ABSTRACT
The term ‘writing coastlines’ implies a double meaning. The word ‘writing’ refers both to the act of writing and to that which is written. The act of writing translates aural, physical, mental and digital processes into marks, actions, utterances, and speech-acts. The intelligibility of that which is written is intertwined with both the context of its production and of its consumption. The term ‘writing coastlines’ may refer to writing about coastlines, but the coastlines themselves are also writing in so far as they are translating physical processes into marks and actions. Coastlines are the shifting terrains where land and water meet, always neither land nor water and always both. The physical processes enacted by waves and winds may result in marks and actions associated with both erosion and accretion. Writing coastlines are edges, ledges, legible lines caught in the double bind of simultaneously writing and erasing. These in-between places are liminal spaces, both points of departure and sites of exchange.
One coastline implies another, implores a far shore. The dialogue implied by this entreaty intrigues me. The coastlines of the United Kingdom and those of Atlantic Canada are separated by three and a half thousand kilometres of ocean. Yet for centuries, fishers, sailors, explorers, migrants, emigrants, merchants, messengers, messages, packets, ships, submarine cables, aeroplanes, satellite signals and wireless radio waves have attempted to bridge this distance. These comings and goings have left traces. Generations of transatlantic migrations have engendered networks of communications. As narratives of place and displacement travel across, beyond, and through these networks, they become informed by the networks’ structures and inflected with the syntax and grammar of the networks’ code languages.
Writing coastlines interrogates this in-between space with a series of questions: When does leaving end and arriving begin? When does the emigrant become the immigrant? What happens between call and response? What narratives resonate in the spaces between places separated by time, distance, and ocean yet inextricably linked by generations of immigration?
This thesis takes an overtly interdisciplinary approach to answering these questions. This practice-led research refers to and infers from the corpora and associated histories, institutions, theoretical frameworks, modes of production, venues, and audiences of the visual, media, performance, and literary arts, as well as from the traditionally more scientific realms of cartography, navigation, network archaeology, and creative computing. Writing Coastlines navigates the emerging and occasionally diverging theoretical terrains of electronic literature, locative narrative, media archaeology, and networked art through the methodology of performance writing pioneered at Dartington College of Art (Bergvall 1996, Hall 2008). Central to this methodology is an iterative approach to writing, which interrogates the performance of writing in and across contexts toward an extended compositional process.
Writing Coastlines will contribute to a theoretical framework and methodology for the creation and dissemination of networked narrative structures for stories of place and displacement that resonate between sites, confusing and confounding boundaries between physical and digital, code and narrative, past and future, home and away.
Writing Coastlines will contribute to the creation of a new narrative context from which to examine a multi-site-specific place-based identity by extending the performance writing methodology to incorporate digital literature and locative narrative practices, by producing and publicly presenting a significant body of creative and critical work, and by developing a mode of critical writing which intertwines practice with theory.
RESEARCH QUESTION
Can a juxtaposition of coastlines create a new narrative context from which to examine a multi-site-specific place-based identity?
In order to address this question it is necessary to understand two things:
What narratives resonate in the spaces between places separated by time, distance and ocean yet inextricably linked by generations of immigration?
Can digital networks serve as narrative structures for writing resonating between locations, beyond nations?
AIM & OBJECTIVES
Writing Coastlines aims to build new networked narrative structures for stories of place and displacement that resonate between sites, confusing and confounding boundaries between physical and digital, code and narrative, past and future, home and away.
The objectives of this research are:
to create a theoretical framework by identifying and incorporating strategies from performance writing, literary fiction, digital literature, locative narrative, networked art practises, and media archaeology.
to utilise that framework to undertake a formal investigation of:
networks as places, placeholders, sites of exchange and narrative structures;
forms of very short fiction capable of travelling through networks intact as narrative units; and
ways in which the syntax and grammar of code languages inflect born-digital literary texts.
WEB-BASED PRACTICE-LED RESEARCH OUTCOMES
Wanderkammer: A Walk Through Texts
J. R. Carpenter (2011) Wanderkammer: A Walk Through Texts
Related Links
J. R. Carpenter (2011) Wanderkammer: A Walk Through Texts, in Walk Poems: A Series of Reviews of Walking Projects, Louis Bury and Corey Frost, eds. Jacket2.
Annabel Iser (2012) Wanderkammer. NT2 Répertoire.
Muddy Mouth
J. R. Carpenter (2011) Muddy Mouth, in Speak iOS app, by Jason E. Lewis and Bruno Nadeau (free download from iTunes)
Along the Briny Beach
J. R. Carpenter (2011) Along the Briny Beach
Along the Briny Beach performed by J. R. Carpenter and Jerome Fletcher at E-Poetry 2011, SUNY Buffalo, Buffalo, New York, USA. Photo by Giovana di Rosario.
Related Links
J. R. Carpenter (2012) Along the Briny Beach, published in ELMCIP Anthology of European Electronic Literature.
J. R. Carpenter (2011) Along the Briny Beach and Sea Garden, published in Boulder Pavement 04.
Lenardo Flores (2012) "Along the Briny Beach" by J.R. Carpenter, I Love E-Poetry.
Nick Montfort (2009) Taroko Gorge
Nick Montfort (2011) Yo Dawg, I Hear You Like Taroko Gorge, Post Position.
STRUTS
J. R. Carpenter (2011) STRUTS
Related Links
Brian Stefans (2011) Third Hand Plays: “Struts” by J. R. Carpenter, Open Space, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, USA.
J. R. Carpenter (2011) Locating Struts Gallery: It’s Somewhere Near Sackville, New Brunswick, on the Tintemar River, in Arcadia, Nouvelle France, Lapsus Linguae.
J. R. Carpenter (May 22 - June 21, 2011) Open Studio Artist in Residence, Struts Gallery & Faucet New Media Centre, Sackville, New Brunswick, Canada.
Staff Reporter (2011) Resident artist brings Web-based writing project to Struts, Faucet. The Sackville Tribune Post, Published on June 15, 2011
Whisper Wire
J. R. Carpenter (2010) Whisper Wire
Related Links
J. R. Carpenter (2010) Whisper Wire: A Poetry Generator Transmitting and Receiving Electronic Voice Phenomena Through Haunted Media, Lapsus Linguae.
Whisper Wire performed by J. R. Carpenter and Jerome Fletcher at Inspace... no one can hear you scream, an evening of language in digital performance presented by the third International Conference on Interactive Digital Storytelling and New Media Scotland at Inspace, 1 Crichton Street, Edinburgh, UK, Sunday 31st October 2010.
Carpenter, J. R. (2011) "Whisper Wire," Rampike Vol. 20 / No. 2 “Scientific Wonders.” University of Windsor, Windsor, ON, Canada, pp 54-56.
Gorge
Writing Coastlines Letters
J. R. Carpenter (2013) Writing Coastlines Letters (refresh page to generate new letters)
Related Links
Matt Sephton (2010) Love Letter (refresh page to generate new letters)
Nick Montfort (2008) The Two
Nanette Wylde (1998, 2012) about so many things
TRANS.MISSION [A.DIALOGUE]
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J. R. Carpenter (2011) TRANS.MISSION [A.DIALOGUE]
J. R. Carpenter (2011) TRANS.MISSION [A.DIALOGUE] (performance script)
J. R. Carpenter (2014) Translation, transmutation, transmediation, and transmission in TRANS.MISSION [A.DIALOGUE], chaiers virtuels, NT2, UQAM, Montreal, QC, Canada.
Related Links
Rozalie Hirs (2012) Vertaallab 17 J.R. Carpenter – TRANS.MISSION [A.DIALOGUE]
J. R. Carpenter (2013) TRANS.MISSION [UN.DIALOGUE], trans. Ariane Savoie, bleuOrange, Montreal, PQ, Canada.
Ariane Savoie (2014) La littérarité du code informatique TRANS.MISSION [A. DIALOGUE], chaiers virtuels, NT2, UQAM, Montreal, QC, Canada.
Barbara Bridger (2013) Dramaturgy and the Digital, Exeunt Magazine.
J. R. Carpenter (2012) "TRANS.MISSION [A.DIALOGUE]," print publication, The &Now Awards 2: The Best Innovative Writing. Lake Forest, IL, USA: &Now Books
J. R. Carpenter (2012) "TRANS.MISSION [A.DIALOGUE]," print publication, A Global Visuage. Jörg Piringer & Günter Vallaster, eds.Vienna: edition ch
The Broadside of a Yarn
J. R. Carpenter (2012) The Broadside of a Yarn, Remediating the Social, Inspace, Edinburgh, UK.
J. R. Carpenter (2012) The Broadside of a Yarn, print map handout, Remediating the Social, Inspace, Edinburgh, UK.
J. R. Carpenter (2012) The Broadside of a Yarn, detail - print map square with QR code linking to the computer-generated narrative dialogue Trading Lip For Ear, Remediating the Social, Inspace, Edinburgh, UK.
J. R. Carpenter (2012) The Broadside of a Yarn, detail - QR code linking to the computer-generated narrative dialogue Trading Lip For Ear.
Related Links
J. R. Carpenter (2012) The Broadside of a Yarn artist's page in Remediating the Social exhibition catalogue (PDF)
J. R. Carpenter (2013) The Print Map as a 'literary platform', article published in The Literary Platform.
J. R. Carpenter (2013) The Broadside of A Yarn, artist's statement published on Authoring Software.
J. R. Carpenter (2012) The Broadside of a Yarn print map handout catalogued in The British Library BL Maps X.8002.
J. R. Carpenter (2014) The Broadside of a Yarn: A Situationist Strategy for Spinning Sea Stories Ashore, Performance Research: A Journal of the Performing Arts, 18:5, 88-95.
The National Library of Scotland online collection of broadsides
Judy Malloy (2014) The Electronic Manuscript, Authoring Software.
There he was, gone.
J. R. Carpenter (2012) There he was, gone.
There he was, gone. performed by (from left to right) Judd Morrissy, Jerome Fletcher, J. R. Carpenter, and Mark Jeffery in the Sculpture Court of Edinburgh College of Art, Edinburgh, UK, 1 November 2013. Photo by Cris Cheek.
Related Links
Funk Island Bank - Marine Weather Forecast - Environment Canada.
bpNichol (1985) Lament (audio) read by bpNichol during the launch in Toronto of Zygal: A Book of Mysteries and Translations (Coach House Press, 1985) on February 20th, 1986.
up from the deep
J. R. Carpenter (2013) up from the deep, in Know, iOS app, by Jason E. Lewis and Bruno Nadeau (free download from iTunes)
...and by islands I mean paragraphs
J. R. Carpenter (2013) ...and by islands I mean paragraphs
Related Links
J. R. Carpenter (2013) ...and by islands I mean paragraphs, The Island Review, Edinburgh, UK
J. R. Carpenter (2013) ...and by islands I mean paragraphs, Cherche le texte Virtual Gallery, launched at the Bibliotheque National de France in Paris, September 2013
Nick Montfort and Stephanie Strickland (2010) Sea and Spar Between, Dear Navigator, SIAC, USA.
Elizabeth Bishop (1971) Crusoe in England
Notes on the Voyage of Owl and Girl
J. R. Carpenter (2013) Notes on the Voyage of Owl and Girl
Related Links
J. R. Carpenter (2013) Notes on the Voyage of Owl and Girl, exhibition, Avenues of Access: An Exhibit & Online Archive of New ‘Born Digital’ Literature, Modern Languages Association 2013, Boston, MA, USA.
J. R. Carpenter (2013) Notes on the Voyage of Owl and Girl, performed at ELO 2013: Chercher le texte, Le Cube, Paris, France, 26 September 2013.
J. R. Carpenter (2013) Notes on the Voyage of Owl and Girl, print publication, Fourteen Hills: The San Francisco State University Review, 20.2. 122-128.
Fred Wah (2013) Poetry Connection: Link Up with Canadian Poetry
description and performance of Notes on the Voyage of Owl and Girl (YouTube)
discussion topics and writing ideas based on Notes on the Voyage of Owl and Girl (PDF)
Edward Lear(1871) The Owl and the Pussy-Cat
Eugene Field (1889) Wynken, Blynken and Nod
CONFERENCE PAPERS
Writing Coastlines: The Operation of Estuaries, Islands and Beaches as Liminal Spaces in the Writings of Elizabeth Bishop
'It Must be Nova Scotia' : Negotiating Place In the Writings of Elizabeth Bishop, University of King’s College, Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada, 9-12 June, 2011
Generating Books: Paradoxical Print Snapshots of Digital Literary Processes
Congrés Internacional Mapping e-lit: Lectura i anàlisi de la literatura digital, Universitat de Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain, 24-25 November 2011
TRANS.MISSION [A.DIALOGUE]: Locating Narrative Resonance in Transatlantic Communications Networks
Network Archaeology, Miami, Oxford, Ohio, USA, 19-21 April 2012
Translation, transmutation, transmediation, and transmission in TRANS.MISSION [A.DIALOGUE]
Translating E-Literature, Université Paris 8 Vincennes-Saint-Denis/Université Paris Diderot, June 12-14 2012
The Broadside of a Yarn: A Situationist Strategy for Spinning Sea Stories Ashore
Environmental Utterance, University College Falmouth, Falmouth, UK, 1-2 September 2012
CONTACT
J. R. Carpenter
http://luckysoap.com
Twitter @jr_carpenter
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