Electronic Bookshelf

Perusing the internet, I ran across Deena Larson's "Virtual Bookshelf," which lists several e-lit pieces according to the time they take to read. Lo and behold, the new media piece that I published with Caren Beilin is on the bookshelf.
Very cool find.
Also a very nice intro to some electronic literature that doesn't (necessarily) take a lifetime to read.

Typopoetry

My friend and comrade, Guido Alvarez, has just self-published his first book, Breakthrough_typopoetry.
You should all go check it out.
Then you can go to Lulu.com to buy it here.
Guido describes this project:

Breakthrough is my first experimental book of "typoetry": A hybrid product of typography, photography, and poetry. The ultimate goal of this product is to finance the completion of my Ph.D. studies in Media, Arts and Text at VCU and to start a career in media production using self-publishing technology to achieve it.

It is certainly not your average beach read, though I suppose you could call it a bathroom book.

Pipe Cleaning Fun.

Pipe cleaner + typewriter keys + shake-your-booty music.
A match made in heaven.
Visit David Bressler's creation here.

"Animals Are Placebos" is Up and Running

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."

A Motley Crew

Any news article that sites Marshall McLuhan, Hannah Montana, and superdelegates catches my attention. So, for you reading pleasure, I offer you Andrew Foster Altschul's "Of Sharks in the Water, Superdelegates, and Hannah Montana's Breasts."

Intentional Fallacy

Here's our completed video, Intentional Fallacy. It was a collaborative piece that Melinda, Sean, Kristine, Jenn Figg and myself all worked on together. I think that, for being the first film most of us had worked on, it turned out pretty nicely. We shot it completely in still images, and then animated them together to get the final product. It was a great learning process.



Here's a brief summary of the film:

Intentional Fallacy is a film that questions the notions of authorial intent. Created with more than 2,500 still images and hand-drawn animation, the film follows a young man experiencing an existential crisis. Mistakenly assuming his sketch pad is a reliable guide, the young man loops through time to find his true reality.

Photoshop Disasters

You've probably already seen this, but I've spent a good hour or so perusing the site when I should be working on papers instead. So goes life, right? I call it research on what not to do. Like make mutant third hands. Or fourth or fifth ones.
Photoshop Disasters