In this amazing short by UK filmmaker Tom Jenkins, a lonely desk toy longs for escape from the dark confines of the office, so he takes a cross country road trip to the Pacific Coast in the only way he can – using a toy car and Google Maps Street View. This is stunning.

Watch:

Better than a book trailer? UK publisher Walker Books has introduced a new type of book cover for the forthcoming YA novel Daylight Savings, which interacts with you when you mouse over it. Try it:

Pretty neat.

Rachel Walsh is a second year Illustration student studying at Cardiff School of Art & Design.  She was given the project: ‘“Explain something modern/Internet-based to someone who lived and died before 1900.” Her choice: explain the Kindle to Charles Dickens.

Walsh says:

‘All the books I made had the actual covers on them, and were the books Dickens wrote, his favourite childhood books, or books I’ve got.

There are 40 little books inside.’

Learn more about the project here. Via MHP.

In the history of world poetry, there have been all kinds of limits and forms we writers have forced ourselves to adapt to over the centuries, such as sonnets, iambic pentameter, odes, pastorals and free verse. Even contemporary novels are often forced to meet certain page requirements to be considered for mass publication unless you happen to be Salman Rushdie or Thomas Pynchon.

While earning my English degree at school, we took a survey class on American and British literature starting from the medieval era, on through the twentieth century—though I believe our class was so disorganized we only made it halfway through the nineteenth century. A certain professor lectured us solely on the title page and the preface or forward for a whole week. We examined how different editions of the same novels evolved with first prefaces then second prefaces then third and so on.

All this “to-do” without even getting to the first page drove me nuts. I’ve always hated conventions and restrictions and necessary evils yet I marvel at the thought that writing without abiding by a specific set of rules is a contemporary conception. Where do we go when we are liberated, when possibilities are limitless? We can make like New York School poet Frank O’Hara and impose our own rules (complete a poem during lunch hour) or abandon the notion entirely to genre-shattering effect (Denis Johnson’s Jesus’ Son).

It used to be that modern meant free verse, yet we’re surrounded by programs like Twitter, Tumblr and Facebook. These sites encourage piecemeal sound bites, snippets of our lives, slices of our day. So why not use these platforms to express our creativity? Read more »

I am a perpetual optimist, especially on the issue of literature in the digital age. I believe that the Internet presents a number of wonderful new ways to create and distribute literature, and I firmly deny, deny, deny when faced with the all-too-ubiquitous argument that the Internet is killing the book.

One point on which I will concede, however, is that the screen is changing the way we think. After spending eight hours at a computer and simultaneously listening to music, checking Twitter or Facebook (more often than I ought to, I should note), answering emails, editing video, or whatever it is that I’ll end up doing on a given day, suddenly I feel very distracted when faced with an open book. Reading a book can be jarringly simple after a day of multitasking and multimedia; when your brain is trained to process multiple streams of information at the same time, at lighting speed no less, sometimes it can be difficult to focus on just one thing.

So for those people, there’s Teleportal Readings, a monthly web video series made for “those who love reading but readings.” Or, I’d like to add, for those who love readings but think that video recordings of them are terribly dull. Watch what a little green screen hoodoo can do for literature:

Read more »

So proclaims The Guardian‘s Jonathan Jones, which seems odd to me. Seriously? I’m trying to think of counterexamples, but I’m coming up with nothing. There’s the theory that Shakespeare’s plays may have been actually composed by a group of people, but as that’s only a theory, I’d be interested in hearing some better-documented examples of group-made art.

In his article “Not everyone can be an artist,” Jones takes a look at the rise of interactive and democratized artwork in the digital age. He says:

Some forms of interactivity are obviously good for art, as they are good for society. The more democratically ideas and information are shared, the more accessible art will be. [...] So democracy is great – except when it shapes the actual work of art. I do not believe a great work of art has ever been created by communal consensus, let alone by multiple editors. There will never be a wiki-masterpiece. This is because art, if it has any value at all, is the product of deep and often rationally incommunicable perceptions, and to try and explain or share those perceptions in a communally created artwork will negotiate and re-edit them to banality.

Participatory art is a denial of talent. It panders to a cosy lie, that everyone is equally able to create worthwhile art. What chance have we of nurturing those rare wonders in our midst, the born artists, if we claim this infantile right to put on a badge that says “artist”?

I think it’s a little premature to begin making claims about how true crowdsourced artwork will fail, as this new art from is only in its infancy (See also: “Why the Internet will fail” article from 1995–d’oh). Neil Gaiman and the BBC’s crowdsourced Twitter audiobook last fall wasn’t an enormous success in turning out a high-quality piece of literature, but it’s helped to kindle the recent interest in crowdsourced art; I imagine Gaiman and the BBC’s project will be only one of many large-scale collaborative art projects we’ll be seeing in the coming months/years. And maybe someone will come along soon and find a way to make crowdsourced art a bit more palatable.

Wild predictions aside, I think Jones has some valid points, and also some invalid ones. Read more »

Twitter is not especially well-known for fiction. But maybe that will change. Writers are embracing Twitter for the creative challenge imposed by its 140-character limit, for its real-time functionality, and for its interactivity. Twitterature, or Twiction, or whatever else you’d like to call it, is not just a means of reaching today’s ADD-raddled reader–it’s a new medium entirely, spawning new ways to create and interact with fiction.

So without further ado, here’s a short guide to try innovative and interesting Twitter fiction projects, past and present:

@ElectricLit

Electric Literature’s highly anticipated “microserialization” of Rick Moody’s novel begins today, and is definitely worth a read. Rather than chopping up a pre-written story into 140-character bursts as many other Twitter novelists tend to do, Moody wrote his novel Some Contemporary Characters expressly for Twitter and embraced the character limit as a source of creative inspiration. Each section of the novel comes every 10 minutes and lasts until December 2nd.

Bloomsday

Last Bloomsday, two Ulysses enthusiasts took the novel’s 10th chapter, Wandering Rocks, and retraced all the events of that day on Twitter. Videogame designers Ian Bogost and Ian McCarthy registered 54 of the novel’s characters as Twitter users, who all Tweeted about what they were doing on June 16, 1904 at the correct fictional times. (Old project, since June 16 is long past at this point, but still worth a read. Here’s hoping Bogost and McCarthy will revive the project in some way next Bloomsday.)

The Twitter of Oz

Read more »

The Guardian‘s Vicky Frost thinks 3D television might not do well because the cardboard glasses you have to wear look goofy. And because strapping those red-and-blue suckers onto your face is a pain. And, yes, she’s right on both counts. But I think the main reason 3D TV won’t do well is because–even if we develop the technology to enjoy 3D TV without the glasses–it’s just not necessary.

These days, pretty much everything we can possibly imagine, we can create.  So of course we’re going to try out new digital methods in storytelling, especially if there’s money to be made and there are television studio executives behind it. But just how much innovation is too much? At what point does technology stop giving us opportunities and instead start becoming a distraction?

Read more »

One of the cool things about the arts is that they all complement each other. Dance and music are each arts unto themselves, but the results are transcendent when they are paired together. Music is also an integral component in film and television, which in turn makes use of screenwriting and visual arts. Everything overlaps.

But with the exception of the rare book soundtrack, the printed word tends to stand alone from the rest of the arts. Maybe that will change as new technology gives us interactive books with synchronized soundtracks and accompanying video. And while we’re at it: maybe new technology will give us books with holographic characters jumping out of every page.

Until then, there’s STFUAJPGM, a miniature micro-music mixtape magazine that marries literature with its long-lost friends: music, visual arts, and video. Each “episode” is centered around a central theme inspired by video game culture (think heroes, love stories, and travel) and involves a smorgasbord of multimedia to illustrate the theme: pixel art, video, short stories, and an overarching soundtrack that neatly weaves all the components together. STFUAJPGM is focused on freely distributed music within the chiptune community, so each episode is also available for download.

They’re only up to episode #5 so far, with new episodes coming out every month or so. An uncommon thing in today’s daily updated culture, but very much worth the wait. To get a better idea of what STFUAJPGM is and what they have to offer, hit the jump for Episode 0 (Pilot): A Love Story. Read more »

The Expressive Intelligence Studio blog has a new post up about the roleplaying card game Magic: The Gathering, which made me feel nostalgic in an odd sort of way. Because while I did enjoy the game in its heyday, I had a very different experience with it because I never actually bothered to learn the rules of the game. I was inspired by the art on the cards and bored by the scoring system, and so instead came up with a new set of rules entirely (which I don’t remember at all now). I taught them to my friends and we played informal tournaments with each other at home, at school, wherever.

Like pretty much everyone ever, I have a certain fascination with my childhood, largely in part because I had no qualms whatsoever about turning up my nose at the so-called rules and inventing my own. No matter how silly or irrational they may have seemed. And because of this fearlessness (or, if you like, naiveté), the artifacts of my childhood consist of horribly-drawn comics, short stories plagiarized from my favorite novels, and scripts for movies I planned to make, camera be damned. I even convinced some of my friends to participate in an original musical about gang warfare, which wasn’t a fraction as hilarious to me then as it is to me now. Sure, I might not have had the necessary knowledge to write about such a subject, being a preteen girl from the suburbs of New Jersey. Sure, I might not have been the best candidate to compose the original score, not being able to actually play any musical instruments. But who cared? I was going to write as much of the musical as I could, and rehearse with my friends as much as I could, and have a blast doing it.

While I am thrilled beyond compare that I can (fairly) confidently say that I’m a better writer now than I was at 10 or 12, and that my ideas now actually come to fruition, I feel like there’s something I’ve lost. Read more »