J. R. Carpenter

J. R. Carpenter (born 1972) is a British-Canadian artist, writer, and researcher working across performance, print, and digital media. She was born in Nova Scotia in 1972. She lived in Montreal from 1990 to 2009. She emigrated to England in 2010 and became a British citizen in 2019. She now lives in Southampton, England.

Education Carpenter studied Life Drawing and Anatomy at the Art Students League of New York in 1988. She graduated with a BFA in Studio Art, with a concentration in Fibres and Sculpture from Concordia University in Montreal in 1995. In 2015, she was awarded a practice-led PhD research degree from University of the Arts London in association with Falmouth University. Her thesis, Writing Coastlines: Locating Narrative Resonance in Transatlantic Communications Networks "contributed to the creation of a new narrative context from which to examine a multi-site-specific place-based identity by extending the performance writing methodology to incorporate digital literature and locative narrative practices, by producing and publicly presenting a significant body of creative and critical work, and by developing a mode of critical writing which intertwines practice with theory." She was a faculty mentor for Performance Writing and Electronic literature on the In (ter)ventions: Literary Practice at the Edge program at The Banff Centre from 2010 to 2014. In 2015, she was awarded a Visiting Fellowship at the Eccles Centre for American Studies at the British Library, London, UK. In 2019, she was awarded a Visiting Fellowship at the Moore Institute for Research in the Humanities and Social Studies at NUIG Galway, Ireland. She was Writer in Residence in the Department of English and Film Studies at the University of Alberta 2020–2021, and Writer in Residence for the StreeLife project at University of York 2022. In June 2022, she began a two-year postdoctoral Research Fellowship, working the AHRC & DFG funded, interdisciplinary research project, Weather Reports – Wind as Model, Media, and Experience at Winchester School of Art.

Writing Carpenter has written critically about place and displacement, textile art, media art, digital literature and internet history. Her print essays, art reviews, poetry and short fiction have been broadcast on CBC Radio, translated into French, Italian, and Spanish, and published in numerous anthologies and journals across Canada, the US, the UK, Spain and Italy, including Oxford Poetry, 3:AM Magazine, PRISM International, Arc Poetry Magazine, Fuse, The New Quarterly, Geist, and The Capilano Review.

Digital writing Carpenter has been writing electronic texts since 1993. Her work combines performance, print, and digital media. in Toronto; Arnolfini in Bristol; Palazzo delle arti Napoli in Naples; Machfeld Studio in Vienna; The Web Biennial in Istanbul; Open Space, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in San Francisco; and Bibliothèque nationale de France and Le Cube in Paris. Carpenter's In Absentia uses a google map of Montreal to show how much of our lives can not be said or integrated into maps. Carpenter's The Broadside of a Yarn was commissioned by Electronic Literature as a Model for Creativity in Practice (ELMCIP) for Remediating the Social, an exhibition which took place at Inspace, Edinburgh, UK, November 1–17, 2012. She discusses this work in Narrabase. Carpenter's Notes on the Voyage of Owl and Girl, 2012 was reviewed in I Love Epoetry and Carpenter wrote an essay on this work in #WomenTechLit A retrospective of her web-based work was presented at Electrifying Literature: Affordances and Constraints an exhibition held in conjunction with the Electronic Literature Organization Conference 2012 in Morgantown, West Virginia. She created a series of short fictions generated by Python scripts, including Excerpts from the Chronicles of Pookie and JR, as described in Narrabase. Her web-based work, The Gathering Cloud was commissioned by NEoN Digital Arts Festival 2016, Dundee, UK. Natalie Pollard has published a close reading of The Gathering Cloud, and explains that this work lists Tung-Hui Hu's The Prehistory of the Cloud as a key source. Pollard analyzes the electronic literature elements of this work through the "layering and sedimenting of textual ang graphic sources" as a different perspective on cloud computing. Her web-app, This is a Picture of Wind a weather phone for phones, was commissioned by the Iota Institute in Canada, with the support of a grant from the Canada Council for the Arts. The print version of This is a Picture of Wind was published as a book in the Sheffield: Longbarrow Press in June 2020. Her soundwork and web app, An Island of Sound, was exhibited at the British Library Mix Conference in 2023.

Her digital work is also included in The Rhizome ArtBase, the Electronic Literature Collection Volumes One, Two, Three, and Four, and the ELMCIP Anthology of European Electronic Literature.

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

Her second book, GENERATION, a collection of code narratives, was published in Vienna by Traumawien in 2010.

In 2017, a print book based on her web-based work, The Gathering Cloud, was published in Axminster by Uniformbooks, featuring a foreword by Jussi Parikka and an afterword by Lisa Robertson. The Belgian critic Jan Baetens situates The Gathering Cloud alongside Christian Bök's Crystallography, stating: "it is part of a newly emerging canon of art and science creations that help reshape the fundamental unity of the humanities." Writing for the Italian journal Neural, Aurelio Cianciotta concurs: "…this book represents the kind of rewarding hybridity in writing and concepts that we'd expect much more often in contemporaneity." Writing for Sabotage Reviews, Ryan Ormonde states: "By gathering together histories and theories on the 'cloud' in all its duality, and, in the process, dissolving that duality, Carpenter founds a whole new discipline. If Cloud Studies takes off, here is its primer."

In 2018, Carpenter's debut poetry collection, An Ocean of Static, was published in London by Penned in the Margins. Writing for Poetry London, Katie Evans-Bush describes An Ocean of Static as "a bravura piece of writing… a bit intimidating next to your average poetry collection.." Writing for The Poetry School, Jade Cuttle calls An Ocean of Static "a poetic endeavour completely unlike any other." Writing for Department of Feminist Conversations, Mary Paterson states: "Carpenter doesn't just take risks; she breaks things apart and creates them anew. Her poems' refusal to settle into one meaning undermines the truth-ambitions of language — shattering language into a multitude of possibilities — and lays bare the principles that make these ambitions persist."

In 2020, her second poetry collection, This is a Picture of Wind, was published by Longbarrow Press, featuring a foreword by Johanna Drucker and an afterword by Vahni Capildeo. This collection explores the paradox presented by our attempts to evoke through the materiality of language a force such as wind which we can only perceive indirectly through its effect. This is a Picture of Wind was listed in The Guardian Best Poetry Books of 2020. Writing for The Guardian, Rishi Dastidar describes This is a Picture of Wind as "title that gives shape to the ineffable."

Carpenter's fourth collection, Measures of Weather, was published by Shearman Books in 2025, and was called a "blustery yet brilliant fourth collection" by The Guardian ''] (2011) Notes on the Voyage of Owl and Girl (2012) There he was, gone. (2012) ...and by islands I mean paragraphs (2013) Etheric Ocean (2014) Notes Very Necessary co-authored with Barbara Bridger (2015) The Gathering Cloud (2016) This is a Picture of Wind: A Weather Poem for Phones (2018) The Pleasure of the Coast: A Hydro-graphic Novel (2019)