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My portfolio website attempts to function as a piece of digital storytelling itself in addition to being a host for my corpus of work. I chose to present my portfolio on an indie website creator with quirky themes because the medium highlighted many of the qualities of the digital storytelling and poetics minor that initially drew me in. In my introductory class to the minor, we spent a lot of time playing/viewing art and games created by individuals, not corporations. It put into perspective the transformative power of democratizing technology so that more people can direct and shape its uses. Straw.page is a website creator I stumbled upon by chance when casually reading fan translated novels. It was being used a translator's blog page, and I fell in love with its theme packs and interface. The personality and character of the software's designer was palpable in every instruction and feature. Their “makership” exuded from the page, and I knew that I wanted my portfolio to tell a story in a similar way. A simple document would not assert itself in the noisy and crowded world of the internet even half as well.
In my Black communications class I learned how to look at unconventional or mundane media with the intention of peeling back the layers of cultural understanding, creativity, and collaboration that I have naturally gone numb with time and familiarity. On my site, visitors must contend with a not quite squeaky clean interface like the ones we've gotten used to and are reintroduced to the affordance of a humble website page by being prompted and rewarded for exploration. There are links you can miss by not exploring enough. You can chat with the website and send messages to its creator. You are part of the story. The portfolio allows the visitor to have some control over what they see and when while also naturally providing an organizational structure.
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This minor has led me to take a more inquisitive look at the phrase “the medium is the message.” The projects that I became the most fond of fully utilized the idiosyncrasies of its medium to enhance the textural narrative. Too often, the medium becomes an empty space for art to simply exist on—a plate. It is important to realize the affordances of said plate, that it can stacked, held on one's head, spun on a stick, whatever it may be. Each new medium I had the opportunity to work with (Twine, Bitsy, Glitch, Notion, Google Slides, a Linoscribe printing press, books, etc.) challenged me to reorient my way of seeing. No matter how much I wanted to, I could not approach using variables in Bitsy like using variables in Twine. The faster I accepted this, the easier it was to work in tandem with the meaning.
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That being said, the mediums of digital storytelling can sometimes have shorter lifespans than physical media. My digital poem “Metropole” was created on a now defunct site called Glitch. Only its code remains now. These servers that host digital media all exist in the physical world somewhere. They take up space and energy and at any point someone can choose to stop paying the price for them to exist. The veil is then ripped open, forcing us to contend with the fact that the internet is not limitless nor above commodification.
In a similar vein, there is artificial intelligence (AI), which takes a vast amount of energy in order to operate at all. While I had the chance to experiment with AI software such as Chat GPT and Claude, I didn’t use it in my work. Claude AI proved to be able to write like me after creating a style sheet based on a story I uploaded to it. It even made a joke that genuinely sounded like my sense of humor! This was both an exhilarating and intimidating experience. It opened my eyes to how accurate learning language models’ mimicry can be of human voice and style when it is given a template to work from. More than anything, it strengthened my own resolve not to use AI in my own creative work and to safeguard others’ work when it comes to interacting with AI models. Reproductions of art, such as photocopies and duplicated files, are one-to-one faithful representations and have been around (and regarded warily) for a long time. Artificial intelligence is different as it inherently augments style and voice based on its vast source data. My voice is how I declare my being to the world, and I prefer it unaltered.
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As an artist, I seek to prioritize interactivity in my work. Whether that interactivity comes from a place of physical co-creation with the audience/user/viewer or from a more metaphysical connection between audience and artwork. Stories have always relied on the audience just as much as the author in order to come alive. It is within the imagination that stories get their spark. It is within the emotional chamber of the heart that poetry leaves its mark. There is interaction, a sense of touch, in all of this. However, in creating works that live in a digital environment I want the interactive element to take a step out of the shadows and have the audience truly see how much they are a part of the art. I don’t believe audience interpretation is the death of the author, nor do I believe interpretation supersedes intent and context. Rather, both author and audience work in tandem to decipher the signs of a poem, a game, a painting, a story, and assign meaning to these signs which others may or may not understand as rational. I want to be an artist who creates languages which are thrown out before the world to be translated.
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