Notes on the Voyage of Owl and Girl | ALN

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Notes on the Voyage of Owl and Girl

Submitted by Joël Gauthier on Wed, 01/23/2013 - 10:56

Author(s):

Gauthier, Joël

Fiche simple

Notes on the Voyage of Owl and Girl est une oeuvre de fiction générative de J. R. Carpenter s'inspirant des navigateurs qui, au fil de l'histoire, sont partis explorer les mers nordiques. L'image servant de toile de fond à l'oeuvre est une image composite constituée à partir de plusieurs cartes maritimes. Au-dessus de cette image, des photographies prises par Carpenter délimitent deux espaces de texte.

À l'intérieur de l'espace principal, situé dans le coin supérieur gauche, des vignettes générées racontent les aventures d'un hibou et d'une jeune fille partis en bateau à la recherche de territoires fantastiques. Ces vignettes sont librement inspirées de «The Owl and the Pussycat» d'Edward Lear (1871) et contiennent parfois des hyperliens vers des articles Wikipedia. Aussi, à l'intérieur de cet espace, un nouveau texte est généré automatiquement à intervalles réguliers, venant chasser l'ancien. Dans le second espace, situé dans le coin inférieur droit, des mots n'apparaissent que très irrégulièrement, faisant de brèves allusions à la mer, à des bateaux, à des naufrages, etc. Plusieurs photographies sont utilisées pour délimiter ce second espace et alternent régulièrement. Finalement, en marge, au-dessus et en-dessous de ces deux espaces, des lignes de texte composées de fragments empruntés à d'anciens récits d'expéditions maritimes, de messages en code morse et d'extraits du poème «Wynken, Blynken, and Nod» d'Eugene Field (1889) défilent de droite à gauche.

Notes on the Voyage of Owl and Girl

Artist·s:

Carpenter, J. R.

Kind of Artwork:

Internet

Year:

2013

http://luckysoap.com/owlandgirl/

Infos

Hosting website:

Luckysoap & Co.

Hosting website URL:

http://luckysoap.com/

Date of last consultation:

January 23, 2013

Coordonnées de l'artiste:

carpenter@luckysoap.com

Groupe de recherche:
NT2

Taxonomies

Nature:

Artwork

Interactivity:

Generation without Data Insertion, Multiple Choice Navigation

Format:

Text/Image/Sound Generator, Hypertext, Image, Text, Animated Text

Theme:

Antarctic, Boat, Map, Morse code, Disappearance , Edward Lear, Eugene Field, Exploration, Ice, Owl, Logbook, Sea, Sinking, Navigation, North, Ocean

Media:

Internet

Année:

2013

Artwork language(s):

English

Traitement numérique des ressources:

Javascript

Citation(s)

An owl and a girl most ardent went to sea in a beetle-green dory; a buoyant sieve, certainly, though a smidge too high in the stern to suit the two of them. They took a bottle of herring fish and a telescope of dubious precision. The owl was slightly afraid of the dark. The girl sought to gain in depth traces of no-man's-land. According to my test results, the girl informed the owl, it's five knots northwest of here. Her great-aunt had been among the most revered of philosophers on this topic. But the girl had her own mode of questioning. The owl said, We are but ships passing in the night. How soon he veered off topic! According to my sea chart, we're nearing the edge of our voyage, the girl said, but still they sailed all night long, through mist and haze. By this time, all the owl's sleeping tablets had run out. Don't fear, said the girl most rationally. The ships logs she kept constitute the entirety of the knowledge we have left of this implausable voyage toward mare incognitum.

Notes

Notes on the Voyage of Owl and Girl is a work of digital fiction. Many of its resemblances to actual events or locals or persons or texts are entirely intentional. The combinatorial powers of computer-generated narrative have been harnessed to conflate and confabulate characters, facts, and forms of narrative accounts of sea voyages into the unknown North undertaken over the past 2340 years. TEXT SOURCES: "The second voyage attempted by Mr John Davis with others, for the discovery of the Northwest Passage, in Anno 1586" as found in "The Principal Navigations, Voiages, Traffiques and Discoueries of the English Nation" complied by Richard Hakluyt, first published 1589-1600. "The Owl and the Pussycat" by Edward Lear, first published 1871. "Wynken, Blynken, and Nod" by Eugene Field, first published 1889. SOURCE CHART: A conflation of islands and soundings of Ellefsen Harbour, Scotia Bay and the South Orkney Islands, from a chart of the Antarctic Ocean published by the Defence mapping Agency Hydrographic / Topographic Centre, Washington, D.C. 1967. SOURCE PHOTOGRAPHS: J. R. Carpenter 2008-2011 SOURCE CODE: Steve Booth, Amy Macdeath, Braille Fem, Caden Lovelace MANY THANKS: Barbara Bridger, Jerome Fletcher

Biography

Carpenter, J. R.

J. R. Carpenter is a Canadian artist, writer, researcher, performer and maker of maps, zines, books, poetry, short fiction, long fiction, non-fiction, and non-linear, intertextual, hypermedia, and computer-generated narratives. Her pioneering works of digital literature have been exhibited, published, performed, and presented in journals, galleries, museums, and festivals around the world. She is a winner of the CBC Quebec Writing Competition (2003 & 2005), the QWF Carte Blanche Quebec Award (2008), and the Expozine Alternative Press Award for Best English Book for her first novel, Words the Dog Knows (2008). Her second book, GENERATION[S], a collection of code narratives, was published by Traumawien in 2010. In 2012 her web-based work CityFish was short-listed for the New Media Writing Prize in Bournemouth, UK, and the Electronic Literature Organization presented a retrospective of her work in Morgantown, WV, USA. She has served as a Digital Literature and Performance Writing faculty mentor for the In(ter)ventions: Literary Practice at the Edge residency program at The Banff Centre since its inception in 2010. She is currently a PhD researcher at Falmouth University in association with University of the Arts London. She lives in South Devon, England. (http://luckysoap.com/bio.html)

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