lapsus linguae

Walks from City Bus Routes – new work published in The New River

Walks from City Bus Routes is a web-based computer-generated guide ‘book’ which perpetually proposes plausible yet practically impossible walking routes through the city of Edinburgh and its environs using JavaScript developed by Caden Lovelace and images and text culled from a City of Edinburgh Transport Map published by the Edinburgh Geographical Institute in the 1940s and a pamphlet called Walks from City Bus Routes published by Edinburgh City Transport in the late 1950s.

Walks from City Bus Routes || J. R. Carpenter

Walks from City Bus Routes has been published in the Spring 2015 issue of The New River – a long-standing online journal of digital writing & art founded by Edward Falco with help from Len Hatfield in 1996. The New River posts new issues twice a year in December and May, and is currently hosted by Virginia Tech’s Center for Digital Discourse and Culture. This Spring 2015 issue is edited by Arian Katsimbras & Emily Dhatt and contains work by Alan Bigelow, J. R. Carpenter, Chris Joseph, J.P. Sipilä, Aaron Oldenburg, Jody Zellen.

Readers keen on web-based bookish-drifting-wander-walking may also be interested in Wanderkammer: A Walk Through texts, a web-based collection of hyperlinked quotations from great writing on walking. Wanderkammer first appeared Walk poems: A series of reviews of walking projects edited by Louis Bury Corey Frost published on Jacket2 in 2011.

The Broadside of a Yarn: A Situationist Strategy for Spinning Sea Stories Ashore – a new article published in Performance Reserch Journal

Performance Reserch Journal The latest issue of Performance Research Journal, On Writing & Digital Media, edited by Jerome Fletcher, includes an article written by me called: The Broadside of a Yarn: A Situationist Strategy for Spinning Sea Stories Ashore. This articleemerges from my practice-led PhD research at Falmouth University in association with University of the Arts London. It has developed over the course of a number of conference papers presented in France and the UK over the past two years. I am very happy to see it out in the world in this format.

The Broadside of a Yarn: A Situationist Strategy for Spinning Sea Stories Ashore, by J. R. Carpenter, reflects upon The The Broadside of a Yarn, a multi-modal performative pervasive networked narrative attempt to chart fictional fragments of new and long-ago stories of near and far-away seas with nought but a QR code reader and a hand-made print map of dubious accuracy. The Broadside of a Yarn was commissioned by ELMCIP for Remediating the Social, an exhibition which took place at Inspace, Edinburgh, 1-17 November 2012. The Broadside of a Yarn remediates the broadside, a form of networked narrative popular from 16th century onward. Like the broadside ballads of old, the public posting of The Broadside of a Yarn signified that it was intended to be performed. Embedded within the cartographic space of this printed map are QR codes which link to web pages containing computer-generated narrative dialogues, performance scripts replete with stage instructions suggesting how and where these texts are intended to be read aloud. As such, these points on the physical map point to potential events, to utterances, to speech acts. The stated intention in creating this work was to use the oral story-telling tradition of the sailor’s yarn, the printed broadside and map, the digital network, and the walk-able city in concert to construct a temporary digital community connected through a performative pervasive networked narrative. Through the process of composition the focus shifted away from the temptation to lure people on walks through a city tagged with links to stories of the sea, toward a desire to compel people to collectively speak shifting sea stories ashore. This paper reflects critically upon this shift, toward an articulation of The Broadside of a Yarn as an collective assemblage of enunciation.

This is my first experience with publishing in an academic journal barricaded behind a paywall. If you are a student or a faculty member of a university with access to Shibboleth, you should have no problem accessing the contents of Performance Research Journal online. If not, try this link: The Broadside of a Yarn: A Situationist Strategy for Spinning Sea Stories Ashore. If that doesn’t work, drop me a line, I’ll see what I can do.

WANDERKAMMER: A Walk Through Texts

Wander (Wun¦der)
verb 1. [with adverbial of direction] walk or move in a leisurely or aimless way: I wandered through the narrow streets, [with object] travel aimlessly through or over (an area): he found her wandering the streets, (of a road or river) meander. 2. move slowly away from a fixed point or place: please don’t wander off again. figurative his attention had wandered. 3. be unfaithful to one’s regular sexual partner. noun an act or instance of wandering: she’d go on wanders like that in her nightgown.

Wanderkammer (Wun¦der|kam¦mer)
noun (plural Wanderkammern)1. a web-based collection of hyperlinked quotations from curious and rare writings on the topic of wandering. 2. a walk through texts.

WANDERKAMMER: A Walk Through Texts
hypertext an odd-ball semantic web project by J. R. Carpenter published in Jacket2, in Walk poems: A series of reviews of walking projects edited by Louis Bury and Corey Frost.

J.R. Carpenter
proper noun 1. author of writing on wandering. 2. wanderer through texts. 3. collector of curious and rare writing on wandering. 4. creator of Wanderkammern.

Jerome Fletcher
proper noun 1. Wanderkammer collaborator. 2. collector of curious and rare writing on wandering.

Additional quotations contributed by Mythogeography, Neil Thompson and Maddie Thompson.

in-situ Cité so far

1. first steps

I borrowed a mic from a friend who has a one-year-old

the kid kept grabbing the mic so we gave him a toy mic

then we gave him a toy ball

we rolled the ball down the hall and he chased it

when we tried to record our dog running in the alley

the dog thought the mic was a stick with a ball on the end

he grabbed the foam wind guard and ran off with it

in the early stages, children and dog are quite alike

2. by my calculations

if our dog is eight-and-a-half

than we’ve lived in our five-and-a-half for a dog’s age

we walk our dog other places besides our alley but let’s say we don’t

eight-and-a-half years of three times a day up and three times a day down

that’s eighteen thousand six hundred and fifteen lengths of alley

writing for one length of alley is harder than I thought it would be

it takes five minutes to walk from Fairmount to Saint Viateur

six if you walk slowly

seven if you walk as if intent on studying every scent

eight-and-a-half years if you walk as if sniffing for stories

. . . . .

in-situ preview

This summer I’ve been working on an audio narrative walking tour project that will be presented by the Playwrights’ Workshop Montréal during Les Journées de la Culture, September 30 – October 1, 2006. Here’s what the PWM website says:

PWM is proud to present In-situ Cité, five short original environmental theatre pieces, organized as an audio walking tour of the Mile End. Directed by Stephen Lawson, In-situ Cité will showcase the works of of J.R. Carpenter, Nathalie Derome, Skidmore, Geeta Nadkarni, and Rosella Tursi.

From the outset I’ve thought of my piece as a continuation of Entre Ville, with our neighbours as characters and the back alleyway as the terrain. The alleyways of Mile End are a world known and shown to us by our dog. The week we thought Isaac the Wonder Dog was dying (see August posts) I had a massive anxiety attack about In-situ Cité. In the long hours spent sitting and waiting on the concrete floors of vets and animal clinics my whole idea of neighbourhood and community and humanity underwent some major revisions.

Isaac walks us up and down the alleyway three times a day. He introduces us to our neighbours and befriends children – things we would never do of our own volition. We’re not crazy about our neighbours. We’re dog people, not children people. But we make the best of things. We try and look at things from the dog’s eye point of view. Which is how I am now aproaching my In-situ Cité piece.
. . . . .