Multimedia: The more the merrier. Collaborations of writers, artists, musicians and programmers yield lively work. Born Magazine is a source.
Sep 30, 2007
By Katie Haegele
This week, as I watched some animated poems and "played" a piece of
interactive fiction, I couldn't help but notice that many of the more
sophisticated pieces took more than one person to build. Artistic
collaboration is nothing new, of course, but within the emerging world of
digital literature it seems to be more important than ever.
Is the new media changing the way artists work?
Chris Joseph might not go that far. But as a writer who works in a
variety of digital media, he's well aware that joining forces with other
artists can yield some very interesting results.
Joseph is Digital Writer in Residence at the Institute of Creative
Technologies at De Montfort University in Leicester, England. His
multimedia project Animalamina (www.animalamina.com) is an unusual and
delightful piece of interactive poetry for children. He created it in
collaboration with 12 visual artists.
"I think collaboration is very common, and almost essential, for a full
multimedia project," Joseph says. "Very few people have the full range
of skills required - writing, music, art, programming. "
Taking his inspiration from the classic storybook teaching tool of
ABCs, Joseph first composed poems featuring animals representing each
letter of the alphabet. There are buzzing bumblebees, for instance, and
"very very vultures being (very) rude. "
He envisioned the project as a traditional print piece, but worried he
wouldn't have much to add to the already well-trodden ground of ABC
books. Digital art, by contrast, was hopping with possibilities,
especially for his intended audience of kids 5 to 11 - people who understand
interactions with computers much better than their parents do.
He described his idea to his visual artist friends and asked them for
submissions. The artists, working in different media, contributed
pictures that Joseph then animated in Flash. The resulting piece is a dynamic
set of interactive, interconnected poetry animations set to sleek
electronic music that Joseph composed.
One of the most striking aspects of the piece is the breadth of styles
represented. The backdrop of one scene is a panoramic photograph of a
view from a mountaintop; the user spins the image around using the
cursor in order to see the view from all angles. The piece representing the
letter C features animated cats that began life as charming paintings
by Clare Drapper, bright, splashy creatures wearing loony expressions
that put me in mind of the pets in George Booth's New Yorker cartoons.
Simply put, Animalamina wouldn't be nearly as interesting without
multiple contributors.
"I think I've been pretty fortunate so far in my collaborating
partners. All the Animalamina artists were friends, including a couple who I've
only ever known online, which was more important to me than any kind
of assessment of 'quality,' and I love the variety of styles that
resulted. But I think it suggests a basic problem, which is finding and
funding collaborators to work on multimedia projects," Joseph said.
This is the very problem Born Magazine (www.bornmagazine.com) exists to
solve.
Created in 1996 in Seattle as a print publication that facilitated
linkups between artists and writers, Born went online the following year.
Today it features collaborations between creators of traditional
literature and artists who work in digital media.
The current issue includes an unnerving poem called "He Wants to Take
Your Picture," written by Susan Brown and brought to life by the
art/design team Synthetic Infatuation. As retro-cute images slide around and
tell their own story, the poem is recited by a robot voice that doesn't
get the inflection of American English even remotely right - you know
it, it's the terrifying "Agnes" voice from your Mac's VoiceOver program.
The piece is as much performance art or film as it is a print poem.
Scott Benish, the magazine's online curator, explains that some of
Born's collaborations are set in motion by Born editors, who select a poem
or short prose piece from the submissions they've received and pass it
on to a visual artist, who then interprets it in "interactive media. "
Other times a team works together throughout the process, blending
words and visuals from their project's inception.
"Design - visuals, interactivity and audio - has the potential to
really enhance the understanding of the piece, or even completely change the
interpretation of a piece, which can be interesting or unfortunate,
depending on the point of view of the writer," Benish said.
A potential pitfall? There had to be one; without risk there is no art.
In other words, stay tuned. This literature is evolving every day.
go back
