archaeological

Description (in English)

"How I Loved the Broken Things of Rome" pieces together fragments of history, poetry, video, photography and cartography collected during an extended stay in Rome. This work reflects upon certain gaps - between the fragment and the whole, between the local and the tourist, between what is known of history and what is speculative. Rome is among the largest and oldest continuously occupied archaeological sites in the world. Daily life is complicated, even for the locals. Everything is running late, circuitous, or quasi-rotto. Romanticism and pragmatism must coexist. My struggles with slang, schedules, and social vagaries reminded me acutely of when I first moved to Montréal. Understanding what's going on around me now seems to be less a question of the acquisition of language than one of overcoming the dislocation of being a stranger. In her poem The Fall of Rome: A Traveller's Guide Montréal poet Anne Carson writes: "A stranger is someone desperate for conversation." I certainly found that to be the case. There were days in Rome that I did not, could not, speak to anyone. Oxford Archaeological Guide and cameras in tow, I tried to capture something of the impossibly elusive and fragmentary nature of language amid Rome's broken columns, headless statues and other, often unidentifiable, ruins.

How I Loved the Broken Things of Rome was produced in residency at OBORO’s New Media Lab with the financial support of the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec.

Pull Quotes

When I could not speak
because I knew no Roman tongues
and all day long I was
overwhelmed by fragments -
headless statues littering the gardens
and the museums, full
of shelves of heads of stone -
for days on end I roamed
alone in beauty.

When I could not think
because I was hungry
or tired or lost
in a crowd of conversation,
when even if I wanted to
I could not seek
answers to ineffectual questions -

"How long will it take?"
"It is impossible to know this…"
What I wanted I could not say.

Screen shots
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How I Loved the Broken Things of Rome || J. R. Carpenter
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How I Loved the Broken Things of Rome || J. R. Carpenter
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How I Loved the Broken Things of Rome || J. R. Carpenter
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How I Loved the Broken Things of Rome || J. R. Carpenter
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How I Loved the Broken Things of Rome || J. R. Carpenter
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How I Loved the Broken Things of Rome || J. R. Carpenter || Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art
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How I Loved the Broken Things of Rome || J. R. Carpenter || Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art
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How I Loved the Broken Things of Rome || J. R. Carpenter || Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art
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How I Loved the Broken Things of Rome || J. R. Carpenter || Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art
Technical notes

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By Eric Dean Rasmussen, 12 September, 2011
Publication Type
Language
Year
Publisher
Journal volume and issue
19.2
License
All Rights reserved
Record Status
Abstract (in English)

A review of two field-defining books about electronic literature by N. Katherine Hayles and Christopher Funkhouser, whose literary scholarship counters the ahistoricizing tendencies of much writing about digital media.

(Source: Eric Dean Rasmussen)

Pull Quotes

The production of digital literature is tied quite closely to its criticism and study, as many digital poets are scholars and vice versa; the shifts and developments in one area are never without
consequence in the other. This is why both an authoritative anthology and an archaeology are valuable interventions against ahistoricizing trends in digital media.

Funkhouser sees the growth of participatory, ergodic texts as "crucial" to the future of digital poetry, and ties the fate of digital poetry to that of games.

As the horizon of digital arts and literatures expands, the question that both Hayles and Funkhouser must confront directly is how to define their field.