Literatura Electrónica
A Critical Writing & Making Course
Ansiedad - To text or not to text
Claudia Valdivia
From social media feeds to smartphone camera rolls, screenshots permeate the digital experience. With their ethos of validity, screenshots of text message conversations document and convey compelling insight into digital interactions between persons. Exploiting the particularities of screenshots as a literary media, the following work exemplifies the creative use of everyday digital resources to produce works of literary value.
Claudia: I created this Google Doc love story on the first week of school when we were asked to "get creative with everyday word processing programs". Inspired by PowerPoint's 'slide' transition's similarity to the 'swipe' movement on iPhone, this slideshow places the reader inside of the conversations and immerses them into the relationship.
Claudia: I created this Google Doc love story on the first week of school when we were asked to "get creative with everyday word processing programs". Inspired by PowerPoint's 'slide' transition's similarity to the 'swipe' movement on iPhone, this slideshow places the reader inside of the conversations and immerses them into the relationship.
GIF Literature
Haejin Song & Joselvin Galeas
In the digital universe of mobile applications, instant messaging platforms, and social media, animations of the file format `.gif` (appropriately called gifs) are ubiquitous. Internet users commonly find gifs that summarize tv series or bring memes to life. The follow works vividly demonstrate the potential for gifs to serve literary means of social activism and expressive exploration.
North Korean Crisis
Haejin: I decided to create a GIF about Liberty in North Korea, a human rights organization that I am a part of– better known as LiNK. This organization has over 300 teams worldwide, including UC Berkeley’s very own LiNK chapter. Through this GIF, I hope to stimulate a critical discussion about the grave human rights crisis in North Korea.
El Daltonismo
Joselvin: Since the age of 7, I have suffered from migraines. I am one of the many men who suffer from color blindness, which makes it difficult to distinguish red from green when they are next to each other. Due to this, I feel a lot of pain trying to distinguish these two. If you suffer from color blindness, take a look at this GIF for 30 seconds. Do you feel it (the pain)?
Where I am from
Nancy Hanna
Timelines and their diagrammatical organization exude factual authority. They summarize expansive claims in history textbooks and document the happenings of individuals and organizations. The following work appropriates the timeline in ways that traverse the paradigm of temporal absolutism, manipulating time as a literary device.
Nancy: This is a bilingual work featuring where I am from. The sight belongs to a mother, a friend, a poet, a writer who came from her ancestors, from cobble stone roads, from forgotten dialects, from the burning sun of Mexico, from European explorers who crossed a cold sea to the new world, from dreamers, from travelers and from story tellers from where I acquired wisdom and strength.
Taroko Remixes
Michelaina Johnson & Kevin Chen
Drawing from predetermined datasets, the processes written by Nick Montfort recombine words in unexpected phrases whose infinite permutations cascade down the webpage. Montfort’s code for “Taroko Gorge” serves as a framework of creativity from which numerous Taroko Remixes arose. The following works illustrate the flexibility and diversity of literary expression that this seemingly restrictive media permits.
Prayer
Michelaina: My Taroko Gorge remix uses words found in the Bible. The purpose of it is to reflect on how religious philosophy sometimes makes sense and resonates with me and other times confuses me. Just like some of the lines are hard to read and others are touching, the Bible has simultaneously challenged me and profoundly influenced my life.
University Gorge
Kevin: Anxiety can blur notions of time, space, context, and meaning. Anxiety and all mental, emotional, and corporeal sensations have the potential to banish our dominion over logic. When powerful mental states take hold, how does one escape the cascade? These are questions that perhaps come to mind when experiencing my Taroko Remix.
Sinapsis Colectiva
Tomás Vega
From classic novels to banal social media profiles, it seems reasonable to suspect that any body of text arises from some human mastermind. However, as the following work demonstrates, the wizard behind the curtain may not be human at all. The following work sources its data by soliciting user inputs and compiling them on a single twitter account with surprising coherence.
Tomás:
Since I began writing poetry in middle-school, I was fascinated by the Exquisite Corpse, a technique by which surrealist poetry and narratives can be collectively assembled. This semester I had the opportunity to take this method to the 21st century: a platform that enables the creation of collaborative fiction and poetry through the use of SMS. I created a Twitter account called "Elvis Cochuelo", which is the juxtaposition of two individual works that together form another word. I make use of Twitter's API, an SMS platform called Twilio, and Node.js as my backend.
Tomás:
Since I began writing poetry in middle-school, I was fascinated by the Exquisite Corpse, a technique by which surrealist poetry and narratives can be collectively assembled. This semester I had the opportunity to take this method to the 21st century: a platform that enables the creation of collaborative fiction and poetry through the use of SMS. I created a Twitter account called "Elvis Cochuelo", which is the juxtaposition of two individual works that together form another word. I make use of Twitter's API, an SMS platform called Twilio, and Node.js as my backend.