PROSE & POETRY
PHOTOGRAPHIC WRITING
25 Ways to Close a Photograph
With Men of Progress
And Women of Vision
Photographic writing based on character weakness. Still my favourite work. The men were presented in a live performance at the Vancouver International Writer’s Festival. Jazz improvisation for each character was provided by Sal Ferraras and his band.
Architectural Writing
Assemblage
These are plans for a Canadian pavilion situated in Venice. The design was one of the successful entries in the National Ideas Competition for the 1995 Venice Biennale International Exhibition of Architecture. The work was produced in collaboration with architects Tom Bessai, Maria Denegri, and Bruce Haden.
Poems that Read Themselves
The Banff Centre's Deep Web Project
Animated poetry and works based on the formative writings of Canadian Poet B.P. Nichol. Augmented by some of my own works.
EXPERIMENTAL FORMATS
Notes Toward Absolute Zero
Stand alone hypertext written in Storyspace. Eastgate Systems, 1995
Published in the heady days of disk-based hypertext, when the term "hypertext" was largely unknown, this electronic fiction centres on a frozen train, the Franklin expedition, and the Canadian landscape. Available today in contemporary form for Mac or Windows from Eastgate Systems.
Tim McLaughlin's Notes Toward Absolute Zero is a lyrical meditation on the geographies of space, time, and desire. Interweaving historical documents of the ill-fated Franklin Expedition with the personal reminiscences of a woman in search of her hypnotist uncle and the man who in turn searches for her, McLaughlin explores the process of memory. Like the hypertext form of the novel itself, memory here is fragmented, indeterminate and elusive. The men and women of Notes Toward Absolute Zero carry out their expeditions into the past not to retrieve the people they have lost there but to discover them all over again, to make them anew. McLaughlin excavates this terrain of the lost with aphoristic precision and archeological tenderness.
C.J. Keep — University of Western Ontario.
Collaboration
The Electronic Labyrinth: Hypertext Fiction and the Literary Artist
A sprawling research work of covering everything from ASCII to the postmodern novel. Produced with co-authors C.J. Keep and Robin Parmar.
The Conscience of Salesmen (written by C.J. Keep)
A collaboration with C.J. Keep produced this meditation on commerce in the heavenly city.