Good News! My digital rendering of Caren Beilin's "Animals Are Placebos" just got published over at the New River Journal of Digital Writing and Art. The New River Journal is currently being hosted by Virgina Tech's Center for Digital Discourse and Art, and is promoted as being one of the first journals devoted exclusively to digital discourse and art.
My piece is a Flash rendering of Caren's text. Caren and I have never met, but I took on the task of giving visual life to her awesome text and am pretty pleased with the result. The editors write of their call for artists and writers:
"When we started this issue, we thought: let’s talk with some writers we enjoy and see if they’d be willing to offer work that’d get re-imagined and digitized by digital artists. It was, we thought, a great idea. What we realized, however, is that to think of digital writing as two interlocking pieces—writing on the one hand, digital magic on the other—is, well, off. Finding writers willing to have their work reimagined was relatively easy: finding digital artists with the time and energy and ability to take good writing and find new ways to present it was much, much more difficult.
The only piece that made it is Jennifer Smith’s presentation of Caren Beilin’s Animals Are Placebos. Both Jennifer and Caren are students—at VCU and the University of Montana, Missoula, respectively—and though they don’t know each other, Jennifer’s original and clever digitizing of Caren’s spare, strange language seems well-matched. In an Alice In Wonderland sort of move, the reader chooses his or her pill and the story moves according to the reader’s decisions."
