French

10 POEMS IN 4 DIMENSIONS was created on and for PC, with Internet Explorer.

Its starting point is a Platonic dialogue, "The Cratylus," in which Socrates debates with Cratylus and Hermogenes on the origin of names.

Do they, as suggested by Cratylus, form the essence of things? Or are they, as suggested Hermogenes, pure convention?

By combining text, graphics and animation, writing in HTML can address this debate, and bring to it if not elements, at least echoes.

Clicking on the left side of the banner shows a navigation bar. Double-click makes it disappear. A click on the right side of the banner is advancing to the next page.

At the top left of each page, another link is proposed, which gives another different reading.

In general, this set is discovered with the eyes and hands. Click and doubleclick anywhere on the page where a link appears: Each page holds many surprises.

Reading is an exploration.

(Source: Translation of Author's description from the project website)

Author Statement:

The interactive and multimedia work Etang (Pond) is the result of a writing experience I have had with a friend. Just like my father, hers had died of a serious illness. For several weeks, we would meet and talk about our experience. Through short texts revolving around several themes, we would try to imagine each other’s experience. These texts have been published in the journal lieu-dit 19 and inspired a first animated, though not interactive, work on Mandelbrot’s website, which was since removed and destroyed by the authors. Some years after this experience in writing, I had the opportunity to take pictures in a burned-down house. On insurance grounds, the former inhabitants had had to leave all their belongings in the burned rooms. I decided to fill these rooms with the voice of my friend’s father who had died ten years before, as well as with his daughter’s voice and the healer’s. By interacting on manipulable elements, the reader moves from room to room in this soot-covered house; yet he/she never immerses him/herself in the scenery as would a video game avatar. The images clearly fulfil their role of photographs. Therefore, walking through this burned-down house does not amount to wandering in a 3D space, which every nook and cranny can be explored. The images are just reflections, vague memories, completely conditioned by the subjective eye of the photographer. They apply to a reality that changed a long time ago. The "voices" floating on these evanescent images are equally labile, i.e. constructed and deconstructed by fragile textual animations. Thus, the voice of the healer, the family’s last hope, asks the patient to "breathe," but instead of being animated via a systolic/diastolic movement, the text deconstructs itself and disappears in a last breath. The author's voice is sometimes superimposed on the animated text; in German, this voice tells her own experience of her father’s death, while never really tallying with the experience described by her friend in French. On the one hand, this work offers no way out, and the reader can wander endlessly to "meet" the voices; on the other hand, the location of the burned-down house does not really present itself to the reader, as is the case with the voices. Death, forgetfulness, the slow but sure decay of memories are both suggested on a "visual" level and denied by the circularity of the "wandering" experience. The digital work tries to preserve these memories, even if they are to fall inevitably into oblivion because of the instability of the device. The work invites the reader to become a party to this desperate attempt to prevent the stream of oblivion from leaking. Therefore, Etang (Pond) is located on the border between the aesthetics of the ephemeral, in which the author accepts the slow decay of his/her work, and the aesthetics of re-enchantment, in which the author ascribes the digital device with a hope of survival, with a spectral characteristic linked to the materiality of the programmed matter and which remains despite the changes it undergoes on the electronic device.

Author description: This text was written during a stay in the hospital in 2001. Computer workers often neglect their bodies and by doing so they risk the development of a Repetitive Strain Injury (RSI). The visitors of Separation / Séparation are compelled to click slowly (as someone recovering from RSI) in order to see how words appear, one by one. Every now and then an exercise for an RSI patient is proposed and all interaction with the computer is postponed. The text seems to be about a separation between human beings, but the last two phrases reveal that it is about a separation between a human being and a computer. The exercises in this piece are based on the exercises in WorkPace, a software tool that assists in the recovery and prevention of RSI. (Author's abstract.)

in absentia is a site-specific web-based writing project which addresses issues of gentrification and its erasures in the Mile End neighbourhood of Montreal, where the author lived for seventeen years. J. R. Carpenter writes, "Faced with imminent eviction, I began to write as if I was no longer there, about a Mile End that was no longer there. I manipulated the Google Maps API to populated "real" satellite images of my neighbourhood with "fictional" characters and events. in absentia is a web "site" haunted by the stories of former residents of Mile End, a slightly fantastical world, a shared memory of the neighbourhood as it never really was but as it could have been. in absentia was created with the support of the Canada Council for the Arts. It was presented by DARE-DARE Centre de diffusion d'art multidisciplinaire de Montréal. It launched June 24, 2008. New stories were added over the summer, in English and French. A closing party was held in conjunction with the launch of my novel, Words the Dog Knows, (conundrum press), at Sky Blue Door, November 7, 2008"