J.R. Carpenter


J. R. Carpenter is a British-Canadian artist, writer, researcher, performer and maker of maps, zines, books, poems, fiction, non-fiction, non-linear hypermedia narratives, and computer-generated texts. She was born in Nova Scotia in 1972, and lived in Montreal from 1990 to 2009. She now lives in Plymouth, England.

Education

Carpenter studied Life Drawing and Anatomy at the Art Students League of New York in 1988 and Fibres and Sculpture at Concordia University in Montreal 1990–1995. In 2015 she was awarded a practice-led PhD research degree from University of the Arts London in association with Falmouth University. Her thesis, Writing Coastlines: Locating Narrative Resonance in Transatlantic Communications Networks "contributed 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."

Professional life

She served on the Board of Directors of OBORO, an artist-run gallery and new media lab in Montreal, from 2006 to 2011. She was a faculty mentor for Performance Writing and Electronic literature on the In ventions: Literary Practice at the Edge program at The Banff Centre from 2010–2014. In 2015 she was awarded a Visiting Fellowship at the Eccles Centre for American Studies at the British Library, London, UK. In 2019 she was awarded a Visiting Fellowship at the Moore Institute for Research in the Humanities and Social Studies at NUIG Galway, Ireland.

Writing

Carpenter has written extensively about textile art, media art, digital literature and internet history. Her print essays, art reviews, poetry and short fiction have been broadcast on CBC Radio, translated into French, Italian, and Spanish, and published in numerous anthologies and journals across Canada, the US, the UK, Spain and Italy, including Oxford Poetry,, PRISM International, Arc Poetry Magazine, Fuse, The New Quarterly and Geist.

Digital writing

Carpenter has been writing electronic texts since 1993. She made her first web-based work for Netscape 1.1. in 1995. Since that time her pioneering works of Electronic literature have been published, performed, and presented in festivals, galleries and museums around the world, including: Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Dare-Dare, OBORO and StudioXX in Montreal; Images Festival and Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art in Toronto; Arnolfini in Bristol; Palazzo delle arti Napoli in Naples; Machfeld Studio in Vienna; The Web Biennial in Istanbul; Open Space, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in San Francisco; and Bibliothèque nationale de France and Le Cube in Paris.
Her digital work is also included in The Rhizome ArtBase, the Electronic Literature Collection Volumes One and Volume Two, and the ELMCIP Anthology of European Electronic Literature.
A retrospective of her web-based work was presented at Electrifying Literature: Affordances and Constraints an exhibition held in conjunction with the Electronic Literature Organization Conference 2012 in Morgantown, West Virginia.
Her web-based work The Gathering Cloud was commissioned by NEoN Digital Arts Festival 2016, Dundee, UK.
Her web-app This is a Picture of Wind, a weather phone for phones, was commissioned by the Iota Institute in Canada, with the support of a grant from the Canada Council for the Arts.

Books

Carpenter's first novel, Words the Dog Knows, was published by Conundrum Press in Montreal in 2008.
Her second book, GENERATION, a collection of code narratives, was published in Vienna by Traumawien in 2010.
In 2017 a print book based on her web-based work, The Gathering Cloud, was published in Axminster by Uniformbooks, featuring a foreword by Jussi Parikka and an afterword by Lisa Robertson. The Belgian critic Jan Baetens situates The Gathering Cloud alongside Christian Bök’s Crystallography, stating: “it is part of a newly emerging canon of art and science creations that help reshape the fundamental unity of the humanities.” Writing for the Italian journal Neural, Aurelio Cianciotta concurs: “…this book represents the kind of rewarding hybridity in writing and concepts that we’d expect much more often in contemporaneity.” Writing for Sabotage Reviews, Ryan Ormonde states: “By gathering together histories and theories on the ‘cloud’ in all its duality, and, in the process, dissolving that duality, Carpenter founds a whole new discipline. If Cloud Studies takes off, here is its primer."
In 2018 Carpenter's debut poetry collection, An Ocean of Static, was published in London by Penned in the Margins. Writing for Poetry London, Katie Evans-Bush describes An Ocean of Static as “a bravura piece of writing… a bit intimidating next to your average poetry collection..” Writing for The Poetry School, Jade Cuttle calls An Ocean of Static “a poetic endeavour completely unlike any other.” Writing for Department of Feminist Conversations, Mary Paterson states: “Carpenter doesn’t just take risks; she breaks things apart and creates them anew. Her poems’ refusal to settle into one meaning undermines the truth-ambitions of language — shattering language into a multitude of possibilities — and lays bare the principles that make these ambitions persist.”

Awards

In 2003 Carpenter won the CBC Quebec Short Story Competition for her short story "Precipice", which was later anthologized in Short Stuff: New English Writing From Quebec. She won the CBC Quebec Short Story Competition again in 2005 for her short story "Air Holes", which was later anthologized in In Other Words: New English Writing From Quebec.
In 2008 she won the Quebec Writers' Federation Carte Blanche Award for "Wyoming is Haunted", a work of creative nonfiction.
In 2009 she won the Expozine Alternative Press Award for Best English Book for her novel, Words the Dog Knows. and was named a Montreal Mirror Noisemaker.
In 2012 her web-based work CityFish was shortlisted for the New Media Writing Prize. In 2015 she won the Dot Award for Digital Literature from if:book UK.
She won the New Media Writing Prize 2016 for her web-based work The Gathering Cloud. The Gathering Cloud was an Editor's Pick in the Wildcard Category in the Saboteur Awards 2017 and was shortlisted for the Robert Coover Award for a Work of Electronic Literature 2017 and The Turn On Literature Prize 2017.
In 2018 her web-app This is a Picture of Wind won the Opening Up Digital Fiction Competition's People's Choice Award and was shortlisted for the New Media Writing Prize 2018 and the Robert Coover Award for a Work of Electronic Literature 2018.
Her debut poetry collection An Ocean of Static was Highly Commended for the Forward Prizes for Poetry 2018.

Selected bibliography

Books






Web-based works


















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co-authored with Barbara Bridger