in absentia is presented by DARE-DARE Centre de diffusion dart multidisciplinaire de Montral, located in Montreal in a park with no name between Saint-Laurent and Clark, between Arcade and the Rosemont/Van Horne overpass. The launch party will take place on June 24, 5-11 pm in the park with no name. This event is free and open to the public. There will be DJs and a cash bar and a possibly a laser light show if we find the time.

in absentia is a web-based writing project that addresses issues of gentrification and its erasures in the Mile End neighbourhood of Montreal. In recent years many long-time low-income neighbours being forced out of Mile End by gentrification. So far fiction is the best way I’ve found to give voice these disappeared neighbours, and the web is the best place I’ve found to situate their stories. Our stories. My building is for sale; my family may be next. Faced with imminent eviction I’ve begun to write as if I’m no longer here, about a Mile End that is no longer here. By manipulating the Google Maps API, I am able to populate “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.

The project will launch in Montreal in the Mile End’s parc sans nom on June 24, 2008 from 5-11PM. New stories will continue to be added until November 30, 2008.

The launch of in absentia marks the end of DARE-DARE’s Dis/location: projet d’articulation urbaine. On July 1st, DARE-DARE’s blue trailer will leave the vacant lot that was its home for two years and move towards Montreal’s downtown, in Cabot Square, corner Sainte-Catherine and Atwater. The launch of in absentia will be the last event held in the Mile End’s parc sans nom, so come on out and help make it a great one.

What are the creative and poetic possibilities of RSS syndication and how might the introduction of omnipresent, iterative publishing processes affect our experience of digital literature? How can a book be transformed and reworked through an exploration of the formal and aesthetic structure of the stream? In February 2007, Vancouver-based literary quarterly The Capilano Review published an issue dedicated to new writing and new technologies guest-edited by Andrew Klobucar and including essays by Andrew Klobucar, Global Telelanguage Resources, Sandra Seekins, Kate Armstrong, David Jhave Johnston, Laura U. Marks, Sharla Sava, Kevin Magee, Jim Andrews, Gordon Winiemko, Nancy Paterson and Darren Wershler-Henry. Commissioned by The Capilano Review, Tributaries & Text-fed Streams: A Feed-Reading of The Capilano Review is a new artwork in which Montreal-based writer and artist J.R. Carpenter undertakes an experimental rereading of and response to this text.

Project launch: Helen Pitt Gallery, Vancouver; May 24, 2008; 7:30 pm.

BIOGRAPHIES

J.R. CARPENTER is a two-time winner of the CBC Québec Short Story Competition and a Web Art Finalist in the Drunken Boat Panliterary Awards 2006. Her electronic literature has been presented at the Musée des beaux-arts (Montréal) and the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art (Toronto), and is included in the Electronic Literature Collection Volume One, the Rhizome ArtBase and the Web Biennial 2007 (Istanbul). Her short fiction has been broadcast on CBC Radio, translated into French and anthologized in Le livre de chevet, Short Stuff, Lust for Life and In Other Words, and has appeared in journals including Geist, The New Quarterly, Blood & Aphorisims and Matrix. A fellow of Yaddo, Ucross and the Banff New Media Institute, she has been awarded grants in literature and in new media from the Canada Council for the Arts and the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec. She presently serves as President of the Board of Directors of OBORO, a gallery and new media lab in Montréal. Her first novel, Words the Dog Knows, is forthcoming from Conundrum Press in Fall 2008

KATE ARMSTRONG is an artist and writer working with networks, participatory systems, and computational poetics. Her projects have taken a variety of forms including net art, psychogeography, installation, audio, performance, painting, and robotics. Recent exhibitions include IAO Gallery, Oklahoma City, US; Yerba Buena Centre for the Arts, San Francisco, US; ISEA, San Jose, US; Simon Fraser University Gallery, Burnaby, Canada; Centre A, Vancouver, Canada; Western Front, Vancouver, Canada; Open Space, Victoria, Canada; Akbank Sanat, Istanbul, Turkey; and Prairie Art Gallery, Grande Prairie, Canada. She has written for P.S 1/MoMA, TrAce, Year Zero One, The Capilano Review, The Kootenay School of Writing, and The Thing, among others. Her first book, Crisis & Repetition: Essays on Art and Culture, was published in 2002. Armstrong is the director of Upgrade Vancouver.

Showings must be strictly limited to six people per session, so we ask that you get back to us at this email address — cayley at shadoof dot net –with your first and second choice of a preferred session. These spaces will be filled on a first-come, first-served basis and we apologize in advance if we are unable to accommodate you.

Wednesday, May 14
- Session 1: 6:30-7:10
- Session 2: 7:10-7:50
- Session 3: 7:50-8:30

Thursday, May 15
- Session 1: 6:30-7:10
- Session 2: 7:10-7:50
- Session 3: 7:50-8:30

Friday, May 16
- Session 1: 6:30-7:10
- Session 2: 7:10-7:50
- Session 3: 7:50-8:30

By Monday, May 12, there will be a program with some details of the pieces to be shown accessible on the Writing Digital Media website: http://writingdigitalmedia.org

Please also visit the CCV website: http://www.ccv.brown.edu/

With thanks to Prof. Jan Hesthaven (CCV Director), Prof. Clyde Briant (Vice President of Research), Sharon King, Sam Fulcomer, everyone else associated with CCV and the Cave, and special thanks to CCV’s John Huffman.

The piece uses Craigslist’s RSS feature to obtain new feeds to add to the XML database that the software uses. Once new feeds are obtained, a screen scraping routine is employed to obtain the full text of the post. The software operates in real time, but it keeps a cache of posts to cycle through. This cache is periodically flushed, its period determined by the number of missed connections posts that the program obtains in a day. Like many of my other pieces, Missed Connections was developed in Java. XML reading and writing was made possible via JDOM and the RSS component used ROME for parsing the feeds.

Cristobal Mendoza is a Venezuelan media artist and programmer whose interests lie in the intersection of technology with the personal. His current research involves databases and data bodies, networks and visualizations of networks. He obtained an M.F.A. in Digital + Media from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2007, and his B.A. from the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, in 2003. His work has been shown in various venues in the United States and Italy.

The emphasis of the software is on the process of writing / typing. TBT is a tool for time-based recording and playback of the process of typing a message, with the accuracy of milliseconds. The basic interface for typing records all typing and plays it back exactly the way the text was typed the first time, including all hesitations and misspellings. It reveals additional information on digital poetry, because the speed of typing and reading it, are visualised. E-mail, blogs, all kinds of digital media can be given a “human touch” by TBT. The software has been kept as basic as possible, is free to use and users are encouraged to add functionalities. The special TBT website offers space for TBT-created messages, haiku’s and poetry, so that visitors can admire each other work.

TBT was made by Jaromil and conceived by Jaromil and JoDi. Following is a short interview with Jaromil about this new tool.

Annet Dekker: TBT was born as an idea formulated by you and JoDi. An interesting relation, a computer programmer/artist and an artist couple who like nothing more than to deconstruct soft -and hardwares. Could you describe your relation and your shared interest?

Jaromil: It is definitely a result and very much inspired by JoDi. What brought us together, besides the curiosity we nurtured about each other, was this commission for “Net art is dead” by Impakt. So we spent two weekends together. JoDi initially thought of taking the dyne:bolic operating system and subverting its functionalities, but the perspective of working further to subvert something I already invested a lot of effort on building was really discouraging for me.

So I opposed their intention and argued that, if we have something in common, surely it is a minimalist aesthetic and a passion for text and inner processes. At that point JoDi mentioned their interest in building a “key logger” that would record keys typed in any program running, in particular word processors. I insisted in focusing on the aspect of literary production, stripping down the approach to a reference implementation of a time-based text protocol for recording time-based literature - I was extremely excited about developing a software tool for literature. We all realized we like literary experiments in automatic writing and we would be interested in a tool to publish online time-based poetry as well to be used in email communication, where hesitations in writing can be a vehicle for sentiments?

AD: One of the important changes in the way of thinking about language, typography and poetry came from Italy, Marinetti said “my revolution is directed against the so-called typographical harmony of the page, instead I want to grasp words brutally and hurl them in the reader’s face.” is this something you can relate to? Does your own background, also coming from Italy has been of influence in your work?

J: Yes, I was born in Italy, but I’m part of a generation that starts, for necessity and virtue, to think about a common European heritage rather than a restricted (and in case of Italy over-celebrated) national identity. I guess this opens even more ways to play with language than Italians used to do in Italy anyway. My education was as classical as it can get in the south of Italy, mostly focusing on literature and philosophy, in particular ancient Latin and Greek; such traditions of written poetry respect metrical schemes and sometimes adopts a richer punctuation than the modern one we are used to. This is certainly a point of contact with the concept of Time Based Text, but by now I’d say my frequentation of digital haiku circles as the ‘five7five’ mailing list played a more important role in this project.

I find it very difficult to relate to Futurism, which I consider a decadent re-use of Symbolism. While it might be considered true that Marinetti’s furor has contributed to syntactical innovation and modern design, I do believe that was too functional to the mission of the industry to be considered art. Furthermore I fear the aggressive attitude of futurists, but that has more to do with personal taste I guess? My inspiration is coming from writers as James Joyce, Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs, to name just a few that challenged in various ways the performative act of what used to be called “automatic writing”.

AD: As the title indicates an important aspect of TBT is that it is time based, something that seems almost paradoxical when linked with a computer. How do you see this relation?

J: TBT is about the dimension of time in literature. The act of writing a flow of consciousness discards information. Such information is very abstract when compared to words and concepts, it can intimately describe the writer’s thoughts with all the hesitations occurring in the creative act. TBT offers also to preserve all the sentimental information that is related to the mediation of text in human communication. With TBT we preserve the emotional information produced when writing, at the same time opening the media art domain to the world of literature. The existence of a software as TBT draws complex relationships between code and language: it softly unveils the mutual influence between literary art and computer programming suggesting they can benefit from each other not just in terms of productivity.

AD: TBT reflects much the Japanese haiku’s or dada experiments. Most of these actions in poetry have a strong relation with the human, organic and emotions. Very little do they relate it seems with the ‘hard’ and ‘cold’ language and command lines of computers. How do you view this difference or better, change? Can we finally start to emotionally engage and understand our mechanics?

J: I guess the exploration of our mechanics (as opposed to the mechanics of machines) is always doomed to a sweet failure, the one that poetry celebrates with the best tears one can cry. The literary approach shifts the analysis to a produced fact, which reflects our inner sentiments: a production that is written out of our inner emotions but still sub-consciously shaped by them. Today the act of writing is arguably the most natural act of creation human kind engages on a regular basis, so there are chances to access a precedented undisclosed intimacy of thoughts there, in everyone who writes, between the lines.

AD: What do you think is more artistic the TBT software, as being software art, or the poetry that can be made by using it?

J: I think what is most artistic is the concept of TBT. The software itself and the poetry that can be made by using TBT are also a propagation of the artistic value of this exploration, but the artistic value is rather conceptual, probably definable media art. There is a formal approach in the realization that also can be argued as artistic: it is not by coincidence that both from a programmer’s and user’s point of view TBT will result minimalistic and, when adopted, extremely flexible. At least I refuse the usual rhetoric of presentation for “artistic software”, instead caring very much for functionality and a design that is faithful to text.

AD: In the past you have also talked about making the net more ‘organic’ by devising ‘new ways for information’, is TBT a step in the right direction?

J: Hopefully yes, at least it is an attempt. I hope that it can work in a natural and spontaneous way. That is why the work consists of a portable source code that works as a clean reference implementation and can be included in any other software (being open source and licensed GNU GPL), rather than building a TBT software that does it all for you, that would probably limit its usefulness on the long term. I also expect it to inspire people to think about less superficial ways of communication: right in a time in which our media-scape is getting polluted by opportunist automatas abusing our attention, the difference between us and them might be just…sentiments.

AD: How can you use TBT in your email program?

J: As an external editor: it can be called when the message needs to be written, once done will quit giving back the TBT message, which can be sent in an attachment. The reference implementation is working with the mail client Mutt, but hopefully some mail client will implement TBT natively in future.

AD: Could you tell me step-by-step what I should do to make TBT poetry?

J: once you have downloaded and compiled the source code (or you have booted a dyne:bolic liveCD or downloaded the OSX binary), just open a terminal and type ‘tbt -h’, you will get this help:

TBT - Time Based Text - v0.7 - tbt.dyne.org
Usage: tbt [options] [file]

-h print this help
-v version information
-D debug verbosity level - default 1
-c console interface mode (S-Lang)
-r record tbt - option alias: rectext
-p playback tbt - option alias: playtext -m mail composer - option alias: recmail -s save format in [ bin | ascii | html ] -x convert binary tbt to html or ascii

which suggests various possibilities to write your message, for example to simply write a message type:

tbt -c -r mymessage.tbt

and type your message, once done quit pressing ctrl+c

you can then play the message on the screen with:

tbt -c -p mymessage.tbt

in case you want to create a web TBT do

tbt -c -r -s html mymessage.html

then type and quit with ctrl+c

you can then upload mymessage.html to your website together with the tbt javascript code to be put in the same directory.

TBT currently also include a full website with “guestbook” functionality for others to upload their TBT, it is written in PHP and quite easy to setup on a normal web server.

Jaromil is a free software programmer, a media artist and activist. He has made significant contributions to the development of multimedia and streaming applications on the GNU/Linux platform (the free counterpart of commercial brands like Microsoft and Macintosh). He was born in Pescara, Italy, but now lives in Amsterdam, Netherlands. He is author of the dyne:bolic GNU/Linux liveCD, and of various free software projects, including MuSE (a streaming server) and FreeJ (a free VJ software to live mix and adjust images and sounds). As an artist, he has created performances and netart works as the :(){ :|:& };: forkbomb (when typed in the command line of a Unix system the computer crashes). He also founded dyne.org in 2000 under the flag of Freedom of Creation, playing hybrid between the fields of politics, art and technology.

Annet Dekker is program manager at Virtueel Platform and freelance curator and researcher based in Amsterdam.

An art project by Andre Lemos, Mari Fiorelli and Rob Shields to “write” on Google maps…

[From the website: GPS Writing, SUR-VIV-ALL - The idea came from the crossing of my reading of the book by Margaret Atwood, "Survival," with my research on locative media, city, mobility and new technologies. In the book "Survival", the author defends the thesis that the relationship with the survival is a pattern in the imagination of Canadian literature, both of prose and poetry: fighting the forces of nature, the natives, and the animals. . So, from my research on locative media, I plan to "write" the city of Edmonton (on 40 km) with a GPS Tracker, and mapping some hotspots along the way (using iStumbler, Loki, Google Maps, Google Earth...). What I was looking for here, in addition to entertainment, was a way to get closer to the city, to understand and feel their spaces, their dynamics. But, basically, a way to see my "survival" here.

The word "SURVIVAL" has been changed to "SUR-VIV-ALL," trying to create different meanings in English and French, the official languages Canada, and in Portuguese, my mother language. In French we can see or inferred "SUR VIV (R) E / VIE ...", something like an excess and a lack of life, just when survival is the least and last resort of existence. In Portuguese, "VIVA", claiming to live, an imperative. In English "survival", has its original meaning, plus the "ALL" that calls for a social dimension, the public and community.

What is at stake here is the imagination of the city, the relationship with extreme temperatures, the use of cars as standard displacement, the empty spaces, the invisibility of electronic processes (written by the GPS is invisible as well the hotspots Wi - Fi) on the actual structures in the midst of public space. We have photos, videos that attempt to capture this relationship, but with the thread to link with the outside world, the nature. The "Waypoints" on the map will show (as soon as we fished the data transfer) this multimedia content, as well as Wi-Fi hotspots open (we've accessed some networks on the street) or closed. - André Lemos]

[blogged by Rob Shields on Space and Culture]

At the very least, “Dolls” explores a fabulous range of themes including but not limited to everything from ethics to fashion. These themes are explored through an absurd collection of systems and materials, from Mohair, through contagion to Venus Fly-traps. Absurdity is perhaps the resuscitated and re-fertilized Venus Fly-Trap of today’s digital art world not to mention the now myriad “send to a friend” online communities. Everything old in the recent history of culture is new again online. Repetition begets re-examination…” From Why Some Dolls Are Bad by Eliza Fernbach, Furtherfield.org.

How do we read a text that removes the stabilizing spatial coordinates of the page and no longer maintains a top-centric and left-centric orientation? How do we read texts that do not simply simulate dimension but in fact materialize and operate on the z-axis? Here, Ender’s Game is suggestive: what Ender Wiggin has to learn about the null-gravity Battle Room is that it requires a fundamental reorientation of spatial perspective. Indeed, the players’ successful navigation and battle victories depend on their capacity to adapt to a space with a different spatial logic. So, too, a three-dimensional text – whether it be presented in the immersive reading environment of a Cave, a game space, a QuickTime video, or a Javascript poem – requires an adaptive flexibility that we might even call a new mode of reading, a “deep reading.”

My thinking about the theme of this issue – Writing.3D – did not begin with a consideration of video installations or gaming spaces, as one would perhaps initially expect, but with a consideration of a set of works that gestured toward the realization of three dimensions within the space of a poetic text. In David Knoebel’s Java series, Click Poetry: Words in Space (2001), for example, “Oh” creates the illusion of sphericality; the words in “Walkdont” spin on the subsidiary axes of an invisible mobile; and “A Fine View” reproduces the cinematic illusion of 3D by miming the roll-out of the prologue to Star Wars. Ted Warnell’s “Codepoetry” brings the suggestion of depth and three dimensionality to the fore with its intricate embedding of a symbolic z-axis within the work. The frame of the visual poem appears as the single face of a cube, each letter of the words “code poetry” laid out along invisible gridlines and marked with a coordinate. Not only do the letters themselves take the form of a “z,” but graphing the coordinates themselves reveals the form of another “z.”

In this special issue of TIR Web we will see a collection of texts in which three dimensionality is suggested and some in which it is actually realized….” Continue reading Editor’s Introduction: Writing.3D by Rita Raley, The Iowa Review - Web.

“Literary hypertext and hypermedia have been made for 15 years with a wide variety of development systems. When the ELO curated its first Electronic Literature Collection in 2006, in an open call for works, the 60 selected were made in some 10 different development systems, from HTML to VRML. Who is in this game, and how do we draw in new readers and players? Our featured artists answer this question in our interviews.

In a world that challenges (and sometimes defeats) writers with its constantly multiplying means, we chose to focus this issue of TIR-Web on two committed long-time practitioners. Donna Leishman, coming from both a fine arts and commercial background, creates finely wrought narrative based on folkloric or historic myth, using very few words. Jason Nelson, coming from a print MFA program and self-taught in software, creates poetical / fictionary “creatures” in great numbers, many of whom use text he has written or appropriated, while others focus on screen morphology or interface, as if “interface” were itself the real “critter” at issue…”

Since the computer was invented, writers have been using it to forge new literary forms. This year the Blue Metropolis Montreal International Literary Festival moves into the cutting-edge field of Electronic Literature. Join us for an exploration of topics ranging from the early days of hypertext fiction to the latest in narrative gaming with an all-star panel of authors who write beyond the book and way outside the box:

J. R. Carpenter’s electronic literature has been published internationally. She is a two-time winner of the CBC Quebec Short Story Competition and a Web Art Finalist in the Drunken Boat PanLiterary Awards 2006.

Jeff Parker’s stories, non-fiction and hypermedia have appeared in several magazines and anthologies, including Stumbling and Raging: More Politically Inspired Fiction (MacAdam/Cage, 2006). His latest book is The Back of the Line.

Jason E. Lewis is a poet, digital media artist and software designer. His creative work has been featured in exhibitions internationally. He conducts experiments in visual language, text and typography at his research studio =.

Alice van der Klei wrote her doctorate on hypertext in 2004 and teaches at UQAM where she is responsible for information and communications for Laboratoire NT2.

This event hosted by Nora Young of Spark, CBC Radio’s audio blog of smart and unexpected trendwatching.

The 10th Blue Metropolis Montreal International Literary Festival will take place April 30 to May 4, 2008. Blue Metropolis Foundation is a non-profit organization located in Montreal. Its core purpose is to bring people of different cultures together to share the pleasures of reading and writing in English, French and other languages. To this end it produces a range of literary activities, educational and literacy programmes, including the multilingual Blue Metropolis Montreal International Literary Festival. Blue Metropolis Foundation plays a leadership role in the literary, educational and literacy community in the Montreal area as well as nationally and internationally.