April 13 – 23, 2006
IMAGES FESTIVAL 2006
On a single monitor PC stationed in MOCCA’s Media/Retail Space, Montreal artist, award winning fiction writer and poet J. R. Carpenter presents a web art project containing twelve Quicktime videos on the subject of the city of Rome. The piece is shaped by and mimics the modern tourist guidebook’s pedagogical style. Carpenter mixes maps, diagrams, photographs, historical facts and literary quotations, and contrasts these mostly romantic notions of Rome by overlapping layers of text and images of the traffic, noise, graffiti, tourists and pollution that characterize the ancient city today.
How I Loved the Broken Things of Rome explores certain gaps between the tourist and the local, between what is known of history and what is merely speculative, between language and understanding, between the fragment and the whole.
“The central narrative of How I Loved the Broken Things of Rome is a poem of the same name which I wrote upon my return to Montreal after an extended stay in Rome in 2002. Surrounding and extruding from this poem are poetic, literary and historical quotations, a less-than-logical atlas of signage and cartography and twelve Quicktime videos shot in modern-day Rome and “shot-through”, as it were, with the abundance of Rome’s “pasts.”
– J.R. Carpenter
How I Loved the Broken Things of Rome was produced in residency at OBORO’s New Media Lab with the financial support of the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec. The work is a web art finalist in the Drunken Boat panLiterary Awards 2006, and can also be viewed online at luckysoap.com/brokenthings.
Opening Reception
Saturday April 15, 2 – 5 pm
Closing Party
Saturday April 22, 9 pm
Partners
