J.R. Carpenter’s guest talk: Writing a Picture of Wind Event

Writing a Picture of Wind

In response to the rollercoaster of winter storms which battered southwestern England in 2014, the award-winning artist, writer, and researcher J. R. Carpenter began to reflect on the difficulty of evoking through the materiality of language a force such as wind which we can only see indirectly through its affect. She began to explore weather in all its written forms.

In this talk J. R. Carpenter will present two recent works. The Gathering Cloud, a hybrid print and web-based work commissioned by NEoN Digital Arts Festival, attempts to address the environmental impact of so-called cloud storage through the oblique strategy of calling attention to the materiality of clouds in the sky. This is a Picture of Wind, a smart-phone optimised web-based work commissioned by IOTA: DATA, merges archival material with live weather data. Part poetic almanac, part private weather diary, and part live wind report for for the South West of England, this work attempts to picture through variations in quotidian language the disturbances and sudden absences left in the wake of wind.

 

Bio
J. R. Carpenter is an artist, writer, and researcher working in Performance Writing, Digital Literature, and Media Archaeology. Her pioneering web-based works have been exhibited, published, performed, and presented in journals, galleries, museums, and festivals around the world. She is a winner of the New Media Writing Prize 2016, a Fellow of the Eccles Centre For North American Studies at the British Library, an artist-in-residence at the Archives Nationales in Paris, a member of the Scientific Committee of Labex Arts-H2H at University Paris 8, and an associate lecturer in Fine Art at Plymouth University in the UK. http://luckysoap.com