practice, knowledge and experience at that table was both humbling and exhilarating. It has been wonderful watching the many names, works, issues and ideas from a vast array of literary practices we discussed coalesce into, first, a dreamboat conference agenda and now, this new residency.

In(ter)ventions: Literary Practice at the Edge is accepting applications until November 15, 2010. The program will run from February 14, 2011 – February 26, 2011. Successful applicants will receive up to %60 funding. Technological, reflective, and collective resources will be available as needed. Guest speakers will be presented. Resident writers will work with faculty to develop new or current work.

Faculty: Fred Wah – collaboration and hybridity, J. R. Carpenter – digital literature, Lance Olsen – new narrative

Guest speakers: Debra Di Blasi, Darren Wershler, Erin Moure and Oana Avasilichioae

Application deadline: November 15, 2010
Program dates: February 14, 2011 – February 26, 2011
Participants should plan to arrive in Banff on Sunday, February 13, 2011, and depart on Sunday, February 27, 2011.
For more information and to apply: In(ter)ventions: Literary Practice at the Edge

Further Adventures of Pookie & JR Appear on the Electronic Literature Authoring Software Website

Pookie is a a biological, digital, quasi-fictional manifestation of Montreal artist Ingrid Bachmann’s imagination. And, for a hermit crab, Pookie sure gets around. Bachmann and Pookie collaborated on The Digital Crustaceans project at StudioXX, Montréal, Québec in 2002. That project lives online here: http://www.digitalhermit.ca/. Bachmann and Pookie collaborated again on Digital Crustaceans v.0.2: Homesteading on the Web at Gallery Articule, Main Gallery, Montréal, Québec, April 4 – May 4 2003.

Pookie and I hung out quite a lot the summer of 2009 and a number of projects emerged as a result. We were in a show together at Arnolfini in Bristol in May, 2010, and have a book coming out any moment now from TRAUMAWIEN.

Our latest adventure – an entry on the Excerpts from the Chronicles of Pookie & JR has just been added to the Electronic Literature Authoring Software Website edited by Judy Malloy.

Pookie Goes to the Beach, Ingrid Bachmann

[screenshot from The Digital Crustaceans project, Ingrid Bachmann, 2002]

The Electronic Literature Authoring Software Website is resource for teachers and students of new media writing, who are exploring what authoring tools to use, for new media writers and poets, who are interested in how their colleagues approach their work, and for readers, who want to understand how new media writers and poets create their work, the Authoring Software project is an ongoing collection of statements about authoring tools and software. It also looks at the relationship between interface and content in new media writing and at how the innovative use of authoring tools and the creation of new authoring tools have expanded digital writing/hypertext writing/net narrative practice in this vibrant contemporary creative writing field.

Begun in conjunction with the 2008 Electronic Literature Organization Conference, this resource was also a part of the Computers and
Writing 2009 Online Sessions hosted by UC Davis.

Visit Excerpts from the Chronicles of Pookie & JR on the Electronic Literature Authoring Software Website.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

with a guest appearance by decadent chef Durain Gray.

machfeld invitation

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

Two New Stories Added to In Absentia

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CityFish Beta Launch at AI_ELO June 3-6, 2010

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

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

CityFish || J. R. Carpenter

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

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

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

Gorge

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

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

Of Gorge, Nick Montfort advises:

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

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

Electronic Literature at PW10

I am thrilled to be involved with curating an exhibition of digital textwork/e-literature to be shown in the Arnolfini Reading Room during PW10 Performance Writing Weekend at Arnolfini, Bristol, May 8-9, 2010. This exhibition includes some of my own work as well as fantastic contributions by John Cayley, Daniel Howe, Christine Wilks, Jason Nelson and Jerome Fletcher. We are also pleased to feature the launch of _feralC_ a new web work by MEZ commissioned by Arnolfini curated by Geoff Cox.

John Cayley and Daniel Howe
Misspelt Landings
http://rednoise.org/readers/misspelt.php

Misspelt Landings is a preliminary work from The Readers Project. It is presented here as a Java Applet, written and generated using Processing and RiTa, the extensive natural language processing and text handling libraries for Processing by Daniel Howe.

J. R. Carpenter
Entre Ville
http://luckysoap.com/entreville

Entre Ville is a web-based hypermedia heat-wave poem commissioned by OBORO, an artist-run centre in Montréal, on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the Conseil des Arts de Montréal.

J. R. Carpenter
Story Generation(s): Excerpts from the Chronicles of Pookie & JR, I’ve Died and Gone to Devon, and Auto-Autobiography

Story Generations(s) are a series of short fictions generated from Python scripts.

Jerome Fletcher
…Reusement
http://www.falmouth.ac.uk/component/contacts/352/view/research-100/jerome-fletcher-335/index.html

…Reusement is an interactive piece that examines the idea of an archaeology of reading. The user uncovers layers of text through a process of ‘erasure’, simultaneously amassing details of an uncertain narrative.

MEZ
_feralC_
http://netwurker.net/
Commissioned by Arnolfini, curated by Geoff Cox.

_feralC_ will launch on the Saturday the 8th May at 3pm East-Coast Australian time.
_feralC_ is a “socumentary” [mix of social_networking mockumentary & Alternate Reality Sequencing] that will trace the Twitter output of special networked characters. Stay tuned + remember: follow the synthetic brick road….

Jason Nelson
WithinSpace
http://www.secrettechnology.com

WithinSpace is a textwork written in Flash which challenges the flatness of the terminal screen and encourages layered contextual readings.

Christine Wilks
Underbelly
http://www.crissxross.net/elit/underbelly.html

Underbelly is a playable media fiction, created in Flash, about a woman sculptor, carving on the site of a former colliery in the north of England. As she carves, she is disturbed by a medley of voices, some from the site’s dark industrial past, and the player/reader is plunged into an underworld of repressed fears and desires.

Also on display: Electronic Literature Collection Volume One
Editors: N. Katherine Hayles, Nick Montfort, Scott Rettberg, Stephanie Strickland
http://collection.eliterature.org/1/

The Electronic Literature Collection is a periodical publication of current and older electronic literature in a form suitable for individual, public library, and classroom use.

PW10 runs Sat 8 May 11.00am – 9.00pm & Sun 9 May 11.00am – 6pm

For more information on PW10 and a full event schedule, visit Arnolfini: http://www.arnolfini.org.uk/whatson/live/details/625

For more information on Performance Writing, visit the Facebook page: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Performance-Writing/446221925633

PW10 Performance Writing Weekend at the Arnolfini

I will be presenting digital work in PW10 Performance Writing Weekend at ARNOLFINI in Bristol, UK, May 8-9, 2010. PW10 is part of Lingua Franca, a series of exhibitions and events looking at intermediary language, linguistic translation and the subjectivity of language presented by Arnolfini during 2010.

As part of the Lingua Franca season, ARNOLFINI has collaborated with the Performance Writing and English with Creative Writing fields at University College Falmouth to create PW10: a weekend of performances, talks, readings, digital and audio / visual work exploring interdisciplinary approaches to language, textuality and environments for writing. PW10 artists and writers include Ric Allsopp, Emma Bennett, J.R. Carpenter, Nisha Duggal, Drew Milne, David Prior, Jean-Jacques Lecercle, Tony Lopez, Marianne Morris, Nancy Reilly-McVittie, Redell Olsen and Aaron Williamson.

A two-day workshop exploring the theme of writing and water, accompanying the PW10 Performance Writing weekend. Led by University College Falmouth lecturers Jerome Fletcher and Simon Persighetti, this practical writing project will use the floating harbour adjacent to Arnolfini as a site to explore the relationship between writing and water.

PW10 will run May 7-9, 2010. These dates coincide with the opening of a major re-site of a text/audio installation by Caroline Bergvall and Ciarán Maher, “Say Parsley,” running for 8 weeks in the ARNOLFINI Gallery, Sat 8 May – Sun 4 July, 2010.

“Say Parsley” is a sparse sound and language installation by London-based French-Norwegian writer Caroline Bergvall and Irish composer Ciarán Maher. Organized across a number of spaces, the installation becomes a place for mishearings, recognition, assumptions, misattribution. You hear what you want to hear. You hear what you think you hear. The background to Say Parsley is the biblical ‘shibboleth’, a violent event where language itself is gatekeeper, and a pretext to massacre. The pronunciation of a given word exposes the identity of the speaker. To speak becomes a give-away. Are you one of us, not one of us? How you speak will be used against you. The most recent example of a large scale shibboleth was the massacre of tens of thousands of Creole Haitians on the border of the Dominican Republic in 1937, when the criteria for execution was the failure to pronounce ‘perejil’ (parsley) in the accepted Spanish manner, with a rolling ‘r’.

PW10 May 8-9, 2010
ARNOLFINI
16 Narrow Quay, Bristol BS1 4QA