Join us on Saturday, May 24th at 7:30 pm at the Helen Pitt Gallery in Vancouver, BC, to launch Tributaries & Text-Fed Streams a new work of electronic literature by Montreal-based fiction writer and web artist J.R. Carpenter.
Many books were harmed in the making of this electronic literature project. Over the past five months Carpenter has been exploring the formal, functional and poetic properties of RSS syndication, rereading, remixing, annotating, parsing and posting fragments of text from the “Artifice and Intelligence” issue of literary quarterly The Capilano Review. Tributaries & Text-Fed Streams is commissioned by The Capilano Review and curated by Kate Armstrong. The work will be simultaneously launched on Turbulence.org.
The Vancouver launch event will feature a reading by the artist in addition to a programme of experimental readings by practitioners in disparate fields such as quantum physics, geography, and poetics, arranged to explore ideas of streams, seriality, or flow. Participants include Michael Boyce, Babble Brook, Maria Lantin, Billy Mavreas, Jeremy Venditti, Global Telelanguage Resources, and J.R. Carpenter.
A reception will follow.
Saturday, May 24th, 2008
Helen Pitt Gallery
102-148 Alexander Street
Vancouver
7:30pm
Sliding scale: $5-$10
LAUNCH EVENT PARTICIPANT BIOS:
MICHAEL BOYCE is a writer from the east coast, living on the west coast, writing different kinds of things in different kinds of ways. His first novel, Monkey, was published by Pedlar Press, and he is now finishing a second one, called Anderson. Boyce has also published short stories, poetry, reviews, and critical theory about artists and their work.
J. R. CARPENTER is a two-time winner of the CBC Quebec Short Story Competition and a Web Art Finalist in the Drunken Boat Panliterary Awards 2006. Her electronic literature projects are included in Electronic Literature Collection Volume One, Web Biennial 2007 (Istanbul) and Rhizome ArtBase (New York). Her short fiction has been anthologized in In Other Words, Short Stuff and Lust for Life, and has appeared in journals including: Geist, Matrix, The New Quarterly and Blood & Aphorisms. Her first novel, Words the Dog Knows, is forthcoming from Conundrum Press in 2008. She lives in Montreal where she serves as the President of the Board of Directors of OBORO, an artist run gallery and new media lab. http://luckysoap.com
GLOBAL TELELANGUAGE RESOURCES (GTR) is an ongoing experimental art project directed by two artists/writers (David Ayre and Andrew Klobucar ) who work exclusively in digital media. The primary objective of each GTR work is to explore creatively different theoretical and aesthetic directions in digital technology as both a field of writing and mode of literary production/distribution. Parallel with most western processes of modernisation, technologies of writing or signification remain highly dependent, both politically and culturally, on how particular societies process, produce and distribute knowledge. It is within this context that each GTR project prioritises the creation of new forms of representation, i.e., new instruments of language, over any simulated product or art piece. Through the actual construction and application of different methodologies of writing, GTR hopes to draw its audience’s collective attention to the vital significance of technological formats in the everyday creation of cultural meaning. To understand more fully how concepts of modern culture and social reasoning continue to evolve, one must consider the forms of representation and organisation that inevitably allow these concepts to cohere. At the centre of GTR’s work, accordingly, is the construction of different media platforms able to simulate the various ways writing
organises itself technologically as a mode of representation and thus as a social discipline able to authorise and regulate cultural skills, attitudes and even moral values. http://www.gtrlabs.org
MARIA LANTIN is the Director of the Intersections Digital Studios, a research space at the Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design. Prior to coming to Emily Carr, Dr. Lantin led the Visualization Lab within the Advanced Research Technology (ART) Labs at The Banff Centre where she helped produce digital media work with a variety of international artists. Alternating between academia and industry for a number of years, she has worked as a senior developer at Mainframe Entertainment, an assistant professor at the Technical University of British Columbia (now SFU), and the Director of Research at IDELIX Software Inc. Dr. Lantin continues to collaborate with many artists on media works, and also produces and exhibits her own work on language visualization.
BILLY MAVREAS is a Greek-Canadian artist living in Montreal. For almost twenty years, Mavreas has produced rock posters, comics, artist books, visual poetry, installation, mail art, web art, performance, essay writing and guerilla consultancy. His artwork and various projects have been shown and published internationally. He is the author of The Overlords of Glee (conundrum press, 2001), Hell Passport Commentary (Perro Verlag, 2006) and the upcoming Inside Outside Overlap (Timeless Books, 2008) among many others. Mavreas is also the proprietor of his enduring project, Monastiraki, a Mile-End magickal curiosity shoppe and art gallery. http://www.billymavreas.blogspot.com/
JERMEY VENDITTI is a river geomorphologist who conducts research on geomorphic and sedimentary processes that shape Earth’s surface. Dr. Venditti’s current work focuses on turbulence and sediment dynamics in sand-bedded rivers, sediment delivery to the ocean, scientifically-based stream naturalization, and sediment transport dynamics in gravel-bedded streams. He uses a spectrum of research approaches, including field observation and experimentation, physical modeling in laboratories, development of theoretical models, and numerical simulation. His work covers a range of temporal and spatial scales from detailed examinations of sediment dynamics occurring over fractions of a second in laboratory channels to monitoring annual river and watershed responses to human impacts.
Dr. Venditti holds a Bachelor of Science from the University of Guelph, a Masters of Science from the University of Southern California, and a PhD from the University of British Columbia. From 2004-2006 he held a research appointment at the University of California, Berkeley and was a senior scientist at Stillwater Sciences in Berkeley California. Dr. Venditti is currently a faculty member in the Department of Geography and leads the Landscape Dynamics Laboratory at Simon Fraser University.
other islands in this text-fed stream
