Print publication

Frequently Asked Questions about "Hypertext" is a short fiction, in the form of a FAQ document, that revolves around various interpretations of a 69-word poem called "Hypertext." The poem "Hypertext," nominally by "Alan Richardson," is composed from all the hidden words/anagrams contained within the nine-letter word "hypertext." The tongue-in-cheek interpretations of the fictional poem include the perspectives of language poetry, cultural studies, feminism, and transgender studies. Emerging through the interpretations and FAQ answers, however, are the interwoven "real-life" stories of the troubled author and his/her troubled critics. The poem's notoriety creates a fan fiction phenomenon centered around an online database, which, along with its creator(s), comes under attack. As in Nabokov's Pale Fire, pseudo-literary criticism gives way to a mystery story about the real author of the text, transformation and transsexuality, love and murder.

(Source: Author description, ELC 1).

Programmatic or computational art is often, although not necessarily, related to art in other media: visual, performative, conceptual, and so on. The art systems of The Readers Project relate to writing and to reading, to our encounters with literary language. This project is an essay in language-driven digital art, in writing digital media. The Readers Project visualizes reading, although it does not do this in the sense of miming conventional human reading. Rather, the project explores and visualizes existing and alternative vectors of reading, vectors that are motivated by the properties and methods of language and language art.

Visualization, especially as a function of computation, is now quite commonplace in artistic practice, but it has little culture moment unless it provides critique, and it is not art unless it conveys an aesthetic. The Readers Project is a visualization of reading but it is implicitly critical of conventional reading habits. Further, because the project’s readers move within and are thus composed by the words within which they move, they also, effectively, write. They generate texts and the traces of their writings are offered to the project’s human readers as such, as writing, as literary art; published as real-time streams of live-writing, available to anyone with internet access.

Computationally-engaged text generation has a significant, if marginal, history in literary art practice. The Readers Project is innovative, however, in having found a number of ways to display the primary source of a text generator’s inputs within this source’s typographically structured literary environment. A less obvious but equally important aspect of the project is its use of current natural language information—especially concerning the relative frequencies of words and phrases considered by the readers—culled from the largest corpus of human language that has ever existed, a universe of language no longer deep within or distant from us, but now made visible to all by the free demons of web indexing and, more recently, by active cells of the Natural Language Liberation Front (http://nllf.net/).

(Source: Artists' Statement from the project site)

The Cape is a short work that engages the history of visual print-based authority by combining impersonal, government-created images with a purportedly personal story. Carpenter animates decades-old black-and-white photographs, illustrations, and maps, adding to these a few laconic caption-sized texts to extend an exploration of "place" that digital space evokes.

(Source: Electronic Literature Collection, Vol. 1)

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"

Implementation was written collaboratively and sent serially through the mail in the form of eight roughly chronological installments, each consisting of texts on thirty stickers. The stickers were also made available online in different paper sizes, so that people could print them out on standard sheets of business-size shipping labels. Participants attached stickers to public surfaces around the world, so that whoever happened to wander by the stickers could read them. Some of these placements of stickers were photographed by participants, and the photographs were sent back to be archived on the Implementation website.Because of the origin of this novel on sheets of stickers, and because of the way these stickers have been situated on public surfaces, Implementation consists of 240 short texts, any number of which can be read in any order. In the 2012 book version, all these atomistic texts have been arranged with a cohesive narrative flow in mind. Each page includes placements of the narrative stickers on various public surfaces. It is a book to be read in photographs.Implementation is about four main characters: Frank, Samantha, Kilroy, and Roxanne, who live in a Midwestern town. The action of the novel begins in September 2001 and runs through the beginning of Operation Iraqi Freedom in 2003. One of the characters, Kilroy, is a reservist who is called up and then sent to Iraq, but the other characters are affected in much more oblique ways by the attack on the World Trade Center and the changes that follow. They continue to dine at restaurants, drink at bars, work, worry about their jobs and careers, have flings and relationships, and go to celebrations and funerals. While even a bombing in town changes little on the surface of these lives, the effects of the war can be read in shifts in their gestures, longings, and language. Implementation is a novel about the peripheral, everyday, psychological toll of the war on terror.

(Source: Project description from the Implementation book)