Beat Generation

Second year university project ‘Beat Generation’. The brief was to produce an interactive website or Flash animation of the group of post-World War II American writers known as the Beat Generation. Notable examples of Beat literature include Allen Ginsberg’s Howl (1956), William S. Burrough’s Naked Lunch and Jack Kerouac’s On The Road (1957).

My take on the project was to take the user through one of Allan Ginsberg’s more recent (comparatively) poems. Hum Bom! from his volume The Fall of America (1971). It is a poem ideal for interactive media as it can be sliced and escalated in different ways thanks to its rhythm and repetition, all without losing it’s satirical political statement. I used a recording of Allan Ginsberg reading Hum Bom! and used that as a guide to typographic interpretation.