The Pleasure of The Coast: A Hydro-graphic Novel

I’m delighted to announce the launch of a new bilingual web-based work of digital literature today, Bastille Day. In English the work is called The Pleasure of The Coast: A Hydro-graphic Novel. In French, Le plaisir de la côte : une bande dessinée. It’s a story of the western mapping of the South Pacific, rather too big for most phones. Best viewed on a laptop or tablet. It’s available here: http://luckysoap.com/pleasurecoast

The Pleasure of the Coast || J. R. Carpenter, 2019
The Pleasure of the Coast || J. R. Carpenter, 2019

This work was commissioned by the « Mondes, interfaces et environnements à l’ère du numérique » research group at Uinversité Paris 8, supported by Labex Arts-H2H (now merged with ArTeC), in partnership with the Archives Nationales in Paris. It was presented as a work in progress at « Des machines imaginantes médiatrices de fiction ? » 11-13 décembre 2018 à l’Université Paris 8. The (more or less) completed work will officially launch at Electronic Literature Organization Conference & Media Arts Festival 15-17 July 2019 at University Collage Cork in Ireland.

An ocean of thanks to Arnaud Regnauld and Pierre Cassou-Nogues at Université Paris 8; to Françoise Lemaire, Nadine Gastaldi, and Clothilde Roullier at the Archives nationales; and to Robert Sheldon and Stelios Sardelas for ground support in Paris.

larecherche2

For anyone unfamiliar with French naval history, some background information may be useful. In 1785 King Louis XVI appointed Lapérouse to lead an expedition around the world. The aim of this voyage was to complete the discoveries made by Cook on his three earlier voyages to the Pacific.

On the 1st of August 1785, Lapérouse departed Brest with no less than ten scientists aboard. On the 10th of March 1788, Lapérouse departed the English Colony at new South Wales, Australia. He was never seen by European eyes again.

To the English ear, the name Lapérouse sounds a lot like the verb ‘to peruse’ — to scan or browse, to read through with thoroughness, to survey or examine in detail. The dictionary cautions, the word ‘peruse’ can be confused with the verb ‘to pursue’ — to follow in order to overtake, to strive to gain, to seek to attain, to proceed in accordance with a method, to carry on or continue. The English word ‘pursue’ sound a bit like the French word ‘perdu’ — disposable, ruined, lost.

On 25 September 1791, Entrecasteaux departed from Brest in search of the lost Lapérouse. One of his two 500-ton frigates was named La Recherche. On board was a young hydrographer, Charles-François Beautemps-Beaupré (1766-1854), a close contemporary of the English hydrographer Francis Beaufort (1774-1857). Beaufort is perhaps most famous for the wind scale named after him, for measuring the force of the wind. Beautemps is an auspicious name for an ocean-going person, in need of fair winds. Once at sea, however, beau pré are few and far between.

Finished sea charts are designed to be uniform in appearance, as precise as possible. The Archives nationales in Paris holds hundreds of sheets of drafts of charts made by Beautemps-Beaupré aboard La Recherche, and boxes of sketchbooks. A mix of drawing, writing, and numbers. The active marks of a practicing hand. Oak gall ink on rough paper. Liquid lines of inquiry. Drawn onwards by a moving ship.

The title and much of the text in this work borrows from Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text (1973). The word ‘text’ has been replaced with the word ‘coast’. This détourned philosophy is intermingled with excerpts from Beautemps-Beaupré’s Introduction to the Practice of Nautical Surveying and the Construction of Sea-Charts (1808). Artistry, philosophy, hydrography — what’s missing. Ah, yes, fiction. And women. This gap is filled by Suzanne, the first-person narrator of Suzanne et le Pacific. In this early novel by Jean Giraudoux, published in 1921, a young French woman wins a trip around the world. She becomes shipwrecked, and survives alone on a Pacific island in roughly the same region surveyed by Beautemps-Beaupré.

I have appropriated, exaggerated, détourned, corrected, and corrupted both the original French and the English translations of these texts. Who, then, is the author of this work? The author is not dead. The author is multiple: multimedia, multilingual, poly-vocal. “Which body?” Barthes asks, “We have several.” Imagine if Barthes were the bastard love child of Giraudoux but grew up to be a hydrographer instead of a philosopher. Or if Beautemps-Beaupré had secretly written a symbolist novel from the point of view of a female castaway. But for the web…

The Pleasure of the Coast || J. R. Carpenter
The Pleasure of the Coast || J. R. Carpenter, 2019

In French, the term ‘bande dessinée’ refers to the drawn strip. What better term to describe the hydrographic practice of drawing views of the coast from the ship? In English, the term for ‘bande dessinée’ is ‘graphic novel’. I’m calling this work a hydro-graphic novel.

The images in this work are a combination of my own photographs and digitisations generously made for me by the Archives nationales. More information on the text sources can be found within the work itself. Finally, I would note that this work is imperfectly bilingual. All errors in translation, transcription, and interpretation are my own.

http://luckysoap.com/pleasurecoast

This is A Picture of Wind wins People’s Choice Award in Opening Up Digital Fiction Competition

I’m thrilled to announce that my most recent digital writing project, This is a Picture of Wind, has won the People’s Choice Award in the Opening Up Digital Fiction Competition, an annual competition for fiction written on and for digital devices hosted by Wonderbox Publishing, in conjunction with Bangor University (Wales).

This is a Picture of Wind expands upon a series of short texts written in response to the winter storms which battered South West England in early 2014, resulting in catastrophic flooding in Somerset and the destruction of the seawall and rail line at Dawlish in Devon. Part poetic almanac, part private weather diary, and part live wind report for the South West of England, this work attempts to call attention to climate change by picturing through variations in language the disturbances and sudden absences left in the wake of wind.

The is a Picture of Wind || J. R. Carpenter
The is a Picture of Wind || J. R. Carpenter

This is a Picture of Wind was commissioned by IOTA:DATA. It was created in part with the support of the Dot Award for Digital Literature. The work is designed to be read on phones but it also works on computers. It calls on live wind data, so it will look different every time you view it. A new text will be added for each month of 2018. A text about this work written by Johanna Drucker will be published by the IOTA Institute in the autumn of 2018.

A full list of descriptions and links to all the winners and honourable mentions in this year’s Opening Up Digital Fiction Competition is available here.

Upcoming Talks – February 2018

I’m hitting the road next week, to talk archaeologies of experimental wind weather writing and unconventionalities of weird web art design to students, faculty, and anyone who turns up really, at Epsom, Southampton, and Winchester school of Art.

On Monday 5 February 12:30-13:30 I’ll be speaking to Graphic Design students, faculty, and members of the public at the University for the Creative Arts in Epsom. I think the event poster gives fair warning of my highly eccentric approach to web ‘design’. I hope a lively discussion of how very best not to do things ensues.

UCA Epsom || J. R. Carpenter, 5 February 2018
UCA Epsom || J. R. Carpenter, 5 February 2018

On Thursday 8 February I’ll head south to Southampton to give a reading at the excellent ENTROPICS experimental poetry series. In advance of the reading, Sarah Hayden asked me a few interview questions. My answers, along with interviews with past ENTROPICS poets are online here. I am deeply indebted to the organizers for the fabulous event poster, below. The reading will take place at 18:30–21:00 at Mettricks Old Town Cafe, 117 High St, Southampton SO14 2AA, UK. All are welcome.

ENTROPICS || J. R. Carpenter, 8 February 2018
ENTROPICS || J. R. Carpenter, 8 February 2018

And then onward on Friday 9 February to talk about my new web-based work This is a Picture of Wind at the Archaeologies of Media and Technology (AMT) Research Group at Winchester School of Art as part of their Talking Heads Series. The event will take place at Winchester School of Art, Lecture Theatre A, 15:00-17:00. It’s free, and open to the public. For more information, see the event page Writing a Picture of Wind. Many thanks to AMT director Jussi Parikka for putting the Southampton-Winchester bit of the tour together.

This is a Picture of Wind

I’m thrilled to announce the launch of a new, web-based work called This is a Picture of Wind. This work expands upon a series of short texts written in response to the winter storms which battered South West England in early 2014, resulting in catastrophic flooding in Somerset and the destruction of the seawall and rail line at Dawlish in Devon. Following the news in the months after these storms, I was struck by the paradox presented by attempts to evoke through the materiality of language a force such as wind which we can only see indirectly through its affect. I began to explore weather in all its written forms.

Part poetic almanac, part private weather diary, and part live wind report for the South West of England, this work attempts to call attention to climate change by picturing through variations in language the disturbances and sudden absences left in the wake of wind.

This is a Picture of Wind || J. R. Carpenter
This is a Picture of Wind || J. R. Carpenter
This work is designed to be read on phones. It calls on live wind data. A new text will be added for each month of 2018. A text about this work written by Johanna Drucker will be published in March 2018.

This is a Picture of Wind was commissioned by IOTA: DATA, with the support of the Canada Council for the Arts. Initial research for this project was made possible by a Dot Award for Digital Literature, from if:book and the New Media Writing Prize.

Many thanks to Mireille Bourgeois, Chris Meade, Kay Lovelace, Johanna Drucker, Michael Saunby, Peter Dickinson, and Jerome Fletcher for walking into the wind with me.

The Gathering Cloud

The Gathering Cloud is a new hybrid print and web-based work by J. R. Carpenter commissioned by NEoN Digital Arts Festival, which takes place in Dundee, UK, 9-13 November 2016.

This work aims to address the environmental impact of so-called ‘cloud’ computing through the oblique strategy of calling attention to the materiality of the clouds in the sky. Both are commonly perceived to be infinite resources, at once vast and immaterial; both, decidedly, are not.

Fragments from Luke Howard’s classic “Essay on the Modifications of Clouds” (1803) as well as more recent online articles and books on media and the environment are pared down into hyptertextual hendecasyllabic verses. These are situated within surreal animated gif collages composed of images materially appropriated from publicly accessible cloud storage services.

The Gathering Cloud
The Gathering Cloud – a new hybrid print and web-based work by J. R. Carpenter

The cognitive dissonance between the cultural fantasy of cloud storage and the hard facts of its environmental impact is bridged, in part, through the constant evocation of animals: A cumulus cloud weighs one hundred elephants. A USB fish swims through a cloud of cables. Four million cute cat pics are shared each day. A small print iteration of “The Gathering Cloud” shared through gift, trade, mail art, and small press economies further confuses boundaries between physical and digital, scarcity and waste.

The Gathering Cloud
The print iteration of The Gathering Cloud

The Gathering Cloud was commissioned by NEoN Digital Arts Festival, Dundee, UK, 9-13 November 2016. Many thanks to the curators Sarah Cook and Donna Holford-Lovell. Portions of this text were first performed at the Bath Royal Literary and Scientific Institution during the South West Poetry Tour, 1-8 August 2016. Thanks and curses to Annabel Banks for sugesting the hendecasyllabic constraint. Thanks to Kay Lovelace, Rachel McCarthy, Michael Saunby, and the fine folks at the Informatics Lab at the Met Office for tips, tricks, and discussions on code and the weather. And thanks to Jerome Fletcher for everything else.

Further reading: NEoN speaks with JR Carpenter

View the work online here: The Gathering Cloud

A Handmade Web

I’m headed to Bath Thursday 26 March 2015 to participate in a one-day symposium on Slow Media hosted by the Media Futures Research Centre at Bath Spa University’s Corsham Court campus. I will be speaking about a A Handmade Web. The term ‘handmade’ usually refers to objects made by hand or by using simple tools rather than machines. The result may be homely — as in a child’s clay ashtray — or exquisite — as in a pair of bespoke brogues. I will evoke the term ‘handmade web’ throughout this presentation to refer to web pages coded by hand rather than by software; web pages made and maintained by individuals rather than by businesses or corporations; web pages which are provisional, temporary, or one-of-a-kind; web pages which challenge conventions of reading, writing, design, ownership, privacy, security, or identity.

I’ve made a hyperlinked version of my presentation available online here: http://luckysoap.com/statements/handmadeweb.html

Fishes & Flying Things || J. R. Carpenter, 1995

The above image is from Fishes & Flying Things, my first web-based project, Fishes & Flying Things, made entirely by hand in 19995.

For more information on Slow Media, see: The Origin of Slow Media: Early Diffusion of a Cultural Innovation through Popular and Press Discourse, 2002-2010, by Jennifer Rauch (2011).

Slow Media, Thursday 26th March 2015, Bath Spa University, UK

Slow Media Symposium Draft Programme (PDF)

#slowmediabathspa

Drunken Boat Panliterary Awards


Finally! Drunken Boat # 8 is now online!

This fat new issue features winners and finalists of the inaugural Drunken Boat Panliterary Awards, including my web art project How I Loved the Broken Things of Rome – a finalist in the Web Art Category.
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Broken Things Closing Party

Come on out to MOCCA tonight for the closing party of the 19th Annual Images Festival. With DJ Kola. Performance by Tammy Forsythe. Outdoor projections by John Oswald. And me, and How I Loved the Broken Things of Rome.


9-12 pm, MoCCA (952 Queen Street W), FREE
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Public Reception Today at MOCCA

HOW I LOVED THE BROKEN THINGS OF ROME

a a hypertext/ poetry/ video/ installation J. R. Carpenter

Public Reception Today: Saturday April 15, 2 – 6PM

Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art
952 Queen Street W.,Toronto, ON, CANADA

Presented in Association With the 19th Annual imagesFestival

If you can’t join us at MOCCA today, you can also visit How I Loved the Broken Things of Rome online any time at: http://luckysoap.com/brokenthings

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Broken Things Now Showing at MOCCA

The broken things of Rome are still broken, but my web/ poetry/ video/ installation How I Loved the Broken Things of Rome is now installed at the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art, and the show is now showing. Come by, buy a mini-book, browse the site on site, and say hi to me, J.R. Carpenter.

How I Loved the Broken Things of Rome is at MOCCA April 13 – 23, 2006
The Gallery Hours Are: Tuesday – Sunday 11 – 6
I will be at the Public Reception: Saturday April 15, 2 – 6PM
And at the Closing Party: Saturday April 22, 9:30PM

Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art
952 Queen Street W.,Toronto, ON, CANADA

http://luckysoap.com/brokenthings
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