CreativeConversations
Date: Monday 02 October 2023
Time: 13:00 - 14:00
Venue: Memorial Chapel
Category: Public lectures
Speaker: J R Carpenter

J. R. Carpenter is a Canadian-born UK-based artist, writer, and researcher working across performance, print, and digital media. She studied Life Drawing and Anatomy at the Art Students’ League of New York in 1988. She graduated with a BFA (with distinction) in Studio Art with a concentration in Fibres and Sculpture from Concordia University in Montreal in 1995. In 2014 she was awarded a practice-led PhD research degree from University of the Arts London. Her thesis, Writing Coastlines: Locating Narrative Resonance in Transatlantic Communications Networks, explores intersections between Performance Writing, Digital Literature, Locative Narrative, and Media Archaeology.

J. R. Carpenter has been using the Internet as a medium for the creation and dissemination of experimental texts since 1993. Since that time, her pioneering works of digital literature have been exhibited, published, presented, and performed at museums, galleries, conferences and festivals around the world including: Musée de Beaux-arts de Montréal, OBORO, Dare-Dare, Studio XX, and the Biennal de Montréal (Montreal), the Museum of Contemporary Canadian, Art and Images Festival (Toronto), Interactive Screen, and In(ter)ventions (Banff), Helen Pitt Gallery (Vancouver), Dalhousie Art Gallery (Halifax), The Rhizome ArtBase at the New Museum of Contemporary Art (New York), San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (San Francisco), Arnolfini (Bristol), Inspace (Edinburgh), Palazzo delle arti Napoli (Naples), Machfeld Studio (Vienna), Jyväskylä Art Museum (Finland), The Web Biennial 2007 (Istanbul), soundsRite (Australia), Cast Gallery (Tasmania), Interrupt Festival 2008 (Brown), Media in Transition 2007 & 2009 (MIT), the Electronic Literature Organization Conference 2008 (Vancouver, Washington) and ELO 2012 (Paris), E-Poetry 2009 (Barcelona) and E-Poetry 2011 (CUNY Buffalo). Her work is included in the Electronic Literature Collection Volumes One, Two, Three, and Four, and 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.

Since the mid-1990s she has been writing on textile art, new media, and internet history. Her essays, reviews, poems and short fiction have been broadcast on CBC Radio, translated into French, Spanish, Italian, and German, and published in numerous anthologies and journals across Canada and internationally including: Oxford Poetry, Arc Poetry, 3:am magazine, The Junket, Fourteen Hills, Performance Research, C, Fuse, Mix, Espace Sculpture, Dandelion, Crannog, Geist, The New Quarterly, Matrix, Ryga, Rampike, Carte Blanche, and Blood & Aphorisms. Carpenter was named a Montreal Mirror Noisemaker in 2009. She is a winner of the Quebec Writers' Federation Carte Blanche Quebec Award (2008), the CBC Quebec Short Story Competition (2003 & 2005), the Expozine Alternative Press Award for Best English Book for her first novel, Words the Dog Knows, the Dot Award for Digital Literature (2015), and the New Media Writing Prize for her web-based work The Gathering Cloud (2016). Her debut poetry collection, An Ocean of Static, was highly commended for the Forward Prizes 2018. Her latest collection, This is a Picture of Wind, was one of The Guardian’s best poetry books of 2020.

Carpenter is the recipient of grants in literature and new media from the Conseil des Arts de Montreal, Conseil des arts et des lettres du Quebec, and Canada Council for the Arts. She is a fellow of Yaddo, Ucross, Caldera, The Vermont Studio Center, Struts, and The Banff Centre. She was a Writer in Residence in the Performance Writing Area at Dartington College of Art in England in 2009. She was President of the Board of Directors of OBORO, an artist-run gallery and new media lab in Montreal, from 2006-2010. She was the Digital Literature and Performance Writing faculty mentor for the In(ter)ventions: Literary Practice at the Edge Literary Arts residency program at The Banff Centre form its inception in 2010 to its closure in 2014. She is a Fellow at the Eccles Centre For American Studies at the British Library and the Moore Institute at NUI Galway. She was Writer in Residence at University of Alberta September 2020 — May 2021. She was Writer in Residence on the StreetLife project with University of York 2022. She is currently a Research Fellow at Winchester School of Art, working on the AHRC-funded Weather Reports - Wind as Model, Media, and Experience 2022-2024

She lives in Southampton. http://luckysoap.com

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