The Silent Numbers combines audio collage with original text appropriated from an e-mail group devoted to recording and transcribing numbers stations. Numbers stations are shortwave radio broadcasts of human and machine-read numbers and letters probably used in espionage to communicate with field agents.
I’m interested in the collision of cold war technology designed for espionage and the desire for knowledge and connection in the community of listeners
The Silent Numbers is a collage of audio and text.
The meaning of the messages doesn't matter to me, only that they are speaking, and though I will never know for sure, they speak to me, so I record the numbers.
The work is web-based and driven by HTML, JavaScript, PHP, and CSS.
Notes Very Necessary is a collaboratively authored web-based multi-media essay that aims to addresses climate change by remixing images, text, and data generated by centuries imperialist, colonialist, capitalist, and scientific exploration in the Arctic. The title is borrowed from an essay authored in 1580 by the Englishmen Arthur Pet and Charles Jackman offering detailed instructions on how to conquer new territories by taking copious notes. In 2015 Barbara Bridger and J. R. Carpenter attempted to follow these instructions by making, finding, and faking notes, images, data, and diagrams online and reconfiguring them into a new narrative. The result is a long, horizontally scrolling, highly variable collage essay charting the shifting melting North.
if the wind does serve
go a seaboard the sands.
set off from thence.
note the time diligently.
turn then your glass.
keep continual watch.
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An article on the creation and critical context of J. R. Carpenter's web-based work "Walks from City Bus Routes", which uses JavaScript to randomly and endlessly recombine illustrations and portions of text from an Edinburgh City Transport booklet published in the 1950sand bus and tram route icons from a City of Edinburgh Transport Map published in the 1940s, resulting in a new guide ‘book’ which perpetually proposes an infinite number of plausible yet practically impossible walking routes through the city of Edinburgh, and and its book shops, confusing and confounding boundaries between physical and digital, reading and writing, fact and fiction.
Questions of place have long-pervaded my fiction writing and maps have figured prominently in many of my web-based works. An outline of a map of Nova Scotia served as the interface for one of my earliest web-based works, Mythologies of Landforms and Little Girls (1996). In The Cape (2005), I used an assortment of maps, charts, and diagrams borrowed from an Environmental Geologic Guide to Cape Cod National Seashore published in 1979 as stand-ins for family photographs. In In Absentia (2008) I used the Google Maps API to haunt the satellite view of the Mile End neighbourhood of Montreal with stories of former tenants forced out by gentrification. My first novel, Words the Dog Knows (2008) included an impossible map of ancient Rome. I’d never set out to map a place I’d never been before, but then sometimes maps seem to call places into being.
Though many of the paths, towpaths, grassy slopes, fields, and roundabouts referenced in the Edinburgh City Transport pamphlet no longer exist, as variables within JavaScript strings these past places are ascribed new locations in computer memory. Called as statements into this new narrative structure, these past places become potential (albeit imaginary) destinations once again (albeit for readers rather than walkers).
This web-based computer-generated guide 'book' perpetually proposes plausible yet practically impossible walking routes through the city of Edinburgh and its environs using JavaScript developed by Caden Lovelace and images and text culled from a City of Edinburgh Transport Map published by the Edinburgh Geographical Institute in the 1940s and a pamphlet called Walks from City Bus Routes published by Edinburgh City Transport in the late 1950s.
DIRECTIONS: Leave the bus and cross the bridge over the canal. Take the footpath about five yards to the left and continue north. Passing a derelict mill you will observe the rather florid facade of a small, unlikely building. Here there is a wide view of the hills - wasted, one feels, on the young, but no doubt comforting to their teachers. The path runs among thickets of rhododendron and flowering trees. The tower was built in 1972 and presented to the city in 1932. Turn Right into the road and follow the path which leads round the shoulder of the hill. If you care to pay the small fee to climb to the top, you will be rewarded with one of the best panoramas in the area. In late autumn the hawthorn hedges assume a remarkable colour. After a few yards, cross the road and continue. Continue along the road from the level crossing to the corner. This walk is not exciting. For the adventurous there is a further section of so-called promenade along the sea wall from the level crossing. The road continues between the grounds of the hospitals to the bus route. For bus route information see appendix.
TRANS.MISSION [A.DIALOGUE] is a computer-generated dialogue, a literary narrative of generations of transatlantic migration, a performance in the form of a conversation, an encoded discourse propagating across, beyond, and through long-distance communications networks. One JavaScript file sits in one directory on one server attached to a vast network of hubs, routers, switches, and submarine cables through which this one file may be accessed many times from many places by many devices. The mission of this JavaScript is to generate another sort of script. The call “function produce_stories()” produces a response in the browser, a dialogue to be read aloud in three voices: Call, Response, and Interference; or: Strophe, Antistrophe, and Chorus; or Here, There, and Somewhere in Between.
TRANS. Un préfixe qui décrit une traversée. Un préfixe qui peut être géolocalisé : transatlantique. Un préfixe qui s’exprime par un mouvement : transférer, transporter, transiter.
MISSION. Un groupe de personnes envoyé dans une contrée étrangère qui assiste, négocie, ou encore établit des relations sur ce nouveau territoire. Une tâche opérationnelle comme un programme informatique.
DIALOGUE. Une conversation entre deux ou plusieurs personnes. Un récit littéraire qui prend la forme d’une conversation.
TRANS.MISSION [UN.DIALOGUE] est un dialogue généré par ordinateur, un récit littéraire ou encore une conversation qui traverse les réseaux de communication transatlantiques. C’est une narration qui voyage sur l’océan, cherchant à envoyer un message aux habitants et aux voyageurs des côtes maritimes.
Les particularités des dispositifs techniques, comme les interférences et les échecs de transmission, ont marqué des générations de migrations transatlantiques et témoignent des réalités propres aux outils de communication. Entre incommunicabilité, atemporalité et asynchronicité se crée un imaginaire de la technologie qui expose les spécificités du langage littéraire lorsque contenu dans un code informatique.
Le texte est un fichier Javascript qui articule nombre de variables comprises dans une suite d’algorithmes. La génération automatique du texte est exécutée par l’ordinateur qui sélectionne les termes à afficher aléatoirement. Le contenu est mis à jour toutes les minutes de sorte que l’usager sera toujours confronté au facteur de variabilité et ne pourra jamais terminer la lecture d’une version.
L’œuvre est une construction mécanique, un programme informatique qui lie des mots à une structure qui leur serait autrement étrangère. La sémantique et la syntaxe n’appartiennent plus au langage littéraire, mais à celui du code informatique, à celui de l’outil de transmission. Le projet brouille et confond les limites du physique et du numérique, du code et du récit, du passé et du futur; il est entre la maison et l’ailleurs.
Ether is a hypothetical medium – supposed by the ancients to fill the heavens, proposed by scientist to account for the propagation of electromagnetic radiation through space. The notion of ‘ocean’ was once as vague. Aristotle perceived of the world as a small place, bounded by a narrow river. Columbus believed the Atlantic was a much shorter distance across than we now know it to be. Even as early electromagnetic telegraphic and wireless transmissions propagating over, under, and through oceans collapsed distances between ships and shores, they revealed vast new oceans – oceans of static, oceans of noise. Etheric Ocean is an underwater web art audio writing noise site. It is an imprecise survey of sounds both animal and mechanical, and of signs both real and imaginary, of distortions born of the difficulty of communicating through the medium of deep dense dark ocean. Like stations dotting a radio dial, murky diagrams, shifting definitions, appropriated texts, nautical associations, and wonky word plays are strung along a very long, horizontally scrolling browser window. This is a world of inversions. Sounds are deep harbours, or are they depths? Sounds purposefully unfold. Out of its element, uncannily airborne, a flying jellyfish drone wobbles about. Noises are made. Islands are Heard.
this sea is nothing in sight but isles.............................................................a company of isles......................................full of fa(i)r sounds......... . . . . . . . . .........................within these sounds we sent our boats..........................................................into the [e(i)ther....................................]................ ..............................................................an etheric ocean................................................an ocean of static........................................................................................an ocean of silence.........................................an ocean of [noise...........................................]. < sounds onclick="likeThis" > [not, a bit, un-] like < /sounds> [ If you can't hear sound here, it's possible that your computer or browser doesn't support the sound file format. Or, that you have your speakers turned off. Or, that you are a land mammal bending you ear to hear sounds deep under water. ] Through its early association with the sea, wireless evoked a slight apprehension over the depthless void technology had revealed to the world. The ether was at once vast and diffuse. Drifting through the spectrum in search of transmissions from the most distant points around the nation and globe was a journey traversed primarily across mysterious expanses of static. [ w h a t I a m c a l l i n g n o i s e ] has an inchoate shape, as weather does.
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Vladimir Propp’s analysis of Russian folk tales is known to have produced a semi-formal description of the structure of these tales that has acted as inspiration for several story generation systems, both sequential and interactive. Its exhaustive description of the constituent elements of tales of this kind, and the enumeration of the patterns they follow provided a very useful starting point for researchers looking for computational implementations of story generators. However, it is less generally known that in his book Propp also proposed a procedure for the generation of new tales based on his analytical framework. Although this generative procedure is much less formal than its analytical counterpart, it is one of the first existing instances of a creative process described procedurally. Of particular interest for the field of creative story generation is the number of issues that are declared relevant but not explored in detail.The present paper revisits Propp’s description and focuses on the task of generating the sequence of character functions that determine the plot of the tale. For this task, a number of possible computational implementations are explored, in search for those that produce better results in terms of a number of simple evaluation metrics inspired by Propp’s formalism.
Electronic Literature is a loaded and slippery category. It is rather dryly defined by the Electronic Literature Organization (what other art form needs a governing body?) as “works with important literary aspects that take advantage of the capabilities and contexts provided by the stand-alone or networked computer.” Does this mean everything or nothing?
If there’s one person who knows the ins and outs of e-Lit as a category and an institution, it’s J. R. Carpenter. The Canadian artist, writer, performer – and myriad other titles – first logged onto the internet in November 1993, and has been deeply invested in making work both online and off ever since. This work floats across all mediums: zines, novels, hypertext fictions and performances, all referencing and circling back on each other.
In February 2013, writer Elvia Wilk took part in a writing residency at the Banff Center called In(ter)ventions: Literary Practice at the Edge, a yearly program where J. R. is a member of faculty. Banff is also an important place in the development of J. R.’s work; it was during a 1995 residency there that she made her first hypertext project. Recently Elvia and J. R. caught up with each other in London to re-hash many of the issues they talked about while together at Banff – dissecting various (misleading) terms in the e-Lit field, going over projects both new and old, discussing code as performance writing, and ending up on a chain of imaginary islands.
EW: Code writing is a performance in which the text performs itself very literally.
JRC: It’s a great methodology to apply to something like digital literature, because you’ve got so many different processes happening at once. N. Katherine Hayles talks about the digital text as being “event-ialized.” I contact a server, and that server contacts another server somewhere, which sends something back, and then the source code performs in the browser, which calls on various aspects of the CPU to make activity happen…so it’s not just one text, it’s a text that’s distributed through what Deleuze & Guattari would call a “machinic assemblage.” This is how I think of the computer-generated texts and code narratives in my work.
Both authors, responsible for a selection of works dealing with textualities in digital media, present the collection published as part of this issue of Texto Digital.