Feeds and Streams

Heraclitus said, “You can never step into the same river; for new waters are always flowing on to you.” In many ways RSS feeds function as tributaries in the rivers of information that flood our Inboxes.

Tributaries & Text-Fed Streams is a project by Montreal-based artist and writer J.R. Carpenter and curated by Kate Armstrong. Carpenter took the February 2007 issue of The Capilano Review, which was dedicated to new writing and technologies, and, using RSS, blogging, tagging, and other Web 2.0 tools, parsed, annotated, reordered, and interlinked the essays. The end result, fed into an RSS stream, both exposes and subverts the formal structure of writing and literary criticism. It flows through undercurrents of pure chance and hits the headwaters of creative insight.