Notes on the Composition of “Notes on the Voyage of Owl and Girl”

This paper will reflect upon the transmutation of male-authored print-based narratives into female narrated digital literary spaces through the strategies of détournement employed in the composition of Notes on the Voyage of Owl and Girl.

Part ship’s log, part sea chart, part sailor’s yarn, part children’s book, part Victorian nonsense poem, part computer-generated narrative — this web-based work détournes characters, facts, fictions, and forms of accounts of sea voyages undertaken over the past 2340 years, into the North Sea, into the North Atlantic, and beyond into territories purely imaginary.

J. R. Carpenter is a Canadian artist, writer, researcher, performer and maker of maps, zines, books, poetry, short fiction, long fiction, non-fiction, and non-linear, intertextual, hypermedia, and computer-generated narratives. Her pioneering works of digital literature have been exhibited, published, performed, and presented in journals, galleries, museums, and festivals around the world.