Thursday, February 14, 2013

TOC: Creators & Technology Converging: When Tech Becomes Part of the Story

How does new technology affect the creative process?

Motion Poems - Todd Boss

Started in corporate marketing. Pushed the first magnetic poem kits by teaming up with American Poetry Society and set up magnetic walls around the US and then decorated the new VW Beetle with them.

Writes poetry for people who hate poetry and writes to be accessible. Poetry has a point of sale issue in that there’s no way to have a sample of the poem to know if you want it. You need to read the whole thing and there’s an imaginative investment that is needed for poetry before you can understand it (unlike most everything else).

Todd teamed up with an animator who turned some of his poems into animations and then it turned into the company Motion Poems, which uses the work of many poets. They want to work with poets and the institutions that support poetry like publishers. The Motion Poem becomes not only a work of art in its own right, but also becomes a marketing tool for the poet.

Minneapolis Minnesota has the biggest art board in the country and it helps support Motion Poems (also KickStarter).


Digital Fiction - Kate Pullinger

Project: Landing Gear. A mix of video and text across the screen. At the moment it is a proof of concept.
Prologue: Flight Paths: A Networked Novel.; Landing Gear; Epilogue: Duel


The Alpine Review - Louis-Jacques Darveau

www.thealpinereview.com about things that matter, a compendium of ideas built by an international team. Neo-mania = technology for its own sake, which can cause fatigue. You can connect to anyone, but to what end? Technology is not the answer, it is the amplifier of intent. Some of the new forms of publishing are almost rational to the point of being boring. There’s a lot of sterile data around us that impairs our ability to think. We fall into a pattern of information overconsumption (not “information overload” because its our choice); The Alpine Review is about perspective (a mountain lets you see the unexplored valleys or nooks in the mountain). Perspective is the answer to the flood of information.

Why print and not digital for The Alpine Review? Permanence is important; we have multiple senses, which is important. People are buying handmade physical crafts these days as a reaction to the digital world. Analog watches give us a sense of time. Computers that are sealed shut (like MacBookAir) are very removed from our senses and us.

Technology does help The Alpine Review. They collaborate with contributors from around the world and also costs are lowered. It also allows for better marketing.


The Silent History – Eli Horowitz and Russell Quinn

Eli worked at McSweeney’s where they spent a lot of time thinking about the book as object, but around 2009 they admitted they had to move into the digital world. It felt like the content was squeezed onto the Kindle in a grey slurry.

In trying to figure out what could be done online with the same sensibility that was applied to the device that was applied to the book. Thoughts like “updates are relatively easy” “we carry these devices around” went into the design.

The Silent History is a novel told by 120 voices. Each day a post is sent to your phone and the post is a part of an oral history. Each day, each week, and each month had an ark to it. So this was not a work shoved into a digital format, this was composed for the digital world. The screen was split between testimonials (circles) and pins on a map. You have to go to the location to read that part of the content. The idea is not that you’re simply unlocking it, but that the setting is part of the text and you need to be there to understand it. This is a novel that can be explored. Readers have responded eagerly to the book.

There is a lack of patience with traditional publishing within McSweeny's so they just started creating The Silent History (with no thought even of VC).

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