The speed at which websites crank out content is usually a good thing — we can skip over the boring links in our feeds and click only on the stories that grab our attention.
But there’s something to be said for slowing things down.
Minneapplesauce is a prime example of the Internet slamming on its own brakes. Bobby Maher, Erik Martz and Andy Voegtline launched the website earlier this month as a venue for their multimedia artistic endeavors — and they’re not going to update it every day, or at any speed close to that.
The three men, who have their fingers in music, art, writing and dance, plan to deliver content slowly.
“We wanted to create issues like a literary magazine would,” said Martz, who has written for City Pages, the Awl and Esquire.
Right now, the cover page of the website is a collage of nine rectangles, each box being a link to a different piece. Some of them open to typical elements of a literary magazine, like short fiction and poetry. But others lead to the types of pieces you could never enjoy on paper.
“We have this unique medium of a website. So can do weird things with the site itself, like use QR codes to add different layers,” Maher said.
The current issue includes word art, a radio piece and a video of a choreographed performance.
Minneapplesauce is unlike most blogs and online lit ventures in that its pieces wouldn’t work in any other format: It is a website through and through, interactive and multilayered.
You’re meant to jump in on any one square and then keep clicking the “Next” button until you reach the credits at the end. Voegtline, Maher and Martz arranged the pieces in a specific way, and they programmed tiny surprises into the pages themselves.
“You can choose how you consume it. But we really want people to try and look through it in sequence. We do sit down and go old-school with pieces of paper and order the content the way we want to order it,” Voegtline said.
In this respect, the website is akin to an art gallery or an album.
One of the most unique pieces on the site right now is a collection of color palettes based on photographs Voegtline took around the Twin Cities.
“I would bike around slowly and look for interesting things that fetched my eye. I took a lot of photos,” Voegtline said.
The color palette project is the kind of thing that Maher, Martz and Voegtline want to keep doing — it’s unconventional, unexpected and pleasing to the eye.
“The point of the website is to unapologetically do whatever we want,” Maher said.
Maher, Martz and Voegtline want other people to try out making things for the simple sake of making things, too. Their hope is that Minneapplesauce will be a showcase of diverse talent. They’re collecting submissions right now, and they’re open to work in any and all formats.
