The challenges of digital creations

This article put a strong emphasis on the transformation digital poetry has made over time and how detailed experimental writing and creating can be. I would like to pull a quote from the beginning of the article that really exemplifies the work that we are doing in this course and the struggles of animated writings in general. Glazier notes, “If this struggle between transparency an materiality is at issue in print poetry, then it is of even greater importance in electronic literature,” (171). This idea is bringing forth the struggles of transparency-what is seen but can be missed and the materiality of something-the content and the core of the piece, and how problems like these are even more challenging when they concern digital works. Ultimately there will always be a struggle for writers to express exactly what they want to say and to say it appropriately, but such a struggle can be overcome. Authors often seem to struggle, understandably with expressing their creative work in just the right manner, but the real challenge is to overcome this challenge of producing work that is transparent and has no meaning or significance or even depth but creating pieces of materiality, in which they do have meaning, depth and importance is very challenging, but to be praised. I can easily see how this challenge in and of itself can often seem even more of a challenge when ‘creating’ digital or animated works because, as with my experience in this course with flash and animations, authors need to create pieces of poetry or digital designs of experimentation, one must create something that is interesting and draws readers/viewers to the experience. Beyond just creating appealing pieces of work, which can be seen as simply transparent, I have found it difficult to also create pieces of digital writing that do have depth and as much emotion as they may serve up on a piece on paper.

This article as a whole really expresses, in my opinion, my struggles in creating well-developed and fascinating pieces of work for this course. I have learned a lot about the act of digital animation and digital poetry in general and I have learned a great deal about flash itself, so ultimately I have grown through this course thus far, but I have some more learning and developing to do to overstep some of the challenges that digital writing and animation serve up. I think that it really takes a great deal of patience and practice to overcome such challenges such as the battle of transparency vs. materiality. The best projects seem actually to encompass both of these traits in the right equivalencies. As Glazier also hi-lites, every creation is made more difficult and every challenge stooped higher when done digitally because there is much more manipulation and drive to achieve what you desire than with the standard way of writing with pen and paper. Every challenge in writing can be overstepped, such barriers concerning digital writing just take more work and patience.