I want to create a short video with a story behind it. I’m not exactly sure what kind of story I want to present yet, but it should have some kind of meaning, and perhaps a short video that reflects the meaning. Nevertheless, I could write a story with a life-skilled lesson for the audience, using visual aids to relay the message, while keeping it clear and engaging to capture viewers’ attention. I might also consider adding a song that enhances both the narrative and the visuals. I am still figuring out the process, but whatever I choose, I know my electronic literature will communicate a powerful message that will be remembered in electronic literature.
I made this in Google Sheet. I was inspired by All of Your Time Tossed Selves and how the author took Google Forms and made a poetic narrative out of it.
The reader will navigate the piece by clicking on the boxes within the ice berg. Each box will link to another sheet on the same workbook and will contain some sort of poem. You will be able to go back to the iceberg once you are done reading the poem.
You can click on the boxes in any order. They will tell a story, but not a linear one. It’s basically about a person who commits suicide and their life experiences are the ice berg. The things above the water are what suicidal people show to society and the things underneath the water are what they don’t show people. Note how just like real icebergs, there is more under the water than above.
This is meaningful to me because my best friend commited sucide about 5 years ago and it has deeply affected me ever since.
I am excited to use a boring and professional medium like Google Sheets to make something fun. Spreadsheets are seen as corporate and uninspiring, so just like All Your Time Tossed Selves, I get to rewrite the narrative on how you can use something like Google Sheets to tell a story in a non traditional way.
For my final e-lit project I plan to create an interactive story using Twine. I sort of went down a rabbit hole on topics and platforms to use to help me with interactive stories because I really want to make a good story. After being exposed to so many creative writers, I have this yearning to create something with electronic literature. Twine is a website where it allows texts to pop up and jump into a new page after clicking it which feels like a perfect way to capture the topic. My topic focuses on how it feels like to live with anxiety and OCD. For example for me, when I fixate on something, it becomes almost impossible to focus on anything else. The words in my head become louder and more frequent, and also more repetitive. I want to use Twine to recreate how words suddenly appear in my head and redirect the reader back to the same place because thats how it feels like for me when I am overthinking about something. I would want to call this piece a “Mental landscape” because that’s essentially what it is. I am taking the reader into the mind of someone with anxiety and OCD..keep in mind… mental health looks different for everyone. I want the readers to feel the chaos, the fixation, the difficulty of grounding oneself. I believe Twine would be the best platform for me to use since it offers clickable texts and will sort of show how “spiraling” feelings like in a sense.
Some early ideas that have been generating since last class towards the final elit project is possibly creating an interactive poem that uses word scape movements on the screen with animation tools in a Microsoft WordDoc. There seems to be many options to animate text, images, using this platform and turn into a creative way to experience my poetry and also interact with it. I was thinking about creating some letters in Adobe Illustrator using clipping mask technique to add an image inside each letter that is associated with emotions, or events. Not really sure yet. Then export into a Word Doc which you can do as a JPEG or PNG file image or even with Adobe Acrobat using the “Export to Word” command.
I would really like to sharpen my skills again in Adobe After Effects but there may not be enough time to rekindle and do what I have planned creatively to the letters. Mister Horse is a free program extension of Adobe After Effects that gives you options of making text animated in various ways. I would like my poem to be in a way a task for the reader to transcribe the words or letters that show up on thw screen at variables in different colors, sizes, sequences compared to mine that was separated prior at a given point of time. This process can attempt to recognize the order of how we put words together to express a thought, emotion and our thought process contemplating our structure of putting things together, so they are comprehended by others . Meaning Making of words. There is also an effect called Clipping Mask mentioned earlier that can replace the inner part of a letter character, number with an image. This can be an effective technique also I may want to experiment with to emphasize certain particular words with a feeling.
I was also thinking about doing cut outs of letters and some images I have or digital artworks to add to the animations in a Word Doc being untraditional to how this program is usually used to communicate. Though this is too ambitious at this point of the Semester and would require too much time.
I have been playing around with an idea for my final project that I think I could have a lot of fun with. I want something light-hearted and fun/silly. The idea follows four roommates one of which received brownies from his grandma. He makes it very clear to his roommates that they are not permitted by any means in any circumstances to touch the brownies. Lo and behold the brownies are eaten and the piece will follow the roommates stories on what they did that evening to have the reader figure out who dunnit. My goal is to having something fun for readers to experience.
I also had been playing around with ideas of a he said/she said story story told in two different perspectives. I want one story to be told with traditional black text on a white screen and the other to be told an inverse of white text on a black screen. I am not the most technologically savvy person so my biggest concern is not the creative piece but the execution of it. I hope to workshop ideas on how I could execute my ideas in a semi easy way while maybe learning a new skill or two.
I don’t enjoy the bot helping me create the poem. It doesn’t match the theme that I’m trying to run with when I make my choices. I do like the concept of a digitalized blackout poem software because it makes the art accessible to those who might’ve never known about it from anywhere else and people who struggle with fine motor skills (handwriting). I’d like this much more if the bot was removed and the original pieces were longer or from contemporary works. I don’t particularly feel inspired by Nick Carroway discussing West Egg.
I reserve my judgements about 200 Castles because I couldn’t find the app that would showcase the story, and I wasn’t willing to print out the pictures. The concept is interesting, and there was bound to be accessibility issues in the execution. The website can definitely be improved upon by adding a section dedicated to troubleshooting. Otherwise, this is a creative means that artists in the future may also begin to adopt more.
I’ve dabbled in blackout poetry a number of times, and this project annuls the finality of merely putting a pen to paper. This may be perceived as a positive trait, as it makes blackout poetry a more accessible practice, especially for those who are hoping to experiment with poetry for the first time. Connoisseurs of poetry, or even blackout poetry specifically, may claim that the finality of pen and paper is the substance of the form.
I have my own personal strife with the form of blackout poetry, as I was once assigned to create a poem from the narrative of a former slave. I personally believe there is an ethical boundary in blacking out someone else’s words, and it must be done cautiously.
“200 Castles” I found to be inaccessible, although I believe augmented reality storytelling may be the future of entertainment. With technology such as virtual reality headsets trending in gaming, it is only a matter of time until virtual or augmented reality art forms overtake the media and entertainment industries.
In order to improve the accessibility of “200 Castles”, it very well seems it could become an iPhone app that may not require printed photos and code to run. As technology rapidly improves, so should the accessibility of the project.
200 Pieces, Felt a bit like rummaging through a junk drawer. The work is scattered, fragmented, a little messy, I was a bit disappointed and frustrated because I really believed that I was getting the hang of this “electronic literature “. 200 pieces did not feel like literature.
One moment that really stuck with me happened about halfway through my wandering. I clicked into a small block of text that looked almost like a glitch It turned out to be just a few lines shoved off to the corner. It read like an unfinished memory: someone describing a bus ride, the way the window fogged up, and the blur of lights outside. It was only a few sentences, but I got the idea that we all have the small memories that may not tie into something else. It reminded me of those flashes of life you remember for no reason at all, scenes that don’t belong to any larger story, but stay with you anyway.
That’s what the whole experience felt like: bumping into moments that didn’t need to justify themselves. No plot arcs. No explanations. Just a collage of hints, confessions, images, and oddities. And the more I clicked, the more I realized the joy was in the wandering, not the understanding.
Tried out the Blackout Poetry Tool the other day, and wow, it turns out to be quite a trip. I grabbed a random piece of text and just started circling words that jumped out at me. There’s something so satisfying about turning a whole page into a little pocket of meaning.
I wasn’t able to get the ‘definition’ of what black out poetry is, but I was able to figure this one out quickly.
At one point, I pulled this line: “Everything fades but the spark remains.” I didn’t even plan it, it just poppedup. I guess that’s the beauty of blackout poetry: the words are already there, you just have to notice them. At first nothing made any sense, but as I worked with the bot version, I started to see how you could create small patterns. It’s kind of like finding your own secret message in someone else’s story.
You start seeing patterns, connections, little nuggets that you’d never notice just skimming a page. It felt more like a game.
There used to be these magnets for your fridge that were words and you could move them around and leave messages for your family or little poems or haiku’s, this reminded me of those magnets.
It’s creative, a little meditative, and honestly not a bad and playful way to spend some time. But I’m not sure how it is literature, other than the poetry that might arise from the words.
This week we covered two pretty cool works of E-lit. To start I want to talk about 200 Castle. This work again goes with the idea of accessibility within the context of E-lit. Augmented Reality works are really cool to experience in person. Much, if not all of their value is based on the interaction between the user and their device’s camera. Since I could only see this work through a video from author Caitlin Fisher, I feel like I am missing the point. It’s the same feeling of hearing a movie that people love to talk about and learning it’s hard to find online. From what I saw through the video, I can say that I am super interested in the work regardless. The work using a real book to flip through is a brilliant way of including a physical aspect into the work. The act of flipping through a book brings another level of immersion rather than scrolling on a webpage for example. The fact that the reader could read it out of order also added a level of control as the reader only interacted with images that they were interested in. The only issue I could consider having with this work is the fact that holding a phone or tablet while trying to see the book could be challenging, though I guess we will never know.
The other work that was covered this week was the Black Out Poetry Tool by Jazer Chand. I have to admit that I initially judged this work too harshly when I first looked at it. I am a poetry hater through and through (honestly, I just do not “get it”). Looking at this, I was kind of put off. The first setting of “Thesis” was pretty straight forward. I took my time to create a work from the first couple lines of Mary Shelley’s masterwork. The “anithesis” setting was off putting in a way. Since I took some time to pick my words, it was kind of a moment of whiplash to see the bot spit out a work almost instantly. It reminded me of my feelings of AI within the realm of writing (that’s a can of worms I do not want to even touch). It was with the “synthesis” setting was great. Working with the bot to create a work was way more enjoyable than I imagined. Rather than spitting out piece, the bot works with the user, vamping off of our selection. I liked how the bot chose words that would naturally fit with the words that the user chose. It creates the illusion of collaboration (only an illusion since the bot is not a real person, just a program). This new back and forth created a pretty interesting experience. Finally, the last setting worth talking about was “symbiosis”. While the user has total control of their word choice, the bot gives a number of suggestions to use. This felt like when word gives grammar suggestions on a paper. It ignores what the writer intends and only spits out what it “thinks” is right. Sometimes I ignored their selections, while other times it chose a word that fit into what wanted to do. This was another interesting option to use. This whole work seemingly looked to explore creatives use of tech. Some people create on their own, some use tech to think for them. But for many of use, tech is used as a tool to help our process. Creators negotiate with this dynamic today now more than ever. Super cool to see it play out through this work. The visual option was nice if you are into that kind of thing.
The official class site for Dr. Mia Zamora's Fall 2025 Electronic Literature course.
