J. R. Carpenter facts for kids

J. R. Carpenter (born in 1972) is a British-Canadian artist and writer. She creates art using performances, printed books, and digital tools. She was born in Nova Scotia, Canada. She lived in Montreal for many years before moving to England in 2010. She became a British citizen in 2019 and now lives in Southampton, England.

Education and Learning

J. R. Carpenter studied art at the Art Students League of New York in 1988. She earned a degree in Studio Art from Concordia University in Montreal in 1995. She focused on Fibres and Sculpture. In 2015, she earned a special PhD degree from University of the Arts London. Her research looked at how stories connect to places, especially through digital tools.

Her Work and Career

Carpenter has worked in many areas of art, including visual art, media art, and writing. She has worked with public groups and universities. From 2006 to 2011, she was the President of OBORO. This is an artist-run gallery and new media lab in Montreal.

She was also a teacher and mentor at The Banff Centre from 2010 to 2014. She taught about performance writing and electronic literature. In 2015, she received a special fellowship at the Eccles Centre for American Studies. This center is part of the British Library in London. She also had a fellowship in Ireland in 2019.

Carpenter was a Writer in Residence at the University of Alberta from 2020 to 2021. She was also a Writer in Residence for the StreeLife project at the University of York in 2022. In June 2022, she started a two-year research fellowship. She is studying how wind is shown in art and media at Winchester School of Art.

Her Writing

Carpenter writes about many topics. These include ideas of place and moving from one place to another. She also writes about textile art, media art, and the history of the internet. Her essays, art reviews, poems, and short stories have been shared widely. They have been on CBC Radio and translated into French, Italian, and Spanish. Her work has appeared in many magazines and books in Canada, the US, and Europe.

Digital Writing

Carpenter has been writing electronic texts since 1993. Her work mixes performance, print, and digital media. She made her first website in 1995. Since then, her early works of Electronic literature have been shown around the world. You can find them in festivals, galleries, and museums. These include the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

• Carpenter's In Absentia uses a Google map of Montreal. It shows how much of our lives cannot be easily put onto maps.
• Her work The Broadside of a Yarn was made for an exhibition in Edinburgh, UK, in 2012.
• Notes on the Voyage of Owl and Girl was created in 2012.
• A special show of her web-based work was held in 2012. It was part of the Electronic Literature Organization Conference.
• She created short stories using computer programs called Python scripts. One example is Excerpts from the Chronicles of Pookie and JR.
• Her web-based work, The Gathering Cloud, was made for a digital arts festival in 2016. This work looks at the idea of "cloud computing" in a new way.
• Her web-app, This is a Picture of Wind, is like a weather phone for mobile devices. It was supported by a grant from the Canada Council for the Arts. A printed book version of This is a Picture of Wind was published in 2020.
• Her sound work and web app, An Island of Sound, was shown at the British Library in 2023.

Her digital work is also part of important collections. These include the Rhizome ArtBase and the Electronic Literature Collection.

Books

Carpenter's first novel, Words the Dog Knows, was published in Montreal in 2008.

Her second book, GENERATION[S], came out in 2010. It is a collection of stories made with computer code.

In 2017, a print book based on her web-based work, The Gathering Cloud, was published. Critics have praised this book. They say it combines art and science in a new way. One critic said it "represents the kind of rewarding hybridity in writing and concepts." Another called it a "primer" for a new field called Cloud Studies.

In 2018, her first poetry book, An Ocean of Static, was published. Reviewers called it a "bravura piece of writing" and "a poetic endeavour completely unlike any other." One critic noted that her poems "break things apart and creates them anew."

Her second poetry book, This is a Picture of Wind, was published in 2020. This collection explores how language can describe something like wind. Wind is a force we can only feel, not see directly. This is a Picture of Wind was listed in The Guardian's Best Poetry Books of 2020.

Awards and Recognition

In 2003, Carpenter won the CBC Quebec Short Story Competition for her story "Precipice". She won this competition again in 2005 for her story "Air Holes".

In 2008, she won the Quebec Writers' Federation Carte Blanche Award. This was for her creative nonfiction work "Wyoming is Haunted".

In 2009, she won the Expozine Alternative Press Award for Best English Book. This was for her novel, Words the Dog Knows.

In 2012, her web-based work CityFish was a finalist for the New Media Writing Prize. In 2015, she won the Dot Award for Digital Literature.

She won the New Media Writing Prize in 2016 for her web-based work The Gathering Cloud. This work was also shortlisted for other awards in 2017.

In 2018, her web-app This is a Picture of Wind won the People's Choice Award. It was also a finalist for the New Media Writing Prize 2018.

Her first poetry collection An Ocean of Static was highly praised in 2018.

Her second collection This is a Picture of Wind was longlisted for the Laurel Prize for Environmental Poetry in 2021.

See also

• List of electronic literature authors, critics, and works
• Internet art
• Digital poetry
• Electronic literature
• Hypertext fiction
• Interactive fiction
• Literatronica