Three months ago, through surprising circumstances, nine writers (including myself) had a chance to create a collaborative digital writing project from the ground up. There was no framework in the beginning. There was no "final vision." There was only the creative process, the creative contributors, and one generous student's dining points. There was Los Angeles. There were many, many gifs.
We gathered our work around our shared space: the Los Angeles area, what it means, what it is, and what it is not. We wrote. We revised. We negotiated. We disagreed. We kept writing. Now, we have a completed, collaborative piece of communicative art, Re:Place. There is good writing here. This writing is also temporal, a digital art installationthat will exist while it exists, and one that we knew was never meant to last forever. I'll be reflecting on the project a little more in another blog, but I can tell you that it was one of the best projects I've ever worked on.
In addition to contributing poems, I also helped with the flow and the design of the site, so here are a few tips to help you explore:
- Start with a pathway: whether it is verse, image, or story. Follow.
- Use the tags at the bottom of each post to see works related to each other, or just click around and read whatever strikes your fancy. I can honestly say that everything you'll find is worth reading.
- Use the links within pieces to get a bigger sense of what is possible in digital art. We didn't know when we started how much we could do. I think all nine of us are proud of what we accomplished.
- Share the project with people wondering if they can do work collaboratively. While I won't give away too much about how authorship broke down, I can tell you that every single piece has an individual author, and that each author contributed to the general project by bringing their individuality into a collective and finding the connections.
