Friday, February 3, 2012

Is Augmented Reality the New Wave in Alternative Storytelling?

I don't know the answer to the question posed in the headline, but I do know I saw this today and it seems pretty cool—a unique way to combine the physical, tactile beauty of a paperbound book with the hip, cool stuff of the internets. The more important (and sort of facetious) question still lingering before us: Does anyone who's not a poet read poetry?


5 comments:

  1. As for the storytelling aspect of this I do feel it to be a type of storytelling. Not only is the story written follow a set of epistolary poems but the over all art it ends up being a type of shape poem.

    As for the second question of 'does anyone who is not a poet read poetry," I believe they do. They might just read it in the aspect of their emotions and how it ties to them and not so critically as we do. We try to find many way this poem might be speaking, who it is addressed to, what it is showing and whatnot. Overall, to me at least, it is storytelling.

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    1. To be clear, I was totally joking with my question about people reading (or not reading) poetry. I read recently that 7 percent of book buyers purchase books of poetry, which—taking into account how many people who aren't students or poets themselves actually buy books—means like 4 or 5 people are reading poetry. Combine this with the 6 or 8 people who buy literary fiction and don't work for NPR, a literary journal, or a small-press publisher, and I'd say the literary arts are doing quite well.

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  2. Although this is a digital pop-up book for poetry—I see the artistically driven visual elements in this video providing a kind of semiotic connection for multimedia storytelling (and hybrid forms of multimedia storytelling) of the past, present, and future. Interesting example!

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  3. I am so glad you found this, Chris. I want one of these books.

    And I know you were kidding about poetry and fiction sales, but there is a mystique around poetry that keeps some folks away, right? Would this sort of "pop-up" book, as Robyn calls it, maybe make poetry seem less scary?

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    1. People, and by people I mean the great mass of people who together get to define what comprises popular culture, seem scared of poetry because, in my opinion, most people's early exposure to it is in the form of the Shakespearean sonnet, which I understand now, at 29 years old, are amazing, but when I was 16 seemed corny and overwrought. I also think there is something intentionally and inherently esoteric about poetry, and contemporary poetry in particular, that keeps people away from it. It takes work to digest a poem in the same way that popular media gets digested, because popular media wraps its subtext in an easy-to-swallow pill—if you get that subtext all the better, but if not the spoonful of sugar still tastes sweet on the way down. With poetry, it's all subtext. It's all in unwrapping the sonic and metaphoric layers of the piece until you find the meaning. And that takes time and a set of reading skills many people, unfortunately, either don't have or haven't cultivated.

      Deep breath.

      I'm not sure whether or not this format will make poetry any less cryptic for those who already find it so, but I do think it makes poetry more hip. And hip is a good thing these days. Which is why I also totally want one.

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