The Cube’s 2014 Digital Writer in Residence, Jason Nelson, introduces his work and plots a way forward.
I like to break technology. This doesn’t mean I traipse around searching for microwaves or old CRT televisions to recreate into artworks (although that would be quite fun). Instead, my digital art is sometimes born from rethinking software and code, breaking the technology away from its original use, building artistic creatures from the ruins.
Digital art has always been about taking some technical wonderment and making it do something experimental or surreal, or to create unexpected beauty. And indeed my goal over my 2014 Australia Council Digital Writing Residency is to create new artworks and digital poems/writings that surprise and allure, that bring new meanings to The Cube at QUT, and make us rethink the languages of science in a poetic and artistic context.
In the simplest terms, digital poems are born from the combination of technology and poetry, with writers using all multi-media elements as critical texts. Sound, images, movement, video, interface/interactivity and words are combined to create new poetic forms and experiences.
And I’ve been lucky in that my work, my digital writing, has been explored around the world, spreading virally at times into such far flung locations as Brazil or Russia. The Wall Street Journal and New Scientist Magazine even blasted and praised my work simultaneously, which as any artist knows, is exactly the reaction you want your work to have.
And as an introduction….I offer the following video:
Within this blog I will be offering both a personal account of my artistic/poetic journey, but more importantly offer code and tips and other curiously good maps for how to make digital art and writing. Join me now and often. Very often.
P.S…..Below is one of my residency T-shirt designs. Not sure if this is the one we are going to use, but wanted to share all the same.
