lit-digital

experiments in digital
& interactive literature

Inside public domain footage of an Oral Robert’s sermon Matt Mullins saw a poem in praise of rational humanism revealing what he feels is the ultimate truth: In the end, it's humanity that's holy. Our bodies with their flaws and potential. So he took Roberts’ sermon apart, reconstructed it, and used Roberts’ voice and image to deliver an original filmpoem in praise of the inherent divinity of our bodies.

Now he (and his digital co-pilot Darik Hall) have created the Our Bodies Remixer, which enables you to create your own remix of Matt’s Our Bodies remix. The interface also contains a number of “channels” featuring Matt’s other explorations in film poetry. Go play.

  • Credits :
  • Matt Mullins
    • concept
    • words
    • sound
    • art direction
    • images
  • Darik Hall
    • concept
    • design
    • programing

I Will Make an Exquisite Corpse takes the Surrealist concept of the three-sectioned exquisite corpse into interactive dimensions by enabling the user to manipulate video, audio, still images, and text in a randomize-able environment. When interacting, users select and drag media from the sidebars onto the “faces” of three hexagonal discs and the background of the interface itself. Users can click and drag to rotate the discs and therefore populate all six sides of each disc with media.

Functionality buttons also enable users to reverse/invert video, still images and text as well “spin” all three discs at once in the manner of a slot machine, thereby randomizing appearance of the visible sides. The result is an interface that enables users to experience the poem in a three-dimensional way as they use a three-tiered eighteen-sided interface to create audio/visual/linguistic collages in nearly infinite combinations.

  • Credits :
  • Matt Mullins
    • concept
    • words
    • sound
    • art direction
    • images
  • Darik Hall
    • concept
    • design
    • programing

The I am Not [ ] Enough interface uses image, sound, and language to confront the user with a series of word-triggered interactive environments, each of which offers its own aesthetic take on various social, personal, and political issues. Through the direct manipulation of the word-navigation system that forms the interface's spine, the user has the ability to compose, edit, reorder and play the various textual elements. Likewise, interactivity within each of the individual "rooms" assigned to the navigational elements/words enables the user to manipulate the aesthetic intentions of these individual sections.

  • Credits :
  • Matt Mullins
    • concept
    • words
    • sound
    • art direction
    • images
  • Darik Hall
    • concept
    • design
    • programing

Highway Coda is a multi-faceted, collaborative project consisting of a prose poem, an experimental film, a musical composition, and an interactive interface. The film/composition iteration of the project has been featured in online magazines such as the Atticus Review and Electric Literature. It has also been screened at numerous conferences including the International Computer Music Conference, the Byte Gallery International Exhibition, The 2011 New Music Festival, and Electronic Music Midwest 2011. The posting of the Highway Coda interface on lit-digital.com marks its online debut.

Click here to watch the film and hear the composition accompanied by the author's reading of the poem.

  • Credits :
  • Matt Mullins
    • concept
    • words
    • art direction
    • music
    • images
  • Michael Pounds
    • music
    • composition
  • Darik Hall
    • design
    • programing
  • Our Bodies
  • Exquisite Corpse
  • I am not [] enough.
  • Highway Coda

About lit-digital

The lit-digital interfaces are a species of electronic literature that apply digital technologies to word, sound and image to create an interactive literary experience.

These interfaces combine guided/static elements rooted in authorial intent with multi-media based interactivity, offering users control of the environment in ways that invite them to create their own "texts."

At the heart of these interfaces is an exploration of the dissolution of boundaries between "author" and "reader" and the multiple literary objects that potentially come into existence as meaning travels between the magnetic poles of sender and receiver.

Bios :

  • Matt Mullins
  • Darik Hall

Matt Mullins is a writer, musician, experimental filmmaker and multimedia artist. His fiction and poetry have appeared in Mid American Review, Pleiades, Hunger Mountain, Harpur Palate, Descant, Hobart, and a number of other print and online literary journals. Three Ways of the Saw, his debut collection of short stories, is forthcoming from Atticus Books in 2012. Matt teaches creative writing at Ball State University where he is an Emerging Media Fellow at the Center for Media Design. You can also read his occasional blog here.

Darik Hall is a motivated individual with a passion for all things interactive, and a devotion to technical development. As a designer and entrepreneur, he has worked to develop start-up businesses and products such as Distract Chicago, a web management tool for sports & clubs, and now works Garfield at Paws INC as the Manager of Digital Marketing. With a focus on video, web design, 3D gaming and its dissemination to mobile devices, he has a highly logical approach to solving technical problems as well as experience in presenting to and working with all age ranges and skill sets.