by Meera Nair
Fall 2015
Performative Storytelling in Digital Spaces
Pitch Perfect was a multi-genre writing workshop taught by Meera Nair in Fall 2015 that took traditional forms of creative writing such as the short story and creative nonfiction essay as starting texts that could be manipulated to take advantage of the malleability of the Internet. Encouraged to consider the essay or the short story as a specific form of performance that could be extended and re-constituted as a digital creative project, students designed websites and explored the possibilities of multi-directional readability, the aural and visual tools offered by NYU’s Web Publishing Platform. Students’ creative projects ranged from exploring memories of a dead parent through the objects they used, and a rich, immersive, virtual experience of the disorder known as misophonia. Students used NYU’s Web Publishing platform, powered by WordPress, to create their websites and in the process also learned how to organize page-files into logical hierarchies and shape their writing on the performance space of the web for maximum impact. Class discussion and workshop style critiques helped students edit their websites.
