🖥 Voiceworks x NYWF Digital Writing Jam 🔍 Cipher 🖥
Voiceworks always love to receive work from writers who have never made something digital before, and from digital artists who have never made something ‘literary’ before! To help you try something new, we’re running a digital writing jam from September 30–October 7 themed 'Cipher’. We are excited to be collaborating on this jam with the National Young Writers Festival.
The Voiceworks x NYWF l Writing Jam will feature:
daily warm ups
daily live sessions with guest hosts to chat about digital tools, form and craft
technical experts available to answer qns
new friends and colleagues in the digital arts
What is a jam?
Historically speaking, a jam (usually a game jam) is an event that combines the free-flow experimentation of a music jam, with the focus and direction employed when developing a tangible piece of art (usually a video game). It's basically a shared space where you're free to play around with different digital technologies and build out your own interactive stories/articles/comics/whatever you want!
Who can participate?
While Voiceworks only publish writers under 25 living in (or with a connection to) Australia, this jam is open to anybody that’s interested in it.
What can I do with the piece I create?
That depends! If you are in Voiceworks’ publishing demographic (under 25, connection to Australia), you could submit your piece for our upcoming issue. If not, we’ve got a list of other journals that publish exciting digital work that we’ll be sharing during the jam. That said, you don’t have to have fancy publisher to share your piece with the world. Platforms like itch.io are also great ways to publish digitally experimental work.
Theme: Cipher
A system of rules to encode information, to encrypt, decrypt, and encrypt once more. Cryptographic cartographic neurostatic. Layers upon layers of meaning. Secrets transformed into nonsense, words into strings, sounds into numbers. The cipher has meaning in relation to the encrypted information. A key without a lock is just an aesthetic object. A cipher without a message is just aesthetic information.
Consider: A message hidden in the annotations of a childhood book. A series of instructions compiled from unrelated newspaper headlines. Clues embedded in dreams, reconstituted as fragments of memory. The colours on a billboard. Secrets hidden within the unassuming, hidden within plain sight.
Things representing other things. Meanings layered upon meanings. A meaning communicated obutesly and indirectly, visible only through a certain lens, from just the right angle. Saying one thing and meaning another. Reading the subtext. The If U Seek Amy of it all.
~Thanks to EdCommers Lujayn Hourani, Carly Stone and Fred Von Jorgs for the blurb~