The 60-Minute Digital Creation & Reflection Challenge: Rethinking Text through Speed and Media

As the semester drew to a close in my Digital Textuality course, I invited students to participate in a creative experiment that asked them to produce original digital work under strict time constraints. Framed as a “60-Minute Digital Creation & Reflection Challenge,” the assignment was designed to simulate the fast-paced, high-output environment familiar to many contemporary digital creators—from meme-makers and TikTok storytellers to AI experimenters and indie game designers. I participated alongside my students, exploring the same creative pressures and possibilities they faced.

The challenge required students to select a digital medium and generate an original “text”—a short video, collage, chatbot dialogue, micro-story, meme set, or other expressive artifact—within one hour. They were also asked to write a brief reflective paragraph analyzing their process, tool choices, and creative outcomes. The purpose was not polished perfection, but immediacy and intuition: how might meaning emerge, change, or fracture when creativity is put on a timer?

For my own piece, The Reason Why the Closet Man Is Never Sad – A Digital Interpretation of Russell Edson’s Poem, I worked with AI-based visual and audio tools to reinterpret a surreal prose poem I had recently discussed in another class. The result was a one-minute video composed of sixty rapidly sequenced surrealist images (generated via Adobe Express) set to ambient music (created through StableAudio), and paired with my own recorded reading of the poem. I initially experimented with AI-generated voices but quickly pivoted to my own narration when the artificial voices failed to capture the poem’s mood.

This compressed creative process led to several discoveries. The AI tools responded best to custom prompts rather than direct excerpts from the poem, forcing me to distill its essence and interpret it in a new medium. The time constraint sharpened my decision-making, emphasizing spontaneity over perfection. The end product—fleeting, disjointed, and strangely cohesive—reflected the original poem’s dreamlike quality and echoed many of the course’s central themes: how digital platforms mediate meaning, how creative control is shared with algorithms, and how rapidly-produced texts can still evoke powerful responses.

Students responded to the challenge with surprising range and ingenuity. Some generated audio collages and interactive fiction, others built AI chat dialogues and poetic Instagram-style stories. In every case, the time limit surfaced interesting tensions between tool and intention, platform and process. More importantly, the exercise reaffirmed how digital creativity, even when time-boxed, can lead to meaningful reinterpretation, discovery, and expression. Working alongside my students reminded me that constraints often generate not limits, but opportunities—for insight, for play, and for rethinking what digital textuality can be.