How I Loved the Broken Things of Rome at the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art

"How I Loved the Broken Things of Rome," a recent hypertext poetry and video project by Montreal poet, fiction writer and web artist J. R. Carpenter, will be exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art in Toronto during the 19th Annual imagesFestival - April 13 - 23, 2006.

Just as in Rome three thousand years of continuous occupation have produced one of the most deeply stratified and complex urban sites in existence, "How I Loved the Broken Things of Rome" fuses together fragments of from past epochs of web programming. Visually, the piece mimics the modern's guidebook's pedagogical style, mixing maps, diagrams, photographs, historical facts and literary quotations, and contrasting romantic ideas of what one is supposed to see in Rome with traffic, noise, gypsies, graffiti, tourists, pollution and corruption. Overlapping layers of video, audio, and found and borrowed image and text echo the confusion of daily life in modern Rome. In this ruin-strewn web-based landscape, an inarticulate exilic traveler wanders through fragments of language. Isn't this how we often feel in our travels from web site to web site? Even as we are constantly on the lookout for something new, don't we also secretly seek something familiar to hold against so much newness?

"How I loved the broken things of Rome when I could not speak because I knew no Roman tongues and all day long I was overwhelmed by fragments […] Occasionally I would stumble, at least, on some ancient, elegant thing." J. R. Carpenter

"How I Loved the Broken Things of Rome"
http://luckysoap.com/brokenthings

Museum of Contemporary Art
952 Queen Street West
Toronto, Ontario, CANADA
http://www.mocca.toronto.on.ca

Presented in association with the 19th Annual imagesFestival
http://imagesfestival.com

Exhibition: April 13 - 23, 2006
Gallery Hours: Tuesday - Sunday 11 - 6
Public Reception: Saturday April 15, 2 - 6PM
imagesFestival Closing Party (at MOCCA): Saturday April 22, 9PM

"How I Loved the Broken Things of Rome" was produced in part during a residency at the OBORO New Media Lab in Montreal, with the financial support of a New Media Development Grant from the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Quebec, and is a Web Art Finalist in the Drunken Boat PanLiterary Awards 2006.

To view "How I Loved the Broken Things of Rome" anytime, please visit: http://luckysoap.com/brokenthings

For more information about this and other J. R. Carpenter projects, please visit: http://luckysoap.com