other sights

Aaron Carpenter: Ffinnigans Wwake

Down­load Art­s­peak Lit­er­ally Brochure (PDF — 135KB)

pre­sented on the Bon­nis Media CoreVision

dual out­door screens located at the inter­sec­tion of Rob­son and Granville Streets

May 15 — 24, 2009

every 3 min­utes for 10 days
This is an Art­s­peak OFFSITE project co-presented with Other Sights for Artists’ Projects.

View­ing and drinks, Fri­day, May 15, 6-8pm at the Lennox Pub (800 Granville Street).

As an OFFSITE exten­sion of the Lit­er­ally exhi­bi­tion cur­rently installed at Art­s­peak, Aaron Carpenter’s new video, Ffinni­gans Wwake, will be shown on the out­door screens at Rob­son and Granville Streets. In con­sort with his draw­ings for the exhi­bi­tion, Car­pen­ter has taken James Joyce’s text and ren­dered it as a dra­matic text crawl akin to the one at the open­ing of the Star Wars films. Intrigued (and per­plexed) by Finnegans Wake’s multi-lingual puns, frac­tured dream nar­ra­tives, and lan­guage exper­i­ments, Carpenter’s work con­flates Joyce’s impen­e­tra­ble opus with the dis­parately pop­ulist genre that is sci­ence fic­tion. Tak­ing this noto­ri­ously dif­fi­cult and exper­i­men­tal work of lit­er­a­ture to filmic pro­por­tions, specif­i­cally ref­er­enc­ing sci­ence fic­tion films, Car­pen­ter sets up an inter­est­ing par­al­lel; Joyce’s work is meant to recre­ate the expe­ri­ence of sleep and dreams, and sci­ence fic­tion (as both a lit­er­ary and cin­e­matic genre) is a fan­tasy based on spec­u­la­tive sci­en­tific dis­cov­er­ies and par­al­lel universes.

Pre­sented by:

Art­s­peak grate­fully acknowl­edges the sup­port from The Canada Coun­cil for the Arts, the province of BC through the BC Arts Coun­cil and the Gam­ing Com­mis­sion, the City of Van­cou­ver, and our donors.

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