geography

A thoroughfare [] beat Across the wilderness follows speculative pathways of long-distance fiber-optic internet service provider (ISP) cabling (as studied in InterTubes: A Study of the US Long-haul Fiber-optic Infrastructure). With fiber-optic routes generally considered a state or corporate secret, this 4-year study headed by Paul Barford is the first of its kind.

Story written in German, with English translation available, using pop-up windows containing text, images and sounds to tell small stories about North.

"traces" is a locative media work delivered on mobile phone via video, audio and MP3, exploring the relationships of people, memory and place. In it, the environments we move through- the streets, buildings; the parks and bridges and alleyways of Sydney’s CBD - reveal themselves as sites rich with meaning, traced over with both personal and shared narrative.

In “traces” 5-7 people will disclose 5-7 true stories, recounting a vivid, intense personal experience that has occurred in a specific place in Sydney. A postcard showing an “alternate” map of Sydney with the 5-7 specific sites marked on it will tie the experiences to the actual locations. This will also allow audiences to choose between accessing the material immediately while in the exhibition space, stepping outside or walking/ travelling to the actual location to experience the stories. Audiences will also be able to submit their responses to the stories or their own vivid location based experiences via SMS to a specific phone number or moblog, revealing a city alive with memory and personal meaning. The moblog of public responses could also be exhibited as part of the overall work within d_Art05. The initial 5-7 narrative “traces” have been selected as experiences representing intimate, personal recollections as well as those forming parts of Sydney’s shared cultural memory. Initial selected sites include the Opera House, Harbour Bridge, Luna Park, Chinatown, Kings Cross and Bondi. In the next few weeks I will also attempt to identify other stories and locations close to the Opera House.

"traces" will use Bluetooth technology to transfer the video or sound files to audiences. Potentially MP3 files of the audio information can also be transferred to iPod users as an alternate mode of experiencing the work.

A collaborative fictional description of a future Copenhagen told in descriptions of places on a satellite map of Copenhagen. The title is a play upon the PR organisation Wonderful Copenhagen. A bus tour of Copenhagen with readings from the work was organised in March 2009.

Core Sample is a GPS-based interactive sound walk and corresponding sound sculpture that evokesthe material and cultural histories contained in and suggested by the landscape of Spectacle Island.The piece engages the extended landscape of Boston Harbor as bound by the new Boston Institute ofContemporary Art building on the downtown waterfront, and Spectacle Island, a former dump andreclaimed landfill park visible just off the coast. The two sites function dialogically, questioningwhat is seen versus what is not seen, what is preserved and recorded versus what is suppressed anddenied. (Source: Project website)

STRUTS is an algorithmic narrative collage created from a collection of fragments of facts and fictions pertaining to a place and its people, history, geography and storm events. Narrative resonates in the spaces between the texts horizontally scrolling across the screen, the flickering updating of monthly tide gauge averages, the occasional appearance of live weather weather warnings pulled in by RSS feed and the animated set of photographs of the ends of the struts that support the seawall that protectsa portion of foreshore from the rising tides of the Northumberland Strait. The photographs were taken on May 23, 2011 the second day of a five-week stint as Open Studio Artist in Residence at Struts Gallery and Faucet Media Lab, Sackville, New Brunswick, Canada, May 22 – June 26, 2011. The Saxby Gale of 1869 is the storm we compare all possible storms to. The tide gauge data represents the monthly tide gauge averages for Shediac Bay from the month I was born to the month I moved from Canada to England. The gauge that measured these averages was destroyed in the same storm surge that damaged the struts in the photographs, onl the night of 21 December 2010. The Tantramar Marsh text is excerpted from Writing Coastlines: The Operation of Estuaries, Islands and Beaches as Liminal Spaces in the Writings of Elizabeth Bishop, a paper written in residence at Struts and presented at "It Must Be Nova Scotia: Negotiating Place in the Writings of Elizabeth Bishop" which took place at University of King's College, Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada, June 10-12, 2011.

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"

Entre Ville was commissioned in 2006 by OBORO, an artist-run centre in Montréal, on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the Conseil des Arts de Montréal. J. R. Carpenter writes: "Although I had lived in Montréal for 15 years at the time of the commission, Entre Ville was my first major work about my adopted city. It took me that long to learn the vocabulary. I don’t mean French, or Greek, Italian, Portuguese, Yiddish or any of the other languages spoken in my neighbourhood. I refer, rather, to a visual, tactile, aural, sensorial vocabulary. My home office window opens into a jumbled intimacy of back balconies, yards, gardens and alleyways. Daily my dog and I walk through this interior city sniffing out stories. Poetry is not hard to find between the long lines of peeling-paint fences plastered with notices, spray painted with bright abstractions and draped with trailing vines. Entre Ville is web-based heat-wave poem presented in the vernacular of my neighbourhood, where cooking smells, noisy neighbours and laundry lines criss-cross the alleyway one sentence at a time." Entre Ville was launched at the Musée des beaux-arts de Montreal April 27, 2006.

This description comes from Rebooting Electronic Literature Volume 2:

Stephanie Strickland's True North came out in 1997 in two formats. First, it was published as a print book of poetry by the University of Notre Dame Press and won––that same year––the Poetry Society of America's Alice Fay Di Castagnola Award and the Ernest Sandeen Poetry Prize. It also appeared as a hypertext poem released on floppy disk for both PC and Macintosh computers by Eastgate Systems, Inc. As Strickland states in her “Prologue,” work on True North began in 1995 at N. Katherine Hayles's National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Seminar but originally was conceived over a decade earlier when, influenced by the writings of Simone Weil, she developed an interest in finding a woman’s language.

The editions and versions include:Print EditionTrue North, published by the University of Notre Dame Press, in 1997; ISBN: 0-268-01899-5Digital Versions✭Version 1.0: True North for PC on 3.5-inch floppy disk, published in 1997 by Eastgate Systems, Inc.Version 1.1: Created with Storyspace 1.0✭Version 2.0: True North for Macintosh on 3.5-inch floppy disk, published in 1997 by Eastgate Systems, Inc.Version 1.1: 3: Created with Storyspace 1.0✭Version 3.0: To Be Here As Stone Is, web poem created for Netscape 4.x browsers by Strickland and M. D. Coverley and published separately at http://califia.us/SI/stone1.htm✭ Version 4.0: True North for CD-ROM, published in 1999 by Eastgate Systems, Inc.Version 2.1: CD-ROM for both Macintosh and PC created with Storyspace 1.0