With all the madness around the world, this sort of slipped through, but I thought it would be good to keep some sort of published record of this piece of good news during these trying times (future readers of the future: I am talking about the 2020 COVID-19 global pandemic that’s going on right now). In any case, this was fantastic news last month, and I am very happy, proud and humbled by this appointment. I have always loved the ELO and I am excited to be formally a part of it now.
I might still not quite believe it but I am a 2020 Poetry Fellow at the Arts Research Center. This fellowship will allow me to work with a group of fantastically talented and interesting Bay Area poets around the main theme of “emergency”. While this is a broad topic, our main goal will be to creatively explore how poetry may help us think through and within the current environmental, political and societal crisis. As they explain in their website: “‘Emergency’ implies urgency, sudden harm, life-threatening violence, and extreme circumstances, but embedded within it is the word ’emergence;’ suggesting rebirth and new beginnings. How can we understand moments of emergency as catalysts for renewal, as ruptures that signal massive—if painful—change?”
As some of you know, I am a digital poet. I build bilingual and multimedia, web-based poems conceived as interventions across different social media platforms. As such, all of my poetic practice emerges from the precarious relationship we have established with the digital technologies that shape most of our relationships and day to day activities, to the detriment of our minds, bodies and the Earth. My #selfiepoetry collections are interested in the perverse transformation of consumer subjectivity and representation through social media, looking at how the subject has turned into an object of massive amateur representation and commercial distribution. The poem 24_7, for example, follows Jonathan Crary in exploring how late capitalism, via digital technology, pushes humans into constant activity, destroying our health, communities and any possibility of political dissident. My #Youtubers series engages with early confessional videos and today’s influencers’ speech, considering the corporate video giant in terms of web visibility and discourse. By being driven essentially by amateur production, YouTube dismantles the prospect of the amateur being bound by the private sphere, and instead, it catapults it not only the public, but also the global, commercial sphere. My poems “Ashes to Ashes #YOLO” and “Bio Data Matter” explore this tension while dealing with topics related to climate change and political activism. Finally, my most recent work, The Offline Website Project (TOWP), is comprised of a series of websites meant to run locally only in the computer where these created and hosted, fundamentally disrupting the distributed logic of the global web. In order to experience the sites, TOWP users need to physically travel to my home and participate in a site-specific experiencing of these digital works. TOWP sites are thus unique material objects: non-replicable, non-sharable, non-transferrable; they are ingrained in a place and a concrete home computer. One of these sites, “beauty routine (a burning desire)” is a poetic commentary on the possibility of thinking beauty only in local terms, seeing beauty as always pertaining to a physical body. As most of my work, this involves thinking about my own displacement and beauty (as a foreign female body in the USA) and how this relates to the larger spaces I occupy, and the environmental impact of my occupation. 153 countries have declared a climate emergency, and digital technologies are an important, usually overlooked, agent of climate change.
As I meet, collaborate, help and get to know my fellows this year, I hope to be exploring these issues further. I am not sure yet what shape this may take, but I am optimistic (more hopeful than optimistic, perhaps) that something good will come out of this! I am also really fortunate to be teaching a creative writing and making class on electronic literature this semester as well, so I am feeling extra inspired (¡gracias, estudiantes!) Just this week I started working on a new project I am calling “corporate poetry” where I intend to explore how corporate language (via digital and standardized forms) relates to that other corpora consisting of our bodies. Check out my first poem *still as a work in progress*, “[room]“.
I am so happy to share this new article I wrote for Revistade Estudios Hispánicos (53.2) analyzing the works of Jorge Carrión, Kenneth Goldsmith and Vicente Luis Mora! You can read it all freely and openly thanks to Project Muse HERE
“Fragmentation and the Digital City: An Analysis of Vicente Luis Mora’s Circular 07. Las afueras” Revista de Estudios Hispánicos 53.2 (2019): 605-632
This essay juxtaposes three recent publications, Vicente Luis Mora’s Circular 07. Las afueras (2007-), Kenneth Goldsmith’s Capital: New York, Capital of the 20th Century (2015), and Jorge Carrión’s Barcelona. Libro de los pasajes (2016), in order to explore how contemporary digital technologies construct and fragment urban experience on a global scale. Despite their different political intentions, these three works share a common aesthetic of appropriation, unoriginal quotation, and fragmentation, as they are also all modelled after Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project. Just like Benjamin did with Paris, each of these works focuses on a particular Western city—Madrid, New York, and Barcelona—now being proposed as paradigmatic representations of urban experience, which is meant to mimic digital media’s modularity and disintegration. Goldsmith’s use of appropriation is read as a blank endorsement of digital mediation of everyday life, which sits in opposition to Carrión’s and Mora’s political projects. Circular 07 and Barcelona mix unoriginal writing techniques, like Goldsmith’s conceptual writing, with other experimental methods to warn readers against apolitical adoption of digital technologies. Fragmentation is still proposed as the most important aesthetic form of twenty-first century writing, but these two Spanish works strive for its contextualization as a complex mechanism structured around reader/writer subjectivity. Finally, this essay ponders how to consider new reader/writer subjectivities within the larger context of global cities in late capitalism.
Estoy muy feliz de compartir mi ensayo “As We May Think/Escribir es escribir como si pensáramos en presente” que ha salido en Fobias – Fonias – Fagias. Escritas Experimentais e Eletrónicas Ibero-Afro-Latinoamericanas, un libro hermosísimo editado por Claudia Kozak y Rui Torres, publicado en la serie Cibertextualidades de la Universidade Fernando Pessoa. El volumen completo, que incluye escritos de algunos de mis artistas favoritos como Eugenio Tisselli, José Aburto y Joana Moll, o de críticos tan interesantes como Roberto Cruz Arzabal, se puede descargar completo y gratis aquí.
Les dejo mi ensayo (y el poema del que hablo) aquí abajo:
Although I am currently in Madrid taking a little breather, this summer has not been without excitement! Let’s catch up a little:
The month of May ended with my participation in Mexico City’s Festival El Aleph where I showed my piece, “Perspectiva_el Aleph”, part of a collaborative multimedia performance, “El texto infinito,” designed together with the talented Jonathan Basile and Edmar Soria. Last minute complications made it impossible for me to attend, but my piece still traveled South, which made me exceptionally happy! [I promise I will be sharing the actual piece soon enough, so stay tuned]
June took me to the U.K., where I had the privilege of giving a keynote lecture at the New Approaches to Transmedia and Language Pedagogy International Conference at Manchester Metropolitan University. In my talk “Digital Literacy, Critical Creativity and the (Digital) Humanities: Why Should We Care about Electronic Literature?,” I advanced a theory I am currently working on how to implement “creativity” as an integral competence to “critical thinking.” Here are my slides, although they won’t make much sense without further context… but I’ll share them just the same 🙂
July took me to Granada, Spain, where I further explored this theory by giving a talk (“Digital Creativity as Critical Thinking: The Case of Electronic Literature”) at the 17th International Conference, New Directions in the Humanities. I won’t share these slides because I am hoping to turn these two talks into an article I am currently working on, which, again, hopefully, will be part of a book I am co-editing together with Scott Rettberg on the exciting topic of the intersection between DH, e-lit and creativity. [This is going to be a kick ass volume with really amazing contributors so I am hoping I can share some more news very soon]
Aaaaaand, still in July, next week I will be in Cork, Ireland, attending my favorite yearly academic event, the Electronic Literature Organization conference <3. I am sure this will deserve its own full post, but for now I’ll share that I will be participating on a really cool panel together with Leo Flores, Rui Torres and Eugenio Tisselli interrogating conceptions of e-lit as a field, its social function, and how it situates itself in relation to literary and digital culture, experimental and mainstream art, high and popular culture. Sounds fun, uh?! If you happen to be in Cork next week, let me know!
I’ve been promoted to Associate Professor! What else can I say about these awesome news!? I won’t, but if you want, you can read what the BCNM had to say about it 😉
Yesterday I had the honor and pleasure (and fun!) of participating in one of the Studio Visits that Mia Zamora and Alan Levine organize as part of their terrific #netnarr open connected course at Kean University. It was amazing to talk to their students about my #YouTubers and #Selfiepoetry work. If you didn’t catch it live and still want to check it out (or you are bored and have a half hour to spare), simply play the video below!
Go, go, go, Chica-go! 2019 started with a quick but adventure-packed trip to Chicago to perform at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (Jan 4), as well as participate in a roundtable discussion at MLA (Jan 5), and have the most decadent vegan feast at Matthew Kenny’s Althea (to celebrate my birthday in style! but that’s another story) so, first things first:
On Jan 4, I was invited to present some new work at Natural Language, an electronic literature event organized in conjunction with the 2019 MLA conference, the Electronic Literature Organization (ELO) and the Art & Technology Studies (ATS) department at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC). The lineup included truly remarkable artists such as Eduardo Kac, Wambli Gamache or Stephanie Strickland, combining performative pieces and literary readings. It really was an amazing experience full of diverse performances and different approaches to electronic literature, with Dene Grigar and Judd Morrissey as emcees (who also performed beautifully!!)
I read my poem-essay “As We May Think”, a bilingual online video essay on representational digital media and their asynchronous relation with the way we think and see the world. It’s part of my larger #YouTubers poetic series, where I explore early confessional videos and today’s influencers’ speech, seeing the corporate online video giant in terms of web visibility and discourse. Here is the essay in slide form>
On Jan 5, I participated in Digital Hispanisms, the best roundtable I have been part of at MLA (I am not exaggerating, the quality of the interventions was breathtaking). Organized by Élika Ortega as part of the TC Digital Humanities MLA forum, this roundtable aimed to spark a conversation on the intersections between Digital Humanities (DH) and Hispanic Studies (HS). An important talk since, as the event’s description reads, “[w]hile most often housed in English and History departments in the US, DH has gained prominence in Modern Languages Departments (or departments of similar denomination) and, particularly, within HS programs. The opening of tenure lines and postdoctoral positions, as well as the proliferation of theses that bridge HS and DH in recent years are evidence of this.”
From left to right> Sylvia Fernández, Élika Ortega, Nora Benedict, Alex Saum, Hilda Chacón @ MLA19
I had the honor of opening the discussion with a pedagogical approach to electronic literature in Spanish Literature classrooms. Following Johanna Drucker’s call to understand DH as practice, I proposed that the practical engagement with electronic literature addresses humanistic and literary concerns, as it develops skills related to digital literacies. I suggested as well that learning competencies over content offers skills that are transferable to other fields, much like learning a foreign language and looks at the implementation of “creativity” as an integral competence to “critical thinking” that reinforces the importance of foreign language methodologies in DH and Spanish Literature programs. [This talk is part of a larger project I am working on for a co-edited book with Scott Rettberg on DH and e-lit, email me if you’d like to know more or want the full talk].
Sylvia Fernández (University of Houston) continued with her project Borderlands Archives Cartography (BAC) . Fernández proposes BAC as a form of resistance to the constant and toxic political discursivity that has imposed negative stereotypes and accusations against the Mexico-U.S. border region and its communities.
Nora Benedict (Princeton University) followed by arguing that the long-standing language-centered model of Hispanism has often isolated the field of study from other research areas. Her digital project, “Global Networks of Cultural Production”, details a complex web of intellectuals, both inside and outside of Latin America, as they relate to one publishing enterprise: Victoria Ocampo’s literary journal Sur and her publishing house of the same name. Check out her other amazing “Mapping Borges” project to learn more!
Next, Lorena Gauthereau (University of Houston) discussed her project, “Are We Good Neighbors?” which uses archival letters from the Alonso S. Perales Collection at Recovering the US Hispanic Literary Heritage. These letters, written to Perales, describe personal accounts of discrimination against Mexican Americans, and reveal the personal and normalized embodiment of racism in the United States.
Finally, Élika Ortega’s (Northeastern University) talk took the concept of hybridity long studied by Latin Americanists to question the tropes of the death of the book and media supersession. Ortega intervenes the well established cannon of media studies, largely originating in the Global North with the debates about cultural hybridity in Latin America. Read more on Élika’s “Binding Media” here.
As if these amazing talks were not enough, we also had the privilege of counting on Hilda Chacón (Nazareth College) as our respondent, whose pioneering work and long experience in the field gave all of us something to aspire to!
Sadly, Vanessa Ceia (McGill University) was not able to come to the talk. She was supposed to discuss her “Mapping la movida” project.
El semestre corre comounreguerodepólvora y jamás encuentro tiempo para actualizar este blog, pero aquí va un poco de promo para la semana que viene:
El martes 23 de octubre y el miércoles 24 estaré en Ciudad de México participando en el 13er Coloquio Internacional en Creatividad Computacional que organizan los amigos de la UAM Cuajimalpa, bajo la dirección de Rafael Pérez y Pérez.
El martes participaré con la conferencia “Computación, electricidad, internet y poesía: qué es la literatura electrónica”, donde contextualizaré un poco la cosa–y accediendo a la petición de los generosos organizadores, hablaré un poco de mi propia obra y procesos creativos. Acompañándome estará Carlos León de la Complutense de Madrid, hablando sobre cómo las máquinas pueden relacionarse con la narrativa desde un punto de vista cognitivo-computacional (wow, no?).
El miércoles siguiente impartiré un taller que he titulado “Literatura electrónica casera”, donde aprenderemos técnicas y el uso de herramientas digitales para producir obras de literatura digital fáciles, rápidas y gratis. I mean, ¿qué más se le puede pedir a la literatura?
Si están en México, ya saben dónde encontrarme! Más info en la web.
*course flyer* image stolen from Belen Gache’s Aurelia, Our Dreams Are a Second Life <https://player.vimeo.com/video/47094240>
Three weeks into the semester already! I guess time flies when you are having fun! And it has been fun! This Fall I am teaching two courses, variations on courses I have taught before–which makes things even funner somehow! (I don’t know why I hadn’t thought about doing this until now. Honestly, I have created about 11 new courses since I joined UC Berkeley! I must be mad).
Transmedia Narratives: a writing intensive course for Spanish majors, around the topic of literature written across different media and platforms. We started reading a selection of Javier Fernández’s VR dystopia Cero Absoluto, we received the visit of Loss Pequeño Glazier, who read from his classic e-work White-Faced Bromeliads in 20 Hectares, and will shortly being reading Belén Gache’s blog project Kublai Moon, Vicente Mora’s magazine-novel Alba Cromm and Agustín Fernández Mallo’s transmedial Proyecto Nocilla. Like the previous cohort, this new group of students will be sharing some of their writing on the course blog: Poéticas de la tecnocultura.
Experimental Literature and Digital Machines: a graduate seminar examining theories, narratives, poetry and other manifestations of electronic literature in Spanish (and English, and Portuguese), both as a particular type of born-digital expression meant to live on a computer, as well as a larger field of inquiry that takes advantages of the capabilities offered by these electronic machines. Throughout this course students get familiarized with different genres of e-lit while they learn how to analyze and explore its particular aesthetics, rhetoric and practical functioning. Apart from analyzing the formal characteristics of born-digital pieces, this course explores the relations between digital experimentalism and some of the most revolutionary works of 20th and 21st Century Spain and Latin America. In order to establish this, students read experimental literature by Borges and Cortázar, the Spanish Futurists and Catalan visual poets, the Brazilian Concrete poets, and contemporary post digital Spanish writers, among others from the English-speaking world (the complete reading list is too long to share here, but do email me if you’d like to see it!). Grad students are also sharing their first reading impressions on the course blog: Electrolite.
Want to learn about digital literature in Spanish? Come to UC Berkeley, friends.
