Turning Literature into Visual Art

Literature doesn’t have to be just words on a page (or screen). One literary publication is taking literature out of the confines of words and turning it into visual art. Electric Literature, a website I have already profiled here, does just that. They not only publish short fiction in both print and digital form, they visualize the literature they produce.

One of my favorite parts of what Electric Literature does is taking a single sentence from a short story they publish, and then animating it. The result is an illuminating visual interpretation of that one sentence. In a way, the short cartoons (often less than a minute long) represent how one’s imagination would perceive a particular literary “bit.”

The following is one of my favorite pieces from Electric Literature. It’s simplicity shines a bright light on the sentence, making it more powerful and thought-provoking than it otherwise would be. The sentence comes from the short story Little Things by Matt Sumell.

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