
Tributaries & Text-Fed Streams: A Feed-Reading of The Capilano Review is a personal, experimental and playful re-reading of and response to thirteen essays published in a recent issue of The Capilano Review, a literary journal based in North Vancouver, that was dedicated to new writing and new technologies. Tributaries & Text-Fed Streams explores the formal and functional properties of RSS, using blogging, tagging and other Web 2.0 tools to mark-up and interlink these essays and to insert additional meta-layers of commentary in order to play with, expose, expand upon, and subvert formal structures of writing, literature, and literary criticism.
For the next four-months I will be reading and re-reading the essays and parsing them into fragments, which I will then annotate, mark-up, tag and post. Fed into an RSS stream, the fragments will be re-read, reordered, and reblogged in an iterative process of distribution intended to open up new readings of the essays and reveal new interrelationships between them.
Streams are both literally and metaphorically the central image of the work. Streams of consciousness, data, and rivers flow through the interface and through the texts. Through this process of re-reading and responding, this textual tributary will feed a larger stream while paying tribute to the original source.
The result of this process-based approach will be a web site that is part blog and part archive - an online repository for the artifacts of re-reading as well as a stage for the performance of live archiving. The final version of Tributaries & Text-Fed Streams: A Feed-Reading of The Capilano Review will launch simultaneously on The Capilano Review website (Vancouver) and on Turbulence.org (New York) in May 2008.
But why wait until then? You can slip into this text-fed stream at any time via the web site, where you can post comments: http://tributaries.thecapilanoreview.ca and/or you can subscribe to the RSS feed and have the posts come to you: http://tributaries.thecapilanoreview.ca/feed/.
There's also a facebook group: Tributaries & Text-Fed Streams. I've started a collection of literary quotations referring to rivers, streams, writing and the flow of information. If you have any to share, please send them along via a comment to this post, or to a post on http://tributaries.thecapilanoreview.ca, or on the facebook group's wall. See you somewhere down river soon ...
Tributaries & Text-Fed Streams is a new work of electronic literature by J. R. Carpenter, curated by Vancouver-based artist and writer Kate Armstrong and commissioned by The Capliano Review - a literary journal based in North Vancouver with a long history of publishing new and established Canadian and international writers and artists who are experimenting with or expanding the boundaries of conventional forms and contexts. Now in its 35th year, the magazine continues to favour the risky, the provocative, the innovative, and the dissident. TCR 2-50 "Artifice & Intelligence" was guest-edited by Andrew Klobucar and included essays by: Andrew Klobucar, Global Telelanguage Resources, Sandra Seekins, Kate Armstrong, David Jhave Johnston, Laura U. Marks, Sharla Sava, Kevin Magee, Jim Andrews, Gordon Winiemko, Nancy Patterson and Darren Wershler-Henry.
Tributaries & Text-Fed Streams: http://tributaries.thecapilanoreview.ca
J. R. Carpenter: http://luckysoap.com
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Link:
http://tributaries.thecapilanoreview.ca/
J. R. Carpenter is an artist, writer, researcher, performer and maker of zines, poetry, very short fiction, long fiction, non-fiction, web-based non-linear intertextual hypermedia narratives and computer-generated texts of various and sundry sorts. She studied Life Drawing and Anatomy at the Art Students’ League of New York and Fibres and Sculpture at Concordia University in Montreal, where she served as President of the Board of Directors of OBORO, an artist-run gallery and new media lab 2006-2010.
She began using the Internet as a medium for the creation and dissemination of experimental texts in 1993. In 1995, she stumbled across the Web at the Banff Centre for the Arts Thematic Residency, “Telling Stories, Telling Tales.” She made her first web-based art project for Netscape 1.1. It is still online and it still works. She has since worked in every aspect of the internet industry, as a writer, artist, designer, teacher, programmer, consultant, and manager of the web development team for a multinational software company. Her pioneering works of electronic literature have been presented at museums, galleries, conferences and festivals around the world including the Musée de Beaux-arts de Montréal, OBORO, Dare-Dare and the Biennal de Montréal (Montreal), the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art and Images Festival (Toronto), Interactive Screen and In(ter)ventions (Banff), Helen Pitt Gallery (Vancouver), Dalhousie Art Gallery (Halifax), The Rhizome ArtBase at the New Museum of Contemporary Art (New York), Arnolfini (Bristol), Jyväskylä Art Museum (Finland), The Web Biennial 2007 (Istanbul), Cast Gallery (Tasmania), Interrupt Festival 2008 (Brown), Media in Transition Conference 2009 (MIT), the Electronic Literature Organization Conference 2008 (Vancouver, Washington), E-Poetry 2009 (Barcelona), E-Poetry 2011 (Buffalo), &Now 2012 (Paris) and Translating E-Literature 2012 (Paris). A number of her works are included in the Electronic Literature Collection Volumes One and Volume Two. She was honored with a retrospective of her work at “Electrifying Literature: Affordances and Constraints” is the Electronic Literature Organization’s 2012 Media Art Show held in conjunction with the ELO’s conference in Morgantown, WV, from 20-23 June 2012.
Her essays, art reviews, poems and short fiction have been broadcast on CBC Radio, translated into French, Italian and Spanish, and published in numerous anthologies and journals across Canada and internationally including Crannog, Dandelion, Geist, Rampike, The New Quarterly, Matrix, Ryga, and Blood & Aphorisms. Carpenter was named a Montreal Mirror Noisemaker in 2009 and is the winner of the QWF Carte Blanche Quebec Award (2008), the CBC Quebec Short Story Competition (2003 & 2005), and the Expozine Alternative Press Award for Best English Book for her first novel, Words the Dog Knows, published by Conundrum Press in 2008. Her second book, GENERATION[S], a collection of narrative codeworks, was published by TRAUMAWIEN, Vienna, 2010.
Carpenter has been awarded grants in literature and new media from the Conseil des Arts de Montreal, Conseil des arts et des lettres du Quebec and Canada Council for the Arts. She was E-Writer-in-Residence at Dartington College (UK) in the autumn of 2009, and is a fellow of Yaddo, Ucross, Caldera, The Vermont Studio Center and the Banff Centre, where she now serves as faculty for the innovative new writing residency program In(ter)ventions: Literary Practice at the Edge. In 2010 she was awarded a full studentship to pursue a practice-led PhD Research degree at University College Falmouth, incorporating Dartington College of Art, in association with University of the Arts London. She is currently working in the emerging and occasionally converging fields of digital literature, performance writing, locative narrative and network archaeology.
marc garrett