TRANS.MISSION [A.DIALOUGE]: Locating Narrative Resonance in Transatlantic Communications Networks

Performance by J. R. Carpenter (University College Falmouth, Cornwall).

TRANS.MISSION [A.DIALOUGE] is a computer-generated narrative spanning generations of transatlantic migrations, propagating across long-distance communications networks. The JavaScript source code generates another sort of script, an asynchronous dialogue to be read aloud in three voices: Call, Response, and Interference; or: Strophe, Antistrophe, and Chorus; or here, there, and somewhere in between. A dialogue begins like any other transmission. With a call: Begin! Followed by a response: How? With a question. What emerges from a question? What we write is always a question. A question desires a reply. TRANS.MISSION [A.DIALOUGE] emerges from practice-led research which incorporates strategies from performance writing, digital literature, locative narrative, media archaeology and networked art practices to investigate: a) networks as places, placeholders, sites of exchange and narrative structures; b) forms of very short fiction capable of travelling through networks intact as narrative units; and c) ways in which the syntax and grammar of code languages inflect born-digital literary texts. 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 stories of place and displacement resonating between sites, beyond nations, confusing and confounding boundaries between physical and digital, code and narrative, past and future, home and away?

TRANS.MISSION [A.DIALOUGE] http://luckysoap.com/generations/transmission.html

J. R. Carpenter is a Canadian artist, performer, poet, novelist, new media writer and researcher based in South Devon, England. She has been using the Internet as a medium for the creation and dissemination of non-linear narratives since 1993. Her digital work has been performed, published and presented in journals, festivals, and museums around the world. She a two-time winner of the Quebec Short Story competition, and recipient of the Carte Blanche Quebec Award as well as numerous research and production grants in literature and in new media from the Conseil des Arts de Montreal, Conseil des arts et des lettres du Quebec and Canada Council for the Arts. Her first novel, Words the Dog Knows, won the Expozine Alternative Press Award for Best English Book. Her second book, GENERATION[S], a collection of code narratives, was published by Traumawien in Vienna in 2010. She is currently a practice-led PhD Researcher at University College Falmouth, Cornwall, working in the emerging and converging fields of performance writing, digital literature, locative narrative, media archaeology and networked art practices.http://luckysoap.com

J.R. Carpenter presents at "Network Archaeology."

 

Tags: language, media archaeology, narrative