Judy Malloy, Editor

J.R. Carpenter: The Broadside of a Yarn
Software: QR code, JavaScript, jQuery, CSS, HTML, Photoshop, Gimp

Detail from J.R. Carpenter: The Broadside of a Yarn

J. R. Carpenter is a Canadian artist, performer, poet, novelist, new media writer and researcher, based in South Devon, England. She began using the Internet as a medium for the creation and dissemination of non-linear narratives in 1993.

Since that time, her work has been presented in journals, festivals, and museums around the world, including the Electronic Literature Collection, the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art; Montréal Museum of Fine Arts; Istanbul Contemporary Art Museum; The Art Gallery, Tasmania; The University of Maryland; Jyväskylä Art Museum, Finland; Palazzo delle arti Napoli in Naples, Kipp Gallery, Indiana University of Pennsylvania; E-Poetry, Barcelona, Spain; the Arnolfini Gallery, Bristol, England; and The Banff Centre, Canada.

She is a two-time winner of the Quebec Short Story competition, recipient of the Carte Blanche Quebec Award, and recipient of research and production grants in literature and in new media from the Conseil des Arts de Montréal, Conseil des arts et des lettres du Quebéc 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.

J. R. Carpenter is currently a member of faculty for In(ter)ventions: Literary Practice at the Edge, a ground-breaking new residency program at The Banff Centre, in Canada, and she is a practice-led PhD Researcher, working in the emerging and converging fields of performance writing, digital literature, locative narrative, media archaeology and networked art practices at University College Falmouth, in England.

Commissioned by ELMCIP for the 2012 Remediating the Social exhibition in Edinburgh, The Broadside of a Yarn is a richly detailed 21st century locative broadside, in which a series of computer-generated narrative dialogues are accessed via QR codes.

One generator "is composed entirely of dialogue from Joseph Conrad's The Secret Sharer. Another contains lines of dialogue from Shakespeare's The Tempest," she explains in her Authoring Software statement. "Details from many a high sea story have been netted by this net-worked work. The combinatorial powers of computer-generated narrative conflate and confabulate characters, facts, and forms of narrative accounts of fantastical islands, impossible pilots, and voyages into the unknown undertaken over the past 2340 years."

Existing not only as a series of gallery mounted "map squares" of images found and/or created, in Edinburgh but also as a live many-voiced performance, The Broadside of a Yarn was/is in her words "a pervasive performative wander through a sea of sailors' yarns".

More information about J. R. Carpenter can be found on her homepage at http://luckysoap.com

The Broadside of a Yarn was commissioned by Electronic Literature as a Model for Creativity in Practice (ELMCIP) for Remediating the Social, an exhibition which took place at Inspace, Edinburgh, UK, November 1-17, 2012.

In theory, The Broadside of a Yarn is a multi-modal performative pervasive networked narrative attempt to chart fictional fragments of new and long-ago stories of near and far-away seas with nought but a QR reader and a hand-made map of dubious accuracy.

In practice, this project is, in a Situationist sense, a wilfully absurd endeavor. How can I, a displaced native of rural Nova Scotia, (New Scotland) perform the navigation of a narrative route through urban Edinburgh? (Old Scotland) How can any inhabitant of dry land possibly understand the constantly shifting perspective of stories of the high seas?

The Broadside of a Yarn remediates the broadside, a form of networked narrative popular from 16th century onward. Broadsides were written on a wide range of subjects, cheaply printed on single sheets of paper, (often with images) widely distributed, and posted and performed in public. During the Remediating the Social exhibition, The Broadside of a Yarn was posted as a discontinuous map printed on 15 A3-sized foam-core-mounted squares arranged in an asymmetrical grid in a 5m x 3m light-box situated in the main entrance of Inspace gallery, visible from the street.

Each of these map squares is composed of a wide range of images, most of which were collected during a research trip I took to Edinburgh in May 2012. These include photographs taken on my Canon G11, and scans of details of maps, charts, drawings, and diagrams found in books, pamphlets, prints and other ephemera gleaned from used and antiquarian bookshops. The Old Town Bookshop was particularly helpful. Other image and text research was undertaken on The National Library of Scotland website, and in The British Library and The Bodleian Library Maps collections. Each map square was composed separately in Photoshop and Gimp and printed at Edinburgh Copyshop. Each is embedded with one or more QR codes, such as the one pictured below. These were created using a free third-party website called http://www.qrstuff.com

Each QR code is links to a computer-generated narrative text. In order to access these texts, the QR codes must be scanned by a smart phone, tablet, or laptop equipped with an internet connection, a camera, and QR code reader, a wide variety of which are available for free download. Although QR codes are woefully unattractive they remain the simplest way to link a physical print surface to a digital text.

I used a portion of the ELMCIP commission to engage Steve Booth, Amy McDeath, Braille Fem, and Caden Lovelace in an extended conversation toward the creation of an extensible code base for authoring slot-type word-level text generators. Booth et. al. wrote a generator engine in JavaScript using jQuery, which I then used, in concert with CSS, HTML and various other JavaScripts, to create 13 different computer-generated narrative dialogues. Most though not all of these are intended to serve as scripts for poly-vocal performances. Some, such as Walks from City Bus Routes, propose imprecise and possibly impossible walking routes through the city. Others, such as Notes on the Voyage of Owl and Girl, may suggest a journey of another kind, a pervasive performative wander through a sea of sailors' yarns.

The generator linked to from this QR code is composed entirely of dialogue from Joseph Conrad's The Secret Sharer. Another contains lines of dialogue from Shakespeare's The Tempest. Details from many a high sea story have been netted by this net-worked work. The combinatorial powers of computer-generated narrative conflate and confabulate characters, facts, and forms of narrative accounts of fantastical islands, impossible pilots, and voyages into the unknown undertaken over the past 2340 years.

On one hand, a print map hung in a gallery exhibition for three weeks, offers but a narrow window of access to such a vast and varied body of digital text. On the other hand, this discontinuous print map is infinitely expansible. Any number of new map squares may be added at any time. In part to extend the life of The Broadside of a Yarn beyond the Remediating the Social exhibition, and in part to further the remediation of the broadside as a form, I also created an A3-sized subset of the gallery map, which was handed out freely during the exhibition and which continues to circulate through gift exchange economies and postal networks. This map collages together imagery and QR codes from some but not all of the gallery map squares. It was created in Photoshop and Gimp and printed at Totcom Copy Centre in Totnes. The folding of 500 A3 sheets into map form took rather longer than expected and became something of a performance in the gallery space in the lead-up to the opening of the exhibition, November 1, 2013.

Immediately following the gallery opening there was a performance event in the Sculpture Court of Edinburgh College of Art, in which, a number of the computer-generated narrative dialogues in The Broadside of a Yarn were performed by myself, Jerome Fletcher, Judd Morrissy, and Mark Jeffery before a live audience. The performance of The Broadside of a Yarn continues. Each gifting, each unfolding, each QR code scanned, each computer-generated narrative dialogue read aloud, each collective utterance prompted by this broadside constitutes an event.

The Broadside of a Yarn may perhaps be best described as an assemblage -- a collection of stories, a folio of broadsides, a prompt, a poly-vocal performance script, an unbound atlas of impossible maps, a network of interrelated narrative elements mediated across a continuum forms. As is the way with assemblages, this work remains fluid and is by no means finished.

Index

Writers and Artists
Talk about Their Work
and the Software They
use to Create Their Work

Mark Amerika
Stefan Muller Arisona
Mark Bernstein: __Interview wirh Mark Bernstein
Alan Bigelow
Bill Bly
Jay Bushman
J. R. Carpenter
__ Chronicles of Pookie and JR
__ Entre Ville
__ STRUTS
M.D. Coverley
__ Egypt: The Book of
Going Forth by Day
__ Tin Towns
Steve Ersinghaus
Caitlin Fisher
Chris Funkhouser
Susan M. Gibb
Dene Grigar
__ 24-Hr. Micro-Elit
__ Fallow Field
Fox Harrell
Dylan Harris
William Harris
Ian Hatcher
Megan Heyward
Adriene Jenik
Chris Joseph
Rob Kendall
Antoinette LaFarge
Deena Larsen
Donna Leishman
Judy Malloy
Mark C. Marino
Mez
Ethan Miller
Nick Montfort
__Lost One
__Nick Montfort and
Stephanie Strickland
Sea and Spar Between
Judd Morrissey
Stuart Moulthrop
__Under Language
and Deep Surface
__ Interview with
Stuart Moulthrop
Alexander Mouton
Karen O'Rourke
Regina Pinto
Andrew Plotkin
Kate Pullinger
Sonya Rapoport:
__Interview with
Sonya Rapoport
Aaron Reed
Scott Rettberg
Jim Rosenberg
Stephanie Strickland
__Nick Montfort and Stephanie Strickland
Sea and Spar Between
__Stephanie Strickland and Cynthia Lawson Jaramillo
Vniverse and slippingglimpse
Sue Thomas
Eugenio Tisselli
Noah Wardrip-Fruin
Joel Weishaus
Nanette Wylde