What is practice-based criticism? • Along the Briny Beach by J.R. Carpenter

THIS IS THIS DRESS, [AIDER]

During Feb and Mar 2012, in collaboration with the Kelly Writers House, we will be hosting materials for

Philadelphia Lawyer (clever, shrewd attorney) :
Poet = Ped[et al.]agog = Idea[l]log ?

a talk series exploring the competing ideologies investing differential practices of critique in Philadelphia, at the University of Pennsylvania, of the KWH, or elsewhere. We welcome submissions of essais that enact complication between university scholarship and its "alternatives".

Talks will take place on February 23 and March 22, at KWH, hosted by CARA BENSON, in collaboration with speakers MARCELLA DURAND and PATTIE MCCARTHY.

Below can be found works with [by] others, in response to the question, What is practice-based criticism?

Along the Briny Beach by J.R. Carpenter

Along the Briny Beach: An Iterative Methodology

J. R. Carpenter

I am a PhD research candidate at University College Falmouth, in Cornwall, England. My research is practice-led. My title is Writing Coastlines. Well, my title is longer than that, but the part before the colon is generally the most interesting.

Writing Coastlines navigates the occasionally divergent theoretical terrains of electronic literature, literary fiction, visual art, zine/mail art and new media through the methodology of performance writing pioneered at Dartington College of Art, incorporated by University College Falmouth in 2010. Integral to this methodology is the notion that writing is research. The result is an iterative writing process. By rewriting and rereading texts through a continuum of forms, by “live archiving,” i.e. making public certain aspects of the research through blogging, tagging, marking-up, interlinking, Tweeting, RSS and other Web 2.0 tools, and by publicly presenting small “finished” works throughout the research, walking reading becomes writing becomes public feedback becomes meta-layers of commentary, inquiry and critique. My response becomes editing, which gradually becomes the production of new work.

Along the Briny Beach is one such work. In considering the conundrum of coastlines, caught, as they are, in the double-bind of simultaneously writing and erasing, I came to think about, read about, and undertake walking as an embodied spatialized way of writing coastlines. I began assembling Along the Briny Beach while serving as faculty for the In(ter)ventions: Literary Practice at the Edge Literary Arts residency program at The Banff Centre, February, 2011. 4540 feet above sea level in February seemed like as good a place as any to think intensely about walking on the beach.

The horizontally scrolling texts quote authors who are writing coastline in various ways. In Elizabeth Bishop’s The End of March, the beach is a line in the poem, written and re-written by walking, first out, then back, strophe and anti-strophe, verse and reverse. In Joseph Conrad’s Hear of Darkness, the strange reversal of perspective evoked in the line “watching a coast as it slips by the ship creates an uncanny effect, which both undermines and is undermined by the nonsensical walk “along the briny beach” undertaken in Lewis Carroll’s The Walrus and the Carpenter. The images document the west to east progression of a walk along a beach in Holguin province, Cuba. The idea to scroll these images and texts horizontally came from working with one of the artists participating in In(ter)ventions, Daniel Takeshi Krause, who was working with Mobius strips. Quotations from favourite authors have a certain Mobius strip quality about them, as they turn, loop, and repeat in the mind.

The vertical scrolling text is computer generated. In one sense it is the only text I have created in the piece. I fed all the words you see on screen into the code that generates the poem. In another sense, the generator itself is a quotation, as the source code is an adaptation of Nick Montfort’s Taroko Gorge. The source code loads the following variables: Land Sea Write Erase Walk Liminal Space. The variable _Read_ is assumed to be client-side. The function _Writing and Erasing_ returns: Edges Ledges and Legible Lines caught in the Double-Bind of Writing and Erasing. Onload: Write Coast. The remediation of well-known literary texts, the juxtaposition of the fixidity of the quoted texts and the variable fluidity of the generated texts, and the performative aspect of all these texts running together on one page, running into each other, and overlapping, allowed me to read them in new ways.

These new readings produced new works. For the first – a performance, presented in collaboration with Jerome Fletcher at the E-Poetry Festival held at SUNY Buffalo, May 2011 – I created a script using the texts quoted and generated by Along the Briny Beach as raw data. The result is a dialogue between the projected work, the audience, and two characters, the Walrus and the Carpenter. I read the part of the Carpenter, of course, because Carpenter is my name. The second new work to emerge from Along the Briny Beach is a short text called Sea Garden, written in response to the publication of Along the Briny Beach in the garden-themed Boulder Pavement 4, launched July 15, 2011.

Along the Briny Beach: http://luckysoap.com/alongthebrinybeach

Boulder Pavement 4: http://boulderpavement.ca/issue004/along-the-briny-beach/

7 months ago