1.
ARTIST TALK

Mapping Place / Troubling Space
Thursday 18 February 2020, 5-7 PM MST

In this public lecture University of Alberta’s current Writer in Residence J. R. Carpenter will share questions which have long pervaded her work. Questions about place, displacement, migration, and climate change. Questions which are mostly unanswerable. Questions which Carpenter continues to try to answer anyway, increasingly through dialectic, dialogic, and collaborative processes. Because speaking about the unspeakable with someone comes as a relief. Drawing together examples from cartography, philosophy, poetry, media theory, and her own work, Carpenter implores us all to ask questions about the loss, desire, and violence implicit in the systems of imperial measurement which underpin the ways we conceptualize and operationalize space.



2.
colab meetup

Land Acknowledgements for Zoom
Friday, February 19, 2:00 – 4:00 pm MDT

In this month’s CoLAB meet-up, we will delve deeper into questions posed by J. R. Carpenter in her talk and in her work. Questions about place, space, time, and identity in relation to digital networks and indigenous territories. What does it mean to make a land acknowledgement over Zoom? Discussion will be guided by pre-shared reading materials.

3.
WORKSHOP

attention, a tension, attend, to tend
February 26 & March 5, 10:00 am – 12:00 pm MST

Shhhhhh. Wait. Look. Listen. How can we engage with the specificities of the places, spaces, and times we live in when we live our lives increasingly online? How can we find ways to think about climate change in human terms that we can act upon? Can small acts of paying attention save the world? 

In this process-oriented workshop J. R. Carpenter will introduce participants to writing exercises based on her own highly interdisciplinary work as an artist, writer, performer, and practice-led researcher. 

This workshop includes one two-hour intensive session which will take place online, one week-long daily activity which participants will engage in individually offline, and one follow-up session online.

J. R. Carpenter is an artist, writer, and practice-led researcher working across performance, print and digital media. Her web-based works have been exhibited in museums, galleries, and festivals around the world. Her digital poem The Gathering Cloud won the New Media Writing Prize 2016. Her print poetry collection An Ocean of Static was highly commended by the Forward Prizes 2018. Her most recent collection, This is a Picture of Wind, is based on a web-app by the same name. She is currently the Writer in Residence in the Department of English and Film Studies at the University of Alberta. More information about her work can be found on her website at luckysoap.com