Document:Q10148

Tributaries & Text-Fed Streams: A Feed-Reading of The Capliano Review is a new work of electronic literature by Montreal-based artist and writer J. R. Carpenter. The work is a commission of The Capilano Review, a literary journal based in North Vancouver with a long history of publishing new and established writers and artists who are experimenting with or expanding the boundaries of conventional forms and contexts. The project is curated by Kate Armstrong and will be released on Turbulence.org.
In February 2007 The Capilano Review published an issue dedicated to new writing and new technologies. TCR 2-50 “Artifice & Intelligence” was guest-edited by Andrew Klobucar and included 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 Patterson and Darren Wershler-Henry.
Tributaries & Text-Fed Streams: A Feed-Reading of The Capliano Review is a personal, experimental and playful rereading of and response to these essays. In this work J. R. Carpenter explores the formal and functional properties of RSS, using blogging, tagging and other Web 2.0 tools to mark-up and interlink essays and to insert additional meta-layers of commentary in order to play with, expose, expand upon, and subvert formal structures of writing, literature, and literary criticism.
Over a four-month period Carpenter reads and re-reads the essays, parsing them into fragments, which she then annotates, marks-up, tags and posts. Fed into an RSS stream, the fragments are re-read, reordered, and reblogged in an iterative process of distribution that opens up new readings of the essays and reveals new interrelationships between them. The result of this process-based approach is be part blog, part archive - an online repository for the artifacts of re-reading and a stage for the performance of live archiving.
Streams are both literally and metaphorically the central image of the work. Streams of consciousness, data, and rivers flow through the interface and through the texts. Through this process of re-reading and responding, this textual tributary feeds a larger stream while paying tribute to the original source.
Slip into this text-fed stream at any time by subscribing to our RSS feed here: http://tributaries.thecapilanoreview.ca/feed/
The final version of Tributaries & Text-fed Streams: A Feed-Reading of The Capilano Review will launch simultaneously on http://thecapilanoreview.ca and http://turbulence.org in May 2008.