Salon Femmes br@nchées #61 :: ART.chives: art, archives and databases

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Ayesha Hameed
J. R. Carpenter
Projet Matricules

outer space
Ayesha Hameed

outer space is a web-based project that will look at the parallels between tropes in science fiction and the fantasies of colonial expansion. What unites science fiction and the colonial-metropolitan imaginary, is a changed conception of distance or ‘outer’ space. The fascination for outer space that is found in science fiction has its counterpart in the dependence of the average metropolitan dweller in the 18th century who consumes sugar and spices from the still unknown ‘New World’ and the ‘primitive’ East. Distance in the outer space of the mysterious New World and ‘Orient’ is ingrained into the daily life of the metropolis, fuelling a fascination with the world outside.

outer space is going to be a site with 3 windows. Two of them will be flash/html based hypertextual sites that look at (1) outer space and colonialism and (2) outer space and science fiction. These will be two separate hypertextual narratives using images, text, moving images and simple vector animation. The third window will use php for the user to combine these elements and form connections of their own.

Ayesha Hameed is a doing a PhD in Social and Political Thought at York University where she writes about new media and history and makes hypertext work on the history of trans-Atlantic slavery. Her academic work has appeared in Fuse Magazine, and two of her collaborative projects are forthcoming in West Coast Line and Public. Hameed was the artist-in-residence for Studio XX’s thematic residency of September – December 2005.

Strata of Data: Digging Through A Dozen Years On Line
J. R. Carpenter

J. R. Carpenter got her first Unix account in 1993 and has been making web art projects since 1995. She constructs online fictions with Internet flotsam and jetsam: found images, found audio, found data, and found scripts. A collage artist and packrat at heart, Carpenter lurks in listserves, prowls developer-sites, copy and pastes and habitually Views Source. She collects old textbooks in the alleyway and photographs other people’s graffiti. She alters slick blocks of CSS, and tweaks cheesy javascript effects for narrative purposes. Her web projects retain a low-tech aura. She uses a lot of black and white images (because that’s what colour photocopies come in), uses DHTML when Flash would do nicely, avoids software solutions, embraces cross-browser/cross-platform vagaries, and aims for scalability and graceful fails. In this presentation she’ll lead us on a tangential tour through her archive of web art projects, pointing out borrowed bits along the way.

J. R. Carpenter works concurrently as a poet, fiction writer and web artist. Winner of the CBC/QWF Québec Short Story Competition 2003-2004 and a Web Art finalist in the Drunken Boat PanLiterary Awards 2006, her poetry, fiction, and web art projects have been published and exhibited internationally. Most recently, she has been commissioned by OBORO to create a new web art project in conjunction with the 50th anniversary celebrations of the Conseil des Arts du Montréal. Born in rural Nova Scotia, and based in Montréal since 1990, her web projects reside at: http://LuckySoap.com

Matricules
Studio XX

In the spirit of celebration of our 10th anniversary, Studio XX launches a large scale interdisciplinary project of research, development and production entitled: Matricules. Over the course of one year, teams of artists, archivists and programmers will be called to excavate the traces left since our inception in 1996. From this research they will construct a digital archive of the studio’s production and create an interactive screen-based work suggesting a portrait of these 10 years of extraordinary collective adventure. Some of the key team members of Matricules, jake moore, Karolina Wisniewska, and Caroline Martel will present the project to the members of the Studio.