Latin American Digital Poetics 3031264258, 9783031264252

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PALGRAVE SPANISH AND LATIN AMERICAN MEDIA STUDIES

Latin American Digital Poetics Edited by Scott Weintraub Luis Correa-Díaz

Palgrave Spanish and Latin American Media Studies Series Editors

Scott Weintraub Languages, Literature, and Cultures University of New Hampshire Durham, USA Luis Correa-Díaz Dept. of Romance Languages University of Georgia Athens, USA

This series publishes cutting-edge monographs and edited volumes on media from Spain and Latin America. With a broad and innovative approach to media, books in this series blend exploration of traditional media with new and under-researched media practices in order to enrich contemporary study of the media landscape. Topics covered in the series include electronic literature (digital and techno-poetries, hypertext fiction, blogs, literary experiments in social media, video games, memes, etc.), social media phenomena, media-based installations/performances, sound poetry, film, and digital humanities.

Scott Weintraub  •  Luis Correa-Díaz Editors

Latin American Digital Poetics

Editors Scott Weintraub The University of New Hampshire Durham, NH, USA

Luis Correa-Díaz University of Georgia Athens, GA, USA

ISSN 2731-9490     ISSN 2731-9504 (electronic) Palgrave Spanish and Latin American Media Studies ISBN 978-3-031-26424-5    ISBN 978-3-031-26425-2 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-26425-2 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: Tatyana Nesterenko / Alamy Stock Vector This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Acknowledgments

This book was written over email, WhatsApp, and Zoom—appropriately enough, for a book on the topic of digital poetics. It is the product of many years of collaborative work and friendship between the editors, which emerged in and from the corner booth of the Athens, GA sanctum sanctorum, Trappeze. Generous funding for this book was provided by the Department of Romance Languages at the University of Georgia and the Center for the Humanities at the University of New Hampshire. We are very grateful for their continued support. Since this is a collective volume, we would like to first thank the critics who paved the way for this intellectual exercise as well as those who contributed their work to the book. We would also like to thank Camille Davies and her team for their tireless and excellent work getting this project—and our book series, titled New Directions in Spanish and Latin American Media Studies—off the ground. SW and LCD would like to thank their families for their unflinching love, support, and patience through all projects, trials, and tribulations. A special thanks to Audrey Hansen, whose expert translation of over a dozen entries in this volume represents a strong contribution to this book. This book is dedicated to the innovative artists whose work is featured—and those who we were not able to include—in this volume. Also, we would like to celebrate the daring of poets, scholars, students, and readers who are curious about the entanglement between literature and science/technology. v

Contents

1 Situating  the Digital in Latin American Technopoetics  1 Scott Weintraub 2 Critical Snapshots 13 Eduardo Ledesma, Luis Correa-Díaz, María Rosa OliveraWilliams, Katherine A. Bundy, Felipe Cussen, Susana González Aktories, Megumi Andrade Kobayashi, Carolina Gainza C, Élika Ortega, Claire Taylor, Claudia Kozak, Thea Pitman, Tina Escaja, Cecily Raynor, Sam McCracken, Jhoerson Yagmour Figuera, Nohelia Meza, Angelica Huizar, Anahí Alejandra Ré, Yasna Flores-Correa, and Scott Weintraub 3 Poetry  and Artificial Intelligence 87 Luis Correa-Díaz 4 Una  muestra bibliográfica [A Bibliographic Sampling] of Latin American Digital Poetry (So Far)119 Scott Weintraub Index123

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Notes on Contributors

Susana González Aktories  is a professor at the Facultad de Filosofía y Letras, UNAM de México. She is the author of numerous studies in semiotics applied to the arts, as well as in comparative literary theory. Among her forthcoming books are Open Scriptures: Notation in Contemporary Art in Europe and the Americas (co-edited with Susanne Klengel, 2022) and Vocabulario crítico para los estudios intermediales (co-edited with Roberto Cruz Arzabal y Marisol Gacía Walls, 2022). Katherine  A.  Bundy  is a doctoral candidate of Hispanic Studies at McGill University. Her research interests include Spanish and Latin American film, digital culture, (trans)nationalism, and posthumanism. As a founder of a short film festival and a feminist wrestling collective, Kate’s approach to scholarship is that of an ongoing dialogue between the analogue and the digital. www.katherinebundy.com. Luis  Correa-Díaz is the Corresponding Member to the Academia Chilena de la Lengua (Chile) and the Real Academia de Ciencias, Bellas Letras y Nobles Artes de Córdoba (Spain). He is a poet and Professor of Digital Humanities and Human Rights at the University of GeorgiaUSA.  He is the author of several books, articles, and special dossiers. Among them is Novissima verba: huellas digitales/cibernéticas en la poesía latinoamericana (2019). His latest poetry books include Ingeniería solar (2022), Crónica, in memoriam-s & ofrendas (2022), Americana-­lcd (2021), and metaverse (2021).

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Carolina  Gainza C is currently Undersecretary of the Ministry of Science, Technology, Knowledge and Innovation in Chile. Cortés is Associate Professor of Latin American Cultural Studies, Cybercultural Theory, and Digital Literature at the Universidad Diego Portales and author of numerous articles and Narrativas y Poéticas Digitales en América Latina. Producción literaria en el capitalismo informacional (2018). Felipe  Cussen  is a professor at the Institute for Advanced Studies, University of Santiago de Chile. His academic and creative investigations cover the relationships between literature, music and visual arts, experimental poetry, digital technologies, mysticism, and pop. Much of his work is available on his website www.felipecussen.net. Tina  Escaja (aka Alm@ Pérez) is a cyber-poet, digital artist, and Distinguished Professor of Latin American and Spanish Poetry and Technologies at University of Vermont. Her creative work transcends the traditional book format, leaping into digital art, robotics, augmented reality, and multimedia projects exhibited in museums and galleries internationally. Yasna Flores-Correa  has a Ph.D. in Contemporary Hispanic American Literature, Comparative Literature, and Interdisciplinary Studies (Universidad de Playa Ancha) and a Diploma in Latin American Feminine Literature and Thought (PUC de Valparaíso). Flores-Correa is research assistant in the Joint Research Project FAPESP-CONICYT/UNICAMPUPLA 2019 and a researcher in the “Memory of the Sea” Project of Emerging Popular Music Fund, FONDART 2017. Angelica Huizar  is Professor of Spanish and International Studies at Old Dominion University. She teaches courses on Latin American Literature and Cultural Studies. Her publications include two books: Beyond the Page: Latin American Poetry from Calligram to the Virtual (2008) and Cosmos, Values and Consciousness in Latin American Digital Culture (2020). Megumi Andrade Kobayashi  is an academic, a researcher, and a curator in contemporary literature and art. She holds a Doctorate in American Studies (IDEA-­USACH), Master’s in Literature (UCHILE), and Master’s in Image Studies (UAH). She is an assistant professor at the School of Literature at Universidad Finis Terrae. Together with Felipe Cussen and Marcela Labraña, she founded La Oficina de la Nada.

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Claudia Kozak  is a senior member of the National Council for Scientific and Technological Research (CONICET) in Argentina and a full professor in the Departments of Literature and Communication Studies, University of Buenos Aires. She currently sits at the Board of Directors of the Electronic Literature Organization (ELO) and coordinates Lit(e)Lat, Red de Literatura Electrónica Latinoamericana. Among other books and essays, she is co-editor of Antología Lit(e)Lat Vol. 1 and editor of Tecnopoéticas argentinas. Archivo blando de arte y tecnología (2012, reprint 2015). Website: Exploratorio Ludión. Eduardo Ledesma  is Associate Professor of Spanish at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He is the author of Radical Poetry: Aesthetics, Politics, Technology and the Ibero-American Avant-Gardes (1900–2015) (SUNY 2016). His second monograph Cinemas of Marginality: Experimental, Avant-Garde and Documentary Film in IberoAmerica is under contract with SUNY.  He has been awarded an NEH Fellowship for a third project, Blind Cinema, about blind filmmakers. Sam McCracken  is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Comparative Literature at the University of Michigan, where he is also enrolled in the graduate certificate program in Digital Studies. Sam’s research centers on the aesthetics and environmental politics of disposability, with a particular interest in digital ephemera. Nohelia Meza  is a researcher in Latin American Digital Literature and Culture. She was a visiting postdoctoral fellow at the University of Leeds, UK, where she developed her project: “Towards a Digital Rhetoric of Latin American Works of Electronic Literature” (CONACYT 2018–2020). Her research interests encompass digital rhetoric, discourse analysis, literary translation, and Latin American cultural studies. María Rosa Olivera-Williams  is Professor of Latin American Literature at the University of Notre Dame. She teaches, researches, and publishes on modern and contemporary Latin American literature and culture; women’s literature and feminisms; memory studies; militant movements, dictatorships, and transitions to democracy in the Southern Cone; and popular culture, music, dance, and film. Élika Ortega  is an assistant professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of Colorado Boulder. Her research focuses on digital literature and media, cultural hybridity, reading practices, and

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books. Élika is currently writing Binding Media: Print-Digital Literature 1980s–2010s. Thea Pitman  is Professor of Latin American Studies at the University of Leeds, UK.  Her research focuses on Latin/x American digital cultural production. She has published Latin American Cyberculture and Cyberliterature (2007), Latin American Identity in Online Cultural Production (2013), and Decolonising the Museum: The Curation of Indigenous Contemporary Art in Brazil (2021). Cecily  Raynor  is Associate Professor of Hispanic Studies and Digital Humanities at McGill University. Her book on spatial practices in contemporary Latin American literature was published in 2021, and she is coediting a volume on digital culture in Latin America under contract at the University of Toronto Press. Anahí  Alejandra Ré  holds a Doctor of Letters and postgraduation in media arts and is CONICET researcher at the Faculty of Art and Design of the Provincial University of Córdoba. She coordinates and teaches Master’s in Technology, Politics and Cultures at the Center for Advanced Studies of the Faculty of Social Sciences at the National University of Córdoba. Claire Taylor  is the Gilmour Chair of Spanish and Professor of Hispanic Studies at the University of Liverpool. She is a specialist in Latin American culture, with a particular interest in two areas: literary and cultural genres being developed online by Latin(o) Americans and memory practices in Latin America, especially Colombia. Scott  Weintraub  is Professor of Spanish at The University of New Hampshire. He is the author or co-editor of over a dozen books and special journal issues and is senior editor of A Contracorriente: una revista de estudios latinoamericanos. See http://www.scottweintraub.com for more information. Johnson Yagmour  is a doctoral candidate in Literature at the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile. Yagmour is winner of the ANID scholarship for doctoral studies and a researcher at the Digital Laboratory, Universidad Diego Portales, Chile. Yagmour is a member of the Literary Research Seedbed—SILAT of the Pontificia Universidad Javeriana. Yagmour has a Master’s in Latin American Literature from Simón Bolívar University, Venezuela and is Professor of Language and Literature at the Libertador Experimental Pedagogical University, Venezuela.

CHAPTER 1

Situating the Digital in Latin American Technopoetics Scott Weintraub

Abstract  In this chapter, we explore definitions and typologies of digital poetry, drawing from studies on the topic from Anglophone and Latin American academic disciplines. It sets up the larger, pedagogically-focused, generational schematic employed in the book, drawing on a chronologically-­ organized model developed by Leo Flores. At the same time, a strength of this book is the emphasis placed on the specific cultural cartography of these poets, which is marked and transected by “the Latin American” in a very geo-techno-political and literary sense. This is the way that our book seeks to bridge the cultural and techno-poetic divides that exist between accounts of digital poetry in the Anglophone and European scenes of writing and those that explore the Spanish- (and Portuguese-) speaking one(s). Keywords  Digital poetry and poetics • Latin America

S. Weintraub (*) The University of New Hampshire, Durham, NH, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 S. Weintraub, L. Correa-Díaz (eds.), Latin American Digital Poetics, Palgrave Spanish and Latin American Media Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-26425-2_1

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Virtual Bodies and Cultural Artifacts: Definitions and Approaches In Bodies in Code: Interfaces with Digital Media, Mark Hansen writes that “With the convergence of physical and virtual spaces informing today’s corporate and entertainment environments, researchers and artists have come to recognize that motor activity—not representationalist verisimilitude—holds the key to fluid and functional crossings between virtual and physical realms.” He goes on to refer to (and quote) Fleischmann and Strauss, who “speak of ‘turning the theory on its head that man is losing his body to technology’; as they see it, ‘the interactive media are supporting the multisensory mechanisms of the body and are thus extending man’s space for play and action’” (cited in Grau, 219; Hansen 2–3). These insightful claims made for integrated virtual reality spaces—sketching a phenomenology in which “the new mixed reality paradigm foregrounds the constitutive or ontological role of the body in giving birth to the world (5)”—might at first seem out of place in a volume that seeks to map the coordinates of digital poetry in Latin America. Yet, Hansen argues that “two corollaries—the primacy of the body as ontological access to the world and the role of tactility in the actualization of such access—effect a passage from the axiom that has been my focus thus far (all virtual reality is mixed reality) to the more general axiom that all reality is mixed reality” (5). And from the standpoint of the institution(alization) of literature and culture, perhaps there is no more salient example of the corporal enmeshed with verbal and visual (even verbicovisual) artifice than contemporary (and in some respects) historical digital poetics. Latin American Digital Poetics seeks to take the pulse of emergent poetic forms whose history is more entangled with the computational than has often been recognized. As critic Loss Pequeño Glazier argues, “[p]oetry is a field of writing/programming whose alliance to digital practices seems to be generally unacknowledged. For one not to see the connection between poetic practices and new technology seems to undervalue a literary genre that has seen its innovative practice consistently at the forefront of artistic investigations of the twentieth century” (153). With this link between experimental form and cultural practices in mind, the present volume carefully and thoroughly probes the intersection between the literary, the cultural, and the technological in order to reflect on the ways that digital technology has radically reshaped and reconfigured nearly all aspects of contemporary culture. The justification for our book, then,

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is simple: by way of more panoramic approaches to the topic as well as select case studies, we seek to account for the multi-directional exchange between poetry, technology, and culture via a (primarily) pedagogical approach. Given the increased interest in Latin American digital poetics and poetry over the past 10 years or so—along with increasing efforts toward the canonization of established e-literary works in several local and global initiatives—we envision that this book will serve as not only a resource for specialists (academics) but also as a textbook for final-year seminars or modules on Latin American new media or on global electronic literature (or, indeed, as a secondary resource in a poetry class). A necessary starting point or heuristic for this examination of (Latin American) e-poetry is terminological in nature, having to do with concepts such as digital or electronic literature, technopoetry, and hypertext and hypermedia. Scott Rettberg’s seminal volume Electronic Literature provides a useful point of departure: “Electronic Literature is most simply described as new forms and genres of writing that explore the specific capabilities of the computer and network—literature that would not be possible without the contemporary digital context” (2). And in a recent article in Latin American Literature Today, Claudia Kozak succinctly outlines the major features of these computational literary forms in the following terms: Unlike literature associated with the book medium, digital literature is: a) generated in/by/from electronic digital devices; b) programmed in binary numeric code through its creation and its use of various software and c) experienced in conjunction with digital interfaces. Texts that are transferred from print medium to a computer screen or similar devices are not digital literature, although in the transfer the digitized texts become, to a certain point, digital texts, computable as discrete units.1

Indeed, Kozak’s succinct typologies are an accurate snapshot of the shifting borders delimiting the scope of the literary in the digital age. In her book Electronic Literature: New Horizons for the Literary (2008), Hayles emphasizes the digital nature of all literary texts: “Except for a handful of books produced by fine letter presses, print literature consists of digital 1  Kozak, “Digital Latin American Poetry” (Latin American Literature Today 1.10). Apart from this 2019 dossier and with respect to key works of criticism dedicated to Latin American e-lit—all of which have helped to define this growing field—please see the bibliography included at the end of this volume.

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files throughout most of its existence. So essential is digitality to contemporary processes of composition, storage, and production that print should properly be considered a particular form of output for digital files rather than a medium separate from digital instantiation” (159). In this way, it is clear that digitality and computation are central to all literary practice, insofar as “[c]ontemporary literature, and even more so the literary that extends and enfolds it, is computational” (85). Digital poetry, in and of itself, is a moving target (not merely in the kinetic sense). In a broad definition, poet Stephanie Strickland asserts that “E-poetry relies on code for its creation, preservation, and display: there is no way to experience a work of e-literature unless a computer is running it—reading it and perhaps also generating it” (“Born Digital”). Leonardo Flores’ entry in The Johns Hopkins Guide to Digital Media reminds us that: Digital poetry is a poetic practice made possible by digital media and technologies. A genre of electronic literature, it is also known as electronic poetry or e-poetry (see ELECTRONIC LITERATURE). The technologies that shape digital media are diverse, are rapidly evolving, and can be used to such different effects that the term has expanded to encompass a large a number of practices … we can define the digital poem as one that distinctively uses digital media in the creation, production, or reception performances of the poem (Flores 155–156).2

Loss Pequeño Glazier, on the other hand, argues that “it is important to note that digital poetries are not print poetry merely repositioned in the new medium. Instead, e-poetries extend the investigations of innovative practice as it occurred in print media, making possible the continuation of lines of inquiry that could not be fulfilled in that medium” (Glazier 26). 2  We would like to acknowledge the fuzziness present in these formulations regarding the generic and stylistic frontiers purporting to separate, for example, digital poetry from computer games, online performance art, visual artworks, etc. Hayles astutely acknowledges this messiness in the following manner: “Like the boundary between computer games and electronic literature, the demarcation between digital art and electronic literature is shifty at best, often more a matter of the critical traditions from which the works are discussed than anything intrinsic to the works themselves” (12). Her point regarding the genealogical lines drawn by the works themselves is key here, especially if we consider it both in terms of Glazier’s claim (cited below) that e-poetry (and contemporary digital media practice as a whole) dialogues with innovative, Modernist and avant-garde poetic practice as well as the larger generational schema outlined by Leo Flores and others (an integral part of the entries that follow this essay).

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Glazier’s study Digital Poetics: The Making of E-Poetries (2002) was groundbreaking in terms of the continuity it established between innovative poetic practice and digital poetry, which is a major focus of Latin American Digital Poetics. Glazier, who is truly a giant in this field, summarizes the main qualities of e-poetry in the following manner: • Works that cannot be adequately delivered via traditional paper publishing or cannot be displayed on paper. This would include innovative works circulated in electronic form. • Texts with certain structural/operative forms not reproducible in paper or in any other non-digital medium. These include works employing hyperlinks, kinetic elements, multi-layered features, programmable elements and events. • Digital media works that have some relation to twentieth-century innovative practices (163). This last point—regarding the clear continuity between Modernist forms of poetic expression and contemporary digital literary practice—is particularly cogent when one considers the specific typologies and “flavors” of digital poetry. In Electronic Literature, Rettberg devotes chapters to combinatory poetics as well as to kinetic, multimedia, and interactive poetry (Chapters 2 and 5, respectively). Below we will outline the main features of the different varieties of digital poetic works that are present in the “samples” taken and presented in the main section of this volume. We will also elaborate upon Leo Flores’ generational model for e-lit, which is also an important component of the entries on specific digital poetic works that follow.

Typologies of Digital Poetry, en breve The first content chapter of Rettberg’s Electronic Literature grounds his discussion of combinatory poetics in the historical avant-gardes (especially Dada, Surrealism, and Oulipo): “In this chapter we will consider how elements of chance and procedurality served as the foundation for combinatory and generative art and literature” (20). He also highlights the role of artificial intelligence and natural language processing in the development of combinatory poetic writing techniques. After this historical and contextual outline, Rettberg turns to different combinatory writing systems, such as poetry generators: “[f]rom a literary standpoint they challenge

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classical notions of authorship and close reading. Form an aesthetic standpoint, they typically involve elements of chance and surprise, constraint, and variability, and explore the poetic and narrative potentialities of text machines” (38).3 These poetic projects often employ a linguistic data set from which an algorithm selects or samples specific combinations—the output is then inscribed into the literary tradition(s) of poetic genres, canons, and forms. These programmable poetic generators, argues Rettberg, should be considered: with an understanding that the author function is fundamentally different from that of writing a single poem or story. While the author of a poem intended for print publication is striving for a singularity—the one perfect expression of what they are trying to communicate—the author of a poetry generator is striving for multiplicity …. The goal for the author of a combinatory work is not to produce the best literary expression of an idea, but the most interesting range of possibilities the literary system can produce (43).4

Indeed, the algorithmic selection among a “range of possibilities” might be based upon a more simple material (linguistic) constraint or perhaps involve interventions/interactions with one or more users. Or, these poetic generation machines might be designed as bots on social media 3  Rettberg remarks that: “We will focus here primarily on generative literature produced in the English language, but it is important to note that generative literature is an international phenomenon, and many of its most important works have been produced in other languages, particularly in Portuguese and French” (38). He then highlights works by Portuguese writer Pedro Barbosa and French writer Jean-Pierre Balpe. See below for a discussion of combinatory poetics in the work of several Latin American poets. 4  Poet and critic Christian Bök analyzes a canonical work of combinatory poetics—The Policeman’s Beard is Half-Constructed (1984)—in the following manner:

RACTER, the author, is an automated algorithm, whose output confounds the metaphysics of authorship, refuting the privileged uniqueness of poetic genius. RACTER gives voice to its own electric delirium, doing so without cognition or intention, so that, much like a somniloquist, the device automatically blurts out statements that are syntactically orthodox, but semantically aberrant. While we might take solace in our own anthropic prejudice, dismissing such nonsensical communiqués as nothing more than computerized gobbledygook, we might unwittingly miss a chance to study firsthand the babytalk of an embryonic sentience, struggling abortively to awaken from its own phylum of oblivion (10).

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platforms such as Twitter; Rettberg cites Flores’ definition of bots as “work[ing] with ‘poetry in many forms (haiku, copulets, sonnets, and more), techniques (n-grams, Markov chains, templates, variables, etc.), and datasets (self-contained, data mining, streaming APIs, user-generated, dictionaries, and more)’” (51). In all, combinatory poetic techniques employ aleatory methods or approaches that produce “strange, uncanny, and beautiful texts resulting from an amalgamation of human and machine intelligence and serve as heuristic devices to help us better understand computation” (53). In Chapter 5 of Electronic Literature, Rettberg turns his focus to kinetic, multimedia, and interactive poetic forms. He explores some of the key features of these animated poetic works, highlighting aspects of time and movement and experimentation with the materiality of language— especially in dialogue with the writing practices of Lettrism, Futurism, visual poetry, sound poetry, and, particularly, concrete poetry. Whereas Brazilian concrete poets such as Augusto de Campos, Haroldo de Campos, and Décio Pignitari (known as the Noigandres group) manipulated the physical form of poetic experiments, melding the visual with the verbal (verbicovisual, in their terms), Rettberg asserts that “[d]igital kinetic poetry provides text as time-based moving image, often with a sound dimension, and is often interactive and responsive as well” (120). This focus on the material nature of language—either visually, in sound, or in time (objects and/or language moving through space)—often fuses content and form in surprising and innovative ways, and early e-poetry (what Christopher Funkhouser calls “pre-historic digital poetry” and beyond) evinces a very fluid transition from page to screen. Rettberg glosses visual poetics’ fascination with language as motion and language in motion in kinetic poetry in terms of the ways in which “[w]e observe language coming together and falling apart in a never-ending process, or struggling between that which can be articulated and that which can merely be gestured toward” (127). And in terms of sound poetry, additional multimedia features of digitally programmed language emerge, either (or in addition to) using phonic or phonetic interventions in language in a semantic or non-signifying manner, depending on the poetic project (such as Rocío Cerón has done in Mexico, for example, with her Burbujas sónicas (2019)).

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Sampling Latin American Digital Poetry We conceive of Latin American Digital Poetry as a pedagogically driven resource for both specialists and the uninitiated. The main section of the book serves as a muestra—a sampling or display—of major works of Latin American digital poetry. Authored by experts in the field, these 25 short entries provide cutting-edge analysis of the canon of digital poetry from Latin America. These entries touch on important precursors to contemporary digital poetics, ranging from early experiments with punch cards by Omar Gancedo and holopoetry by Eduardo Kac, to concrete poet Augusto de Campos, to Carlos Germán Belli’s cybernetic explorations (still in print, as Luis Correa-Díaz convincingly argues). Other entries analyze the advent of web-based digital poetic projects in approximately 1995 (and include selections from Gustavo Romano, Belén Gache, Lucía Grossberger, Eugenio Tisselli, Luis Bravo, and Santiago Ortiz). The remaining entries mark the arrival of the current generation of digital poets, who draw upon social media technologies (Eduardo Navas, for example), as well as more interactive, site-specific modalities or haptic/locative/VR technologies (María Mencía and Benjamín Moreno Ortiz, among others). Each entry consists of the following: • A technical description of the work. • A brief contextualization of the work (referencing typologies, generational schema, and taxonomies developed by Leonardo Flores and Scott Rettberg). • An analysis of the e-poetics of the digital work. • Minimal (e-)bibliography (about the author/in general). This “sample” of trends in Latin American digital poetics is not meant to be exhaustive; rather, it seeks to situate some key features of these emergent forms in larger computational, literary, and cultural contexts. With respect to the temporal model employed in these entries, Leo Flores has identified three generations (or waves, as he suggests) of electronic literature: The first one, much as defined by my predecessors, consists of pre-Web experimentation with electronic and digital media. The second generation begins with the Web in 1995 and continues to the present, consisting of innovative works created with custom interfaces and forms, mostly ­published in the open

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Web. The third generation, starting from around 2005 to the present, uses established platforms with massive user bases, such as social media networks, apps, mobile and touchscreen devices, and Web API services. This third generation coexists with the previous one and accounts for a massive scale of born digital work produced by and for contemporary audiences for whom digital media has become naturalized. Each generation builds upon previous and contemporary technologies, access, and audiences to develop works and poetics that are characteristic of their generational moment (https://electronicbookreview.com/essay/third-­generation-electronic-literature/).

Flores’ final point—about the accumulation of tendencies, tools, and tricks in subsequent generations—anchors the genesis of digital poetry in the historical avant-gardes (as Glazier argues, op.  cit) and yet does not employ a teleological logic that would suggest that digital poetics is “merely” a realization of the innovations of the avant-garde or the post-­ avant-­garde. Rather, it is this and more: as a renewed or revitalized post-­ post-­avant-garde, if such a temporal contradiction or tautology makes sense, digital poetry and poetics is a (Borgesian or Cortazarian) dream of the avant-gardes that nevertheless is the heartbeat of contemporary, innovative literary practice. Indeed, the final chapter in this volume—titled “Poetry and Artificial Intelligence”—seeks to take the pulse of these innovative pulsations and analyze the role that machine learning and writing plays in the composition of digital poetic works.

Closing Thoughts on Locating the Latin American: Poéticas y poesías digitales and the Question of Futurity Despite the clear Anglophone focus of the majority of critical work done on the topic of digital poetry and poetics, digital poetry in languages other than English (and its corresponding secondary literature) has flourished over the past couple of decades or so. Indeed, e-poetry does “speak Spanish (and Portuguese)”; we might say that the non-place of Latin American digital or technopoetics evinces a positionality that departs from a specific cultural, linguistic, and geographic cartography that is marked and transected by “the Latin American” in a particular manner. Claire Taylor and Thea Pitman are the critics who have most thoroughly theorized the non-place of Latin American digital poetics, especially in their

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book Latin American Identity in Online Cultural Production.5 In order to consider the question of virtuality and identity, we might think through some of the ways in which (following Taylor and Pitman) Latin American digital poets articulate a specific praxis of “Latin American-ness,” since they write from a positionality that is postregional in nature but still clearly engage “tropes and discourses of ‘Latin American-ness’” (Taylor and Pitman 21). This postnational and resistant praxis, according to Taylor and Pitman: aris[es] precisely through the very contradictions and tensions of the medium itself—that is, from the problematic, and unresolved tensions in online interaction between the local and the global, between expression uncoupled from a geographical specificity, and reterritorialization—Latin American online culture plays upon these contradictions and tensions, and thus becomes a “postregional” Latin American cultural practice. Latin American cultural practice online, as “Latin American postregional practice” is thus a practice which works through the dismantling of the conventional conceptualizations of “Latin America,” all the while taking up, engaging with and reworking, tropes and discourses of “Latin American-ness” (21).

One might argue, however, that in 2023 all cultural production deemed “Latin American” in some way, shape, or form is “postregional practice,” reterritorialized in terms of global flows of capital, information, and discourses (social, legal, cultural, etc.). In fact, much of the poetic exploration featured in the present volume departs from a cultural cartography 5  We might also consider recent groundbreaking developments in terms of mapping the field of Latin American electronic literature. The Electronic Literature Organization, for example, has included key works by Latin American and Latinx authors in their three Collections (https://collection.eliterature.org). Scholars from across Latin America have created LITELAT (https://litelat.net), a research network devoted to the topic. In Brazil, a team led by Rejane Rocha has created the Repositório da Literatura Digital Brasileira https://atlasldigital.wordpress.com/o-projeto/; in Mexico, the Centro de Cultural Digital has worked tirelessly to promote electronic literature and digital culture from the region (https://www.centroculturadigital.mx). Finally, in Chile, Carolina Gaínza directs a project titled “Cultura digital en Chile: literatura, música y cine” (http://culturadigitalchile.cl), which has asked some key questions about Latin American e-lit, such as: “¿Existe una “cultura” digital en Chile? ¿Qué características adopta la transformación mencionada en nuestro país? ¿Cómo lo digital afecta los procesos de producción/creación? ¿Cómo afecta la circulación?” (http://culturadigitalchile.cl/descripcion/)

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that is materially (and virtually) transected by “the Latin American” in a very real sense, and yet many of the digital poets included here reside outside the geographical region known as Latin America (there is also the growing population of Latinx or Chicanx poets living in the United States, of course). And, looking back at the evolution of the larger topographies of the field over the past 10 years or so, it is evident that writing this book in 2023 is a far different experience than, say, our first edited volume on the topic, which was a special issue of the Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies titled “Literatura latinoamericana, española, y portuguesa en la era digital (nuevas tecnologías y lo literario)” (2010). At that time, there were only a handful of monographs and edited volumes dedicated to the subject; in a 2007 essay—part of their collective volume Latin American Cyberliterature and Cyberculture—Taylor and Pitman wrote that “to date, Latin America constitutes something of a blind spot in terms of the analysis of cyberculture available in English” (Taylor & Pitman 2), to which we added “No sólo en inglés, sino también en castellano y portugués. Podemos observar no la ausencia, pero sí la escacez de discursos críticos e iniciativas de estudio” [“Not only in English, also in Spanish and Portuguese. We can observe not an absence, but certainly the scarcity of critical discourses and initiatives”] (3). As this chapter has shown, this is far from the case, as Latin American digital poetry and poetics definitely speaks Spanish and Portuguese today. What language(s) will digital poetry speak tomorrow and beyond? Who/what will be composing it? For now, we might say that the futurity of Latin American digital poetry is indeed one in which “il faut être absolument moderne” [“One must be absolutely modern”], per French symbolist poet and seer Arthur Rimbaud (“Une saison en enfer” [1873]). This formulation recalls Mexican Nobel laureate Octavio Paz’s analysis of the Latin American avant-gardes in terms of “la tradición de la ruptura” (“the tradition of rupture”) and yet projects or anticipates a robopoetic futurity that has, in a sense, always already arrived. As we argue in the conclusion to this volume—echoing Italo Calvino (writing some 55 years ago)— “[w]riters, as they have always been up to now, are already writing machines” (15).

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Works Cited Bök, Christian. “The Piecemeal Bard is Deconstructed: Notes Toward a Potential Robopoetics.” Object 10. Accessed July 8, 2021. < ­ http://www.ubu.com/ papers/object/03_bok.pdf>. Calvino, Italo. “Cybernetics and Ghosts.” The Uses of Literature. Trans. Patrick Creagh. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1986. Cerón, Rocío. Burbujas sónicas. 2019. Accessed July 8, 2021. . Correa-Díaz, Luis y Scott Weintraub. “Literatura latinoamericana, española, y portuguesa en la era digital (nuevas tecnologías y lo literario)”. Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies 14 (2010): 149–155. Flores, Leo. “Digital Poetry.” The Johns Hopkins Guide to Digital Media. Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014. 155–161. ———. “Third Generation Electronic Literature.” Electronic Book Review. April 6, 2019. Accessed July 8, 2021. . Hansen, Mark B.  N. Bodies in Code: Interfaces with Digital Media, Taylor & Francis Group, 2006. ProQuest Ebook Central. Accessed July 8, 2021. . Glazier, Loss Pequeño. Digital Poetics: The Making of E-Poetries. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2002. Hayles, Katherine N. Electronic Literature: New Horizons for the Literary. Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 2008. Kozak, Claudia. “Digital Latin American Poetry: Experimental Language in the Times of Bits.” Latin American Literature Today 1.10 (May 2019). Rettberg, Scott. Electronic Literature. Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2019. Rimbaud, Arthur. Œuvres complètes. Paris: Gallimard, 2009. Strickland, Stephanie. “Born Digital.” 2009. Accessed July 8, 2021. . Taylor, Claire and Thea Pitman. Latin American Cyberliterature and Cyberculture. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2007. ———and———. Latin American Identity in Online Cultural Production. London: Routledge, 2013.

CHAPTER 2

Critical Snapshots Eduardo Ledesma, Luis Correa-Díaz, María Rosa Olivera-­ Williams, Katherine A. Bundy, Felipe Cussen, Susana González Aktories, Megumi Andrade Kobayashi, Carolina Gainza C, Élika Ortega, Claire Taylor, Claudia Kozak, Thea Pitman, Tina Escaja, Cecily Raynor, Sam McCracken, Jhoerson Yagmour Figuera, Nohelia Meza, Angelica Huizar, Anahí Alejandra Ré, Yasna Flores-Correa, and Scott Weintraub

Abstract  This section offers a muestra—a sampling or display—of major works of Latin American digital poetry. Authored by experts in the field, these 25 short entries analyze the canon of digital poetry from Latin America. Each entry consists of: (1) a technical description of the work; (2) a brief contextualization of the work (referencing typologies,

E. Ledesma University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Champaign, IL, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 S. Weintraub, L. Correa-Díaz (eds.), Latin American Digital Poetics, Palgrave Spanish and Latin American Media Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-26425-2_2

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generational schema, and taxonomies); (3) an analysis of the e-poetics of the digital work; (4) minimal (e-) bibliography (about the author/in general); and (5) QR codes linking to the author’s work. This “sample” of trends in Latin American digital poetics is not meant to be exhaustive; rather, it seeks to situate some key features of these emergent forms in larger computational, literary, and cultural contexts. Keywords  Digital poetics • New genres • New technologies L. Correa-Díaz (*) University of Georgia, Athens, GA, USA e-mail: [email protected] M. R. Olivera-Williams University of Notre Dame, Notre Dame, IN, USA e-mail: [email protected] K. A. Bundy • C. Raynor McGill University, Montreal, QC, Canada e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected] F. Cussen Instituto de Estudios Avanzados, Universidad de Santiago de Chile, Santiago, Chile e-mail: [email protected] S. G. Aktories Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Mexico City, Mexico e-mail: [email protected] M. A. Kobayashi Universidad Finis Terrae, Providencia, Chile e-mail: [email protected] C. Gainza C Universidad Diego Portales, Santiago, Chile e-mail: [email protected] É. Ortega University of Colorado Boulder, Boulder, CO, USA e-mail: [email protected] C. Taylor University of Liverpool, Liverpool, UK e-mail: [email protected]

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Author: Arnaldo Antunes Work: Nome [Name] VHS (1993); DVD (2006) Link to the work: Work is in a DVD format. Information about the work can be found on the author’s webpage. C. Kozak Universidad de Buenos Aires-CONICET/UNTREF, Buenos Aires, Argentina e-mail: [email protected] T. Pitman University of Leeds, Leeds, UK e-mail: [email protected] T. Escaja University of Vermont, Burlington, VT, USA e-mail: [email protected] S. McCracken University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, USA e-mail: [email protected] J. Y. Figuera Universidad Diego Portales, Santiago, Chile Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, Santiago, Chile e-mail: [email protected] N. Meza Universidad de las Américas Puebla, Puebla, México e-mail: [email protected] A. Huizar Old Dominion University, Norfolk, VA, USA e-mail: [email protected] A. A. Ré Center for Research and Studies of Culture and Society (CIECS-CONICET), Universidad Nacional de Córdoba, Córdoba, Argentina Universidad Nacional de San Luis, San Luis, Argentina e-mail: [email protected] Y. Flores-Correa Universidad de Playa Ancha, Valparaíso, Chile e-mail: [email protected] S. Weintraub (*) The University of New Hampshire, Durham, NH, USA e-mail: [email protected]

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Author’s webpage: [

]

Biography: (São Paulo-Brazil, 1960) Poet, essayist, musician, composer, visual and performance artist, MTV-Brazil video-jockey, and even an occasional actor, Antunes exemplifies the concept of the interdisciplinary creator. He studied linguistics at the University of São Paulo but did not complete his degree, devoting himself instead to music with his first rock band, the Titãs [Titans]. From his extensive lyrical production, the books that stand out include Ou e [Or I] (1983), Psia (1986), Tudos [All] (1990), As coisas [Things] (1992), Nome (1993), Outro [Other] (2001), Palavra desordem [Word Disorder] (2002), Como é que chama o nome disso [What is the Name of That?] (2006). From his musical output we can mention as his best works Nome (1993), O Corpo [The Body] (2000), Iê Iê Iê (2009). He received the prestigious Jabuti Poetry Prize (Brazil, 1993) for his collection As coisas. Technical description of the work: Nome is a collection of video poems created prior to the era of the Internet. Nome was conceived for an analog medium and was later converted to digital. It was distributed through various formats, first as a VHS (1993) and later as a DVD (2006). The work does not require a computer to be viewed, since both its original VHS version and its more recent DVD version only require audiovisual technologies (VHS and DVD player and a monitor, etc.). Nevertheless, Nome is fully attuned to an esthetic characteristic of kinetic digital poetry. Context + e-generation of the work: Nome is a multimedia work that relies on image, sound, and text for the creation of 30 kinetic poems. It is part of a second generation of digital poetry, one that includes works that were created prior to the development of the Internet, and that were usually distributed via CD ROM or other disks (in this case DVD). Nome is inspired by the Brazilian concrete poetry of the 1950s and 1960s (exemplified by brothers Augusto and Haroldo de Campos and Décio Pignatari),

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and displays a notable influence from 1960s and 1970s Tropicalismo, especially its music. The poem is also influenced by Brazilian rock from the 1980s, a movement in which Antunes participated as the lead singer for the transgressive band Titãs. Nome masterfully combines typography, images, diagrams, photographs, video, voice, and music. By carefully considering the potential effects of each video poem on spectators, Antunes crafts a moving and richly multisensorial experience. E-poetics of the digital work: Antunes’ poetry reflects a cybernetic nomadism that anchors itself in both local Brazilian culture (concrete poetry, Tropicalismo) and global culture (international pop and rock music, digital poetry, video art). Profoundly self-reflexive, Nome investigates the poetic act itself, although its close attention to linguistic games and rhythmic structures is linked to an ethical concern for social justice, as seen in the content of the poems. The eponymous “Nome,” the first poem in the anthology, denaturalizes everyday language to reveal its visceral materiality and the hidden meanings of words. The process questions the connection between “names” and the “things” they refer to. In so doing, the poem demonstrates the power of language as a tool for oppression in a late capitalist world where human beings are objectified, commodified, and consumed. As the poet’s voice rhythmically recites the progressive descent of a human being towards becoming (capitalist) “waste,” the images display the words of the poem in different sizes and colors, but ironically placed over a mound of industrial garbage. Brief (e-)bibliography: Antunes, Arnaldo. Palavra desordem. São Paulo: Iluminuras, 2002. Print. Beiguelman, Giselle. “The Reader, the Player, and the Executable Poetics.” Eds. Jörgen Schäfer, Peter Gendolla. Beyond the Screen: Transformations of Literary Structures, Interfaces and Genres. Berlin: Verlag, 2010. 403–427. Print. Fernandes Júnior, Antônio. Os entre-lugares do sujeito e da escritura em Arnaldo Antunes. Curitiba: Editora Prismas, 2012. Print. Funkhouser, Christopher T. Prehistoric Digital Poetry: An Archeology of Forms, 1959–1995. University of Alabama Press: Tuscaloosa, Alabama, 2007. Print. Kim Stefans, Brian. “Animation Kineticism.” Ed. Marie-Laure Ryan, Lori Emerson y Benjamin J Robertson. The Johns Hopkins Guide to Digital Media. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014. 13–16. Print.

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Eduardo Ledesma University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (USA) http://www.spanport.illinois.edu/people/eledes1 Author: Carlos Germán Belli Work: ¡Oh Hada Cibernética! [O Cybernetic Fairy!] (1961) Link to work: [ ]

Link to author: [

]

Biography: Carlos Germán Belli (Lima, Peru, 1927) is considered to be one of the most important figures of Peruvian poetry. He received a Ph.D. in Literature from the Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos in Peru. Among his major books are Poemas [Poems] (1958), Dentro & Fuera [Inside and Out] (1960), ¡Oh Hada Cibernética! [O Cybernetic Fairy!] (1962), Por el monte abajo [Down the Hill] (1967), En alabanza del bolo alimenticio [In Praise of Cud] (1979), El buen muladar [The Good Trash Heap] (1986), En el restante tiempo terrenal [In the Remaining Time on Earth] (1987), Trechos del itinerario [Stretches of the Itinerary] (1998), ¡Salve, spes! [Hail, Spes!] (2000), En las hospitalarias estrofas [In the Hospitable Stanzas] (2001), and El Imán [The Magnet] (2003). Accolades include Peru’s National Poetry Award (1962), the Pablo

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Neruda Ibero-American Poetry Award (2006), and the Guggenheim Fellowship, both in 1969 and 1987. Technical description of the work: Everything began, if it can be thought of as such, with a poem titled “¡Oh Hada Cibernética!…,” which appeared in the book Dentro y fuera (1960). In 1961, this book was expanded, resulting in a complete collection of poems that also claimed this exclamation as its title. It was re-edited, revised, and expanded in 1962. Within these two books, only two of the poems are related to the topic at hand: the early appeal to cybernetics. One poem carries over from the 1960 book of poems to the 1961 book (known by its first line: “Cuándo harás…?” [“When will you…?”]). The other poem appears in the 1962 book (“Ya líbranos…” [“Deliver us now…”]). The rest of the poems in both books are not directly related to this theme, but they are associated with certain lines of thought that the two cybernetic poems also develop, such as the stress/exhaustion/weight of human labor, for example. In any case, these two poems are enough to place Belli at the vanguard of electronic and/or digital poetry, not so much as a genre but rather with respect to its meta-poetics, which is to say, in its reflection on the medium. Context + e-generation of the work: Of course, Belli’s poems don’t directly match up with what is conceived of as digital poetry, neither in the narrow or broad understanding of the term (Correa-Díaz, 2015; Flores); however, they can be considered part of the process that led literature to experiment with the new electronic-computational technology, including the new means of mass communication. In this way, the “¡Oh Hada Cibernética!” poems can be seen in two ways. First, as relevant to the “prehistory” of digital poetry, if we extend the concept proposed by Funkhouser, who situates it archaeologically in relation to the early poetry of the computerized (but pre-WWW) world, and “to lesser degree […] to link that history with precomputerized poetry” (5). Second, we could consider what is described here as “cybernetic poetry (still?!) in print” (how I referred to it in a 2013 article), or those poems/books of poetry that portrayed (and still portray) the print world, to the point of sometimes including digital aspects on the printed page, such as pixellation, a certain kineticism, and so on, or producing co-dependent, hybrid books belonging as much to “print culture” as to “digital/cyber culture.” In terms of representation, Belli’s case would be, as far as I know, anticipatory, since the aforementioned books are located, by their dates of publication, at the advent of cybernetics and of all the changes that this has

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produced at all levels, where the artistic and the literary are implicated, of course. E-poetics of the work: In an old-fashioned language (Velázquez) of the (Neo-)Baroque kind, Belli, always attentive to professions (almost all of which are “horrific,” while conveying an almost enslaving vision of human labor) and, in particular, to the profession of the writer, issues an invocation at once salutary and salvational in praise of the recently debuted cybernetic tool. The poet anthropomorphizes this tool, converting it to “Hada” [“Fairy”] and “señora” [“Mrs.”], and, ultimately, into a second mother, whose magic and “electric” power would free man from his [biblical] punishment of labor, to say it bluntly. However, the poem doesn’t stop here; the second part of “Oh Hada Cibernética (ya líbranos…)” is oriented toward the “cyborg” issue of the posthuman in our scientific/ philosophical/techno-cultural condition. The “Cybernetic Fairy” is asked to slow the passage of time so as to enjoy “the leisure of love and wisdom” [“el ocio del amor y la sapiencia”], which in the ideological framework of the text does not have to be the sole happiness of the owner; the servant also demands it as a (human) right. What also appears here, in a certain sense, is what would later be the democratizing expectation that has been associated with cybernetic activity (Martín-Barbero; Gubern) (Correa-­ Díaz, 2013, 63–64). In an interview that can be seen on YouTube, Belli himself explains certain factors that inspired him to write these poems and, in particular, how cautionary they are (https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=-­LoAArYajZI). Brief (e-) bibliography: Belli, Carlos Germán. ¡Oh Hada Cibernética! Lima, Peru: La Rama Florida, 1961. 2nd edition revised and expanded in 1962. Print. ———. Los Talleres del tiempo: versos escogidos. Ed. Paul W. Borgeson, Jr. Madrid: Visor, 1992. Print. Correa-Díaz, Luis. “Una introducción.” Poesía y poéticas digitales/electrónicas/tecnos/new-media en América Latina: definiciones y exploraciones. Eds. Luis Correa-Díaz and Scott Weintraub. Bogotá, Colombia: Universidad Central Ediciones. Print and e-book, 2015. ———. “Poesía cibernética (todavía?) in print en América Latina (1950/60 hasta 2010).” New Readings [UK, 2013] 13: 57–73. Web. (http://letras.mysite.com/lcor071213.html)

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Funkhouser, Christopher. Prehistoric Digital Poetry. An Archaeology of Forms. Tuscaloosa, Alabama: University of Alabama Press, 2007. Print. Gubern, Román. “De la computadora al libro.” Metamorfosis de la lectura. Barcelona: Anagrama, 2010. 87–123. Print. Martín-Barbaro, Jesús. “Latin American Cyberculture: From the Lettered City to the Creativity of its Citizens.” Latin American Cyberculture and Cyberliterature. Eds. Claire Taylor and Thea Pitman. Liverpool: University of Liverpool Press, 2007. Xi–xv. Print.

Appendix: ¡Oh Hada Cibernética! (cuándo harás…)” [1960, 1961] Oh Hada Cibernética cuándo harás que los huesos de mis manos se muevan alegremente para escribir al fin lo que yo desee a la hora que me venga en gana y los encajes de mis órganos secretos tengan facciones sosegadas en las últimas horas del día mientras la sangre circule como un bálsamo a lo largo de mi cuerpo. [Oh, Cybernetic Fairy, when will you make the bones in my hands move happily to final write whatever I want in the moment that I wish and make the lace of my secret organs have calm factions in the day’s final hours while my blood circulates like a balsam throughout my body (translated by Scott Weintraub).] “¡Oh Hada Cibernética! (ya líbranos…)” [1962] ¡Oh Hada Cibernética!, ya líbranos Con tu eléctrico seso y casto antídoto, De los oficios hórridos humanos, que son como tizones infernales encendidos de tiempo inmemorial

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por el crudo secuaz de la hoguera; amortigua, ¡oh señora!, la presteza con que el cierzo sañudo y tan frío bate las nuevas aras, en el humo enhiestas, de nuestro cuerpo ayer, ceniza hoy, que ni siquiera pizca gozó alguna, de los amos no ingas privativo el ocio del amor y la sapiencia. [Oh, Cybernetic Fairy!, free us now With your electric brains and chaste antidote, From humanity’s horrid offices, Which are like infernal flaming brands Set ablaze in time inmemorial By the cruel henchman of the bonfires; hinder, oh lady, the swiftness with which the north wind so cold and furious beats against the altars, arise amidst the smoke of our body yesterday, which is ashes today, which could not even enjoy the briefest of moments of what belongs to our masters alone, the leisure of wisdom and of love (translated by Scott Weintraub)]

Luis Correa-Díaz University of Georgia (USA) http://www.rom.uga.edu/directory/luis-­correa-­diaz-­o Author: Luis Bravo + 20 artists Work: “Árbol veloZ,” multimedia CD-ROM in Spanish, English, and Portuguese, and a “book in traditional format” (1998) Link to work: Available only on CD-ROM Link to author: [ ]

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Biography:  Poet, essayist, critic, university professor, and performer, Luis Bravo (Montevideo, Uruguay, 1957) has published more than 11 works of poetry in the form of books and multimedia works, including: Puesto encima el corazón en llamas [On Top of the Heart in Flames] (1984), Lluvia [Rain] (1988), Gabardina a la sombra del laúd [Raincoat in the Shade of the Lute] (1989), Árbol veloZ [Swift Tree] (CD-ROM and book, 1998; 2007–09), Liquen [Lichen] (2003), Tarja (2004), and Tamudando [Tamudando] (performance on DVD, 2010). His 2012 book of criticism, Voz y palabra. Historia transversal de la poesía uruguaya (1950–1973) [Voice and Word: Across the History of Uruguayan Poetry (1950–1973)], received several awards. In 2012 he participated in the prestigious International Writing Program at the University of Iowa. Technical description of the work: “Árbol veloZ” aims to restore the performative and communal nature of poetry, which characterized the genre from the beginning. Making the most of the development of sophisticated tools of multimedia authorship, Bravo and twenty Uruguayan artists created a “comprehensive poetic spectacle” [“espectáculo poético integral”] (Bravo, “Introducción al formato del CD-ROM”), in which the traditional concept of poetry as canto—spoken words accompanied by musical instruments, where image and sound unite—results in an extremely visual and auditory work. “Árbol veloZ” uses digital media in the creation, production, and reception of the poems. Context + e-generation of the work: The multimedia CD-ROM in three languages, “Árbol veloZ,” is presented to users as an imaginary forest evocative of a “video game.” The project allows for reading the written poems in no particular order, to experiment with language in the space, and to enjoy the digital performance of the e-poems. The process of conversion of some written poems to e-poems results, as Bravo explains, from the “indissoluble” overlap of word and sound; sound is never “a mere backdrop” [“un mero telón de fondo”] (Bravo, “Introducción al formato del CD-ROM”), and in this way the e-poems become a new creation. Other poems can only exist in “the image-reality that cybernetic support offers” [“la imagorealidad que ofrece el soporte cibernético”] (Bravo p. 7); they are conceived and produced by digital means and don’t identify as written texts. “Árbol veloZ” belongs to the genre of multimedia poetry, since it includes images, video, and audio in the poems. In addition, it has characteristics of hypertextual poetry. The links don’t, however, give the CD-ROM users the freedom to participate in the creation of a poem by rearranging verses or words in a different order than they appear on the

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computer screen. By accessing a library bookshelf, users can click links and receive information about the titles of some poems, the location where others were composed, or the source of poetic inspiration. Also, they can decide how to experience the digital poetic spectacle depending on the paths that they take in the imaginary forest, the doors that they open in the big tree trunk, or the bridges that they decide to cross. “Árbol veloZ” belongs to the third generation of digital poetry, characterized by the use of multimedia elements, animation, and a certain interactivity. Still, it shares with the second generation the CD-ROM format, destined to be used on personal computers. E-poetics of the work: Starting with the letters in its title, “Árbol veloZ” emphasizes the evolution of the lyrical genre. It quickly runs through its phases, from “A” to “Z”: from spoken poetry to poetry collected in texts to digital poetry. Why is this “comprehensive poetic spectacle” in the form of a CD-ROM and a book? In a 2010 article I answer this question by focusing on the rapid evolution of digital technology that makes some of its creations obsolete and inaccessible. If the publication of a “traditionally formatted” book indeed addresses the uncertainty of poets that move from print poetry to digital poetry, it also shows how all new technology requires a different way of reading poetry. The book, which does not play the e-poems of the CD, cannot be read as a book independent of the CD-ROM, calling into question concepts of authorship (Bravo appears as the author of the book, but he is also part of the team that made the CD-ROM), originality, and the concept of definitive text—about which Jill Kuhnheim has asked: “Is there a definitive version here?” (162). Brief (e-) bibliography: Aguirre Molina, Roberto. “Entrevista a Luis Bravo. La música, las palabras: el espejismo y el silencio.” El Litoral [Santa Fe, Argentina] 5 March 1999: 4–5. Print. Bravo, Luis. Árbol veloZ (poemas 1990–1998) with CD-ROM. Montevideo: Ediciones Trilce, 1998. Print. Hayles, N. Katherine. Electronic Literature. New Horizons for the Literary. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2008. Print. Kuhnheim, Jill S. Spanish American Poetry at the End of the Twentieth Century. Textual Disruptions. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2004. Print.

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Olivera-Williams, María Rosa. “La nueva vanguardia, tecnología y ‘Árbol veloZ’ de Luis Bravo.” Correa-Díaz, Luis y Scott Weintraub, eds. Special dossier: “Latin American, Spanish & Portuguese Literatures in the Digital Age. New Technologies and the Literary.” Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies 14 (2010): 349–360. Print. María Rosa Olivera-Williams University of Notre Dame (USA) https://romancelanguages.nd.edu/people/faculty/ maria-­rosa-­olivera-­williams/ Author: Augusto de Campos Work: SOS (2000) from the Clip-poemas CD-ROM included with the book, Não (2003) Link to Works: http://www.augustodecampos.com.br/clippoemas.htm with Flash plug-in (expired on December 31, 2020); translated HTML5 versions will be available in 2023 in the Electronic Literature Lab collection (http://dtc-­wsuv.org/wp/ell/) Author Link: [ ]

Biographs: Augusto de Campos (São Paulo, 1931–) is a poet, translator, and music and literary critic. de Campos launched the avant-garde Concretismo movement in 1952 with Décio Pignatari and his brother, Haroldo de Campos. His poetics revolve around the union and harmony of form, verbiage, and sound elements. Having worked with media like holograms, neon, LED, and Flash video clips, de Campos has been a pioneer in poetic and visual experimentation and a monumental figure of Brazilian and Latin American (digital) poetics at large. Most of de Campos’ poetry works can be found in the anthologies: Viva Vaia (1979), Despoesia (1994), and Não (including a CDR of his Clip-poems), (2003).

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Technical description of the work: SOS is a visual and kinetic e-poem and Flash-compatible videoclip that is a transcreation1 of a print version of SOS from 1983. True to the tenets of Brazilian concretismo, SOS (2000) is a verbivocovisual 2 e-poem composed of movement, verbiage, and sound which are structurally and thematically interrelated and poetically inseparable. SOS has two video-clip versions with text and sound in either English or Portuguese. Context + e-generation of the work: The context of SOS as a clip-­ poem exemplifies how generations of electronic literature require maintenance, preservation, translation, and transcreation to remain visible to future readers and audiences. Originally,  de Campos’ Clip-poemas were accessible through a CD-ROM attached to a book collection titled Não (2003), and henceforth made available on the open Web with a Flash media plug-in. As a work of second-generation e-literature, SOS as a Flash-­ based clip-poema surfaced in the early 2000s (Y2K) during a pivotal era of technological panic revolving around programming bugs and technological obsolescence. Nearly 20 years later, the digital fabric that created the existence of SOS is in crisis. Adobe’s Flash Player is now blocked from running Flash content as of December 31, 2020, and now, a significant number of works of e-literature are facing either disappearance or reincarnation through alternate open standards like HTML5. SOS is an example of electronic literature that is being ushered from the second generation into the third generation through collaborative efforts to program, curate, and preserve digital works of art and literature for updated platforms across devices. The next iteration of Augusto de Campos’ Flash-based Clip-poemas (including SOS) is currently being migrated into HTML5 (with his permission) by the Aarea.co collective in Brazil. The new versions of the Clip-poemas appeared in a virtual exhibition online at Aarea.co in June 2021. The Electronic Literature Organization hosts several poems in their database in an effort to maintain and preserve these works for the next generations of e-literature. 1  ‘Transcreation’ is a term first coined by Haroldo de Campos, who described the process of translation as a creative and transformative act rather than an adaptive practice (Nóbrega, 2006: https://www.revistas.usp.br/clt/issue/view/4146). 2  Originally a Joycean term that was hyphenated as verbi-voco-visual, the Concretists condensed and incorporated the term, verbivocovisual in the poetics of Concretismo: “the realization of a dynamic whole, of indivisible dimensions, the mutually effective fusion of vocabular, enunciative and ocular constituents” (Perrone, 2007: https://poesiaconcreta. com.br/texto.php).

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E-poetics of the digital work: Against a black background, yellow words form a circular pattern that rotate slowly around a central axis labeled “sos” in a galaxy-like motion. Tightly interlinked, the sound, movement and verbiage of SOS are both unified and in tension. While the form of the clip-poema evokes a spiraling galaxy with a symmetrical and harmonic order, the verbiage in SOS expresses existential worry, disconnection, emptiness, disorder. The voice that narrates in the video clip recites the words in a linear fashion (from the most inner to outer circle) albeit with vocal distortions like echoes and dissonance, creating a sense of dilution, confusion, and conflict. With each outer layer, the words become shorter and further apart, appearing like an expansion that, if contracted, could only collapse back into the core of it all: sos. While the three letters, s-o-s, could refer to the expression “a sós” in Portuguese, which means “alone,” another interpretation of sos is the Morse code for S.O.S. or “Save Our Ship,” which is used to signal a vessel in distress. The reader/user is not compelled to choose a meaning based on language affiliation as de Campos often plays with translations and the constructions of words across contexts. As the central axis of a galaxy in motion, the word “sos” is an expression of loneliness as well as a coded cry for help, and vice versa. In the universe of SOS as a verbivocovisual e-poem, methodical deconstruction in spiral-like movement and existential crisis read in the verbiage and enunciated through distorted sound are polemics held in suspension by gravity and yet are able to contract and collapse in oneness. In the post-Flash era, SOS as a clip-poem is in crisis as it is no longer viewable/readable as it was created, and, for the moment, only exists as low-quality thumbnail without animation. When the user clicks on the thumbnail for SOS on http://www.augustodecampos.com.br/clippoemas.htm, the HTTP code, 404 (page not found error) message appears. Interestingly enough, the error message dialogues closely with SOS as an illustrated image of an astronaut that is floating away, untethered from their spaceship. The astronaut reminds the reader/user in a speech bubble: “It seems like this page went to space.”3 Albeit temporary, the Flash-­ expiration of de Campos’ SOS online is momentarily transcreated into a new visual poem communicating the loss and disconnection of code and expression. 404 is the new SOS: lost and alone in the void of digital obsolescence… for now. 3

 My translation from Portuguese to English.

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Brief (e-) bibliography: de Campos, Augusto. “Concrete Poetry: A Manifesto.” Original from 1958, Translated by John Tolman, Augusto De Campos: Textos, www. augustodecampos.com.br/concretepoet.htm. Flores, Leonardo. “Third Generation Electronic Literature,” Electronic Book Review, April 7, 2019, https://doi.org/10.7273/axyj-­3574. Perrone, Charles A. “Versatile Vanguard Vectors: from Visible Voices to Virtual Vortices in the Vamps, Versions, and Voyages of Brazilian Concrete Poetry.” Graphos, vol. 10, no. 2, 2008. Print. Shellhorse, Adam Joseph. “The Verbivocovisual Revolution: Anti-­ Literature, Affect, Politics, and World Literature in Augusto De Campos.” CR: The New Centennial Review, vol. 20, no. 1, 2020, pp. 147–184. Print. Katherine E. Bundy McGill University (Montréal, Canada) www.katherinebundy.com Author: Augusto de Campos Work: “cidadecitycité” (1999) Link to the work: http://www2.uol.com.br/augustodecampos/cidadecitycite.htm [link no longer functional] Link to the author’s webpage: [ ]

Biography: Augusto de Campos (São Paulo, 1931) was one of the founders of the Noigandres group, along with his brother, Haroldo, and Décio Pignatari. He has promoted the international movement of concrete poetry since the mid-1950s. His oeuvre encompasses not only poetry in a variety of formats (visual poems, voice and instrument recordings,

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artist books, holograms, videos, computer animation); he has also had a fruitful career as an essayist and translator. In 2015 he received the Pablo Neruda Ibero-American Poetry Award. Technical description of the work: This work consists of a “poem-­ clip” included in the book Não [No] (2003) by Augusto de Campos. The creation and production, as well as the voice, were done by the author, and the sound processing was done by his son, Cid Campos. André Vallias was in charge of the technical supervision. The text is a single, very long word that advances while some syllables appear intermittently, together with a reading by various voices. Context and e-generation of the work: According to the classification by Leonardo Flores, this piece is located on the border between the second and third generations of digital poetry. While its early circulation was on a CD-ROM accompanied by a book, until recently it was also available on the author’s webpage. Augusto de Campos began to experiment with digital graphics in the 1980s, in collaboration with the group Olhar Eletrônico. After acquiring a personal computer, he began to use it to create many of his new visual poems. In recent years he has continued his experimentation with interactive animation and webpage videos, many of which are available at http://www.erratica.com.br. E-poetics of the work: This “poem-clip” corresponds to a version of the poem “cidade” (1963), which, in its original version, was printed as a folded page over which the complete word was spread, formed by the juxtaposition of various words. This procedure (“portmanteau words”) was commonly used by concrete poets, and was inspired by Lewis Carroll and James Joyce, among others. The animated version also employs a lot of operations that were already envisioned at the start of this movement, such as the inclusion of colorful letters and the mutual relationship between visual and auditory materiality. Furthermore, in some ways this work fulfills the wish that Augusto de Campos expressed in 1953: “but luminous ones, or filmletters, whoever had them!” [“mas luminosos, ou filmletras, quem os tivera!”] Brief (e-) bibliography: Aguilar, Gonzalo. Poesía concreta brasileña: las vanguardias en la encrucijada modernista. Rosario: Beatriz Viterbo Editora, 2003. Print. Araújo, Ricardo. Poesia Visual. Vídeo Poesia. São Paulo: Editora Perspectiva, 1999. Print.

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Campos, Augusto de, Décio Pignatari, Haroldo de Campos. Teoria da poesia concreta. Textos críticos e manifestos 1950–1960. São Paulo: Ateliê Editorial, 2006. Print. Sterzi, Eduardo (org.). Do céu do future. Cinco ensaios sobre Augusto de Campos. São Paulo: Marco Editora, 2006. Print. Süssekind, Flor and Júlio Castañon Guimarães (orgs.). Sobre Augusto de Campos. Rio de Janeiro: 7Letras/Fundação Casa de Rui Barbosa, 2004. Print. Felipe Cussen Instituto de Estudios Avanzados, Universidad de Santiago de Chile https://usach.academia.edu/FelipeCussen Author: Rocío Cerón Work: Heredad [Inheritance], included in Sonic Bubbles, an album published by Subunda & Breakbeats (Mexico), released October 16, 2020 Link to work: [ ]

Link to author: [

]

Biography: Rocío Cerón (Mexico City, 1972) is a cultural facilitator, editor, teacher, essayist, and one of the most distinguished and multifaceted poets of her generation in Mexico. As a poet she has succeeded in

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creatively expanding her writing mission to other media, in combination or in dialogue with photographic image, collage, video, or sound exploration. Interested in growing the potential of her work beyond the page, Cerón is known for giving poetry readings in the form of multimedia performances or poetic actions in which she often collaborates with artists from other disciplines in different cities in Mexico and abroad. Her publications include Litoral [Coastal] (2001), Basalto [Basalt] (2002), Soma [2003], Apuntes para sobrevivir al aire [Tips to Survive the Air] (2005), Imperio [Empire] (2009), Tiento [Care] (2010), Diorama (2012), Anatomía del nudo. Obra reunida (2002–2015)] [Anatomy of the Knot. Collected Works (2002–2015)] (2015), Nudo Vortex [Vortex Knot] (2015), Borealis (2016), La rebelión, o mirar el mundo hasta pulverizarse los ojos [Rebellion, or Watching the World Until Your Eyes Disintegrate] (2016), Materia oscura [Dark Material] (2018), and Spectio (2019), in addition to audio works on CDs released between 2003 and 2008 by the Motín Poeta [Poet Riot] collective, of which she is a co-founder and member. Her most recent album, available online for download, is Sonic Bubbles (2020). Her works have been translated into eight languages. Technical description of the work: Heredad (duration: 3  minutes 41 seconds) is the seventh track on the album Sonic Bubbles, one of Cerón’s experimental sound creations. Her voice, recorded in analog format, was electronically processed by the author herself with the program Ableton. The concept, voice, and sounds are all by Cerón. The postproduction and mastering were done by Fabián Ávila Elizalde. The track can be downloaded in high quality as MP3 or FLAC, among other formats. The project received the support of the Sistema Nacional de Creadores de Arte de México. Context + e-generation of the work: In addition to the 11 sound pieces on the album, of which Heredad is one, Cerón also presents other performances and poetic actions that are site-specific. Some are documented and edited in video form on the webpage of the author. These projects are distinct from the sound-only pieces because they involve projections of animated digital art and/or are designed in a multi-channel format, for example, using between 18 and 24 mobile stations with pre-­ recorded material electronically processed by Cerón. Each device is entrusted by Cerón, almost ritualistically, to a member of the public who, beyond being a listener, also becomes part of the piece, as a resonant body that moves and interacts with other bodies, as well as with the space, for the duration of the piece. In this way a sound fabric is woven, unique and special each time. With these distinct projects, Cerón wishes to create not

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only “multidimensional and plurisensorial objects,” but also to provoke a particular experience of listening that is synesthetic and attentive, an “observant listening,” in which both the vocal enunciation and the other sound components (object noises or electronically processed sounds) lead to an estrangement upon finding themselves dislocated from their sound origins. Nonetheless, in this re-sounding from other bodies and in other spaces, they are rediscovered and revalued as new forms. E-poetics of the work: Heredad is part of a “written project of sound and visual poetry” which has resulted in diverse materialities that form a trilogy: La Observante [The Observant One], La Observante Toca [The Observant One Plays], and La Observante Escucha [The Observant One Listens]. In the latter, the piece is presented as an exploration and a process capable of leading to a recognition linked to the sound experience that is evoked by physical, presential places, but also intimate places, from memory, all of which could implicate this nominalization of the verb heredar [to inherit], which appears as a neologism in the title and in this way offers a key for the listener. As an “aural miniature,” Heredad presents an encapsulated, suspended universe, as fragile as it is volatile, capable of illuminating and delighting us with its authentic condition as a sonic bubble that invites contemplation through the act of listening. A listening that is also, according to its author, a “gathering of noises, textures, voices, and sound anchors that occur in certain spaces. These poems-voices-sounds and their mechanisms and fluctuations open other readings of the world.” Carried by the rhythm and by what seems to be the breath of one or various vibrating bodies, Cerón recites numbered verses, sometimes taken from her poetry collections, combining them improvisationally with other elements to generate the impression of distinct textual and sound planes. The poetic-sound occurrences, which initially seem isolated, reappear as echoes and resonances of one another. Their recurrence varies in order to interact in new ways and to generate distinct atmospheres or episodes, as well as diverse emotional states within the same sound flow. The vocal enunciation, which is modulated by changes in speed and variations in emphasis, is also manipulated electronically, mixed, duplicated, distorted, as if in these multiple appearances was the survival of a body made of impressions and memories that alternate, juxtapose, and dialogue among themselves, in a kind of acoustic testimony filled with colorful experiences, where it doesn’t matter who is speaking or who is being addressed, but rather the only thing that matters is perceiving the condition and nature of these reverberations. With these kinds of projects, Cerón moved from the

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practice of reading aloud and collaborating over many years with other sound artists toward individual creation, thanks to the fact that the current dominant sound editing techniques allow continued experimentation and expansion of the poetic text, as a sensitive object, beyond writing. Brief (e-) bibliography: Cerón, Rocío. “La Observante Toca-Experimentación Sonora.” El Rizo Robado 5 (2020). [Video presenting a session of poetry and sound experimentation organized by the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Hidalgo.] http://www.elrizorobado.com/textos/2020_05_jul/2020_ 05_ceron_sonora.html. González Aktories, Susana. “Cerrar los ojos—abrirlos: visiones poéticas de Rocío Cerón en 3D.” Anatomia del nudo. Obra reunida (2002–2015), by Rocío Cerón. Mexico: CONACULTA, Secretaría de Cultura de Colima e Intersticios, 2015. 374–390. Print. ———. “¿Y si te lo dijera al oído?: acción poética en ‘Persona’ como forma extendida de la literatura contemporánea.” Desafíos y Debates para el Estudio de la Literatura Contemporánea. Christian Sperling, Daniel Samperio Jiménez, Gabriel Ramos, and Alberto Rodríguez, eds. Mexico City: UAM, 2021. 497–518. Print. Salomón, Sabina. “Poesía y Performance: espacios creados a partir del contacto entre cuerpo, voz, objetos, poesía y tecnología.” Badebec 4/7 (2014): 319–337. Print. Susana González Aktories Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México Author: Carlos Cociña Work: Plagio del afecto [Plagarism of Affect] Link to the work: [ ]

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Link to author’s webpage: [ ]

Biography: Carlos Cociña (Concepción, Chile, 1950) is a poet and editor. His first book, Aguas servidas [Wastewater] (1981), is considered one of the essential books of Chilean poetry of the 1980s. While he was a student, he directed the literary journal Fuego Negro [Black Fire], and later Envés [Reverse]. During the 1990s he directed the publishing house Intemperie [Outdoors] with Andrés Ajens, and he has participated in various independent projects, such as the works of visual and written poetry of the Foro de Escritores de Chile [Chilean Writer’s Forum]. In 2014, he received the Santiago Municipal Literature Award in the Poetry category for his book El margen de la propia vida [The Margin of Life Itself]. Technical description of the work: Plagio del afecto is a poetry collection written gradually between 2003 and 2005, at which time Cociña finished the 52 entries that make up the final version. Plagio del afecto was written starting with appropriated material (theoretical texts, interviews, and colloquial phrases) which is recombined and interspersed with new phrases or words. Its visual aspect is simple, almost minimalist. It is housed on a website designed and programmed by Boris Mejías C. Tchorix. The web design was done by Ediciones del Temple. Its homepage provides information regarding the process of the construction and editing of the book. By clicking on a link that says “comenzar” [“start”], the user accesses another page where all of the “affections” can be read in any order desired. Context + e-generation of the work: Plagio del afecto was published in a piecemeal manner on the author’s webpage, http://www.poesiacero. cl, between 2003 and 2005. It was a book in progress: once Cociña finished a new poem and decided that it should form part of the collection, it was uploaded to the platform. In this way, over three years, the direction of the book was in constant flux. Five years after the last poem was added to the site, Plagio del afecto was published in print by Ediciones Tácitas (Chile, 2010). Just as in its web version, the printed book consists of a

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total of 52 poems or units, of which 19 are written and 33 remain empty. The digital aspect of this poetry collection can be appreciated in both its compositional process as well as its reception. Due to its design and programming, Plagio del afecto can be understood as “interactive poetry” (Flores). In order to access the content of the book, the user must press the “start” button on the first page. Then the user arrives at the page where the list of all of the “affections,” or poems, appears in a vertical column to the right side. To the extent to which the reader activates the different links, the text of the “affections” appears on the left side of the screen. They can read the poems as many times as they want and in whatever order they want. In contrast to the print version, users cannot “read” the empty poems; they are replaced by three dots. In the lower part of the screen, with the same minimalist design found throughout the site, are the links “portada” [“title page”] and “home.” E-poetics of the digital work: As the title of the book suggests, these poems were composed with found material, which is to say, phrases or verses that were not “originally” written by the author. For the most part, they are scientific or theoretical texts, interviews and even what seems to be sentences heard in passing. In this sense, the author questions the demand for originality that carries so much weight in the world of poetry (Perloff, 2010). One of the most noteworthy aspects of Carlos Cociña’s writing is, precisely, the uneasiness that is produced by its cold character and restrained and distanced tone. Although the “plagiarized” materials in this book belong to a field that seems distant from literature, at times the poems come to produce a tremendously attractive and even moving effect, strange though it may seem. In Plagio del afecto, the alienation that is generated in the reading is fundamental when contradictions are perceived in a kind of language that is supposed to be a priori unquestionable, true, and even pedagogical. Brief (e-) bibliography: Ayala, Matías. “Reseña: Carlos Cociña. Lo impersonal.” 60 Watts. April 2014. Print. Cussen, Felipe. “’Desde el timpano hacia adentro’, entrevista a Carlos Cociña.” Revista Chilena de Literatura. Sección Miscelánea. November 2010. Web. http://www.revistaliteratura.uchile.cl/index.php/RCL/ article/viewFile/9050/9009. ———. “Presentación aleatoria de El margen de la propia vida de Carlos Cociña.” Paniko. December 2013. Web. https://paniko.cl/presentacionaleatoria-­de-­el-­margen-­de-­la-­propia-­vida-­de-­carlos-­cocina/.

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Folch Maass, Nicolás. “Dos poetas penquistas: Carlos Cociña y Tomás Harris.” Atenea 506. 2012: 187–203. Print. Weintraub, Scott. Latin American Technopoetics: Scientific Explorations in New Media. London: Routledge, 2018. Print. Megumi Andrade Kobayashi Universidad Finis Terrae (Chile) http://independent.academia.edu/MegumiAndradeKobayashi Author: Luis Correa-Díaz Work: clickable poem@s (2010–2015) Links to work: [ ]

[

]

Link to author’s homepage: [ ]

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Biography: Luis Correa-Díaz (Chile, 1961) is a Corresponding Member of the Academia Chilena de la Lengua [Chilean Academy of Language], poet, and professor of Latin American digital literature at the University of Georgia (USA). In addition to many articles in journals from Europe, the United States, and Latin America, he is the author and/or editor of various books of criticism, most recently Novissima Verba: huellas digitales y cibernética en la poesía latinoamericana  [Novissima versa: digital footprints and cybernetics in Latin American Poetry] (RIL Editores/ Academia Chilena de la Lengua, 2020). His books of poetry are: clickable poem@s: the hyper love-songs by lcd (2016), Cosmological Me (2010), Mester de soltería [Minstrel of Bachelorhood] (2006 and 2008), Diario de un poeta recién divorciado [Diary of a Recently Divorced Poet] (2005), Divina Pastora [Divine Shepherdess] (1998), Rosario de actos de habla [Rosary of Speech Acts] (1993), Ojo de buey [Porthole] (1993), Bajo la pequeña música de su pie [Under the Little Music of his Foot] (1990). His poems can be read in the Letras.s5 archive. Technical description of the work: The clickable poem@s are made up of poems that link the written word to the audiovisual. There are about 23 poems, among which we find the following 3: “iDA—en un i-mode slightly tántrico” [“iDA—in a slightly tantric i-mode”], “Clea’s tattoos—a poem shared t/facebook,” and “the link.” These poems play with the idea that the reader must “complete” the poem themselves by inviting them to open links (mostly videos on YouTube). Context + e-generation of the work: The clickable poem@s are works that are (best) read on a computer screen, although they have a textual dimension that is self-sufficient to a certain extent. They can be classified as hypertextual interactive poetry, because they are poems composed of/ by links—connected with the text—that ask the reader to activate them. In this sense, the poems are built like a network of meanings and connections that the reader must assemble. These poems show a historical moment in which written culture—as well as the forms associated with it—has gradually lost its dominant place. The poem “iDA—en un i-mode slightly tántrico” exemplifies this even at a meta-literary/cultural/technological level. More and more, the orality, the visual, and the aural question this dominant status through their strong presence in digital culture. Digital writing and reading are hypertextual, discontinuous, and segmented practices; they are read in jumps or leaps, with the reader going from link to link— isn’t this what we do when we navigate the Internet?

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E-poetics of the work: The h-poems that comprise clickable poem@s refer, in different ways, to the possibilities that the digital world opens to us. The concept of “clickable” effectively points to the interaction that is necessary for a digital poem to make sense. The reader of electronic texts must know how to play with them and must run their codes. The aforementioned poems generate an esthetic experience based on the interaction of the reader. In the case of the clickable poem@s, the esthetic experience is related to a performative act in which the reader “plays” at being an author, by participating in the exercise of completing a puzzle. On the other hand, in these poems the poet is a hacker who transforms the literary task with hyperlinks. They appropriate available material on the Internet and display their work on the Internet so that the readers-players can read it, take part in it, comment on it, and expand it. This is the case, for example, of “the link,” a poem that reflects on the links that connect us. The predominance of alphabetical writing is interrupted by the presentation to the reader of two links that carry them to explore the announcement of the discovery of a fossil and its virtual recreation, since its diachronic recreation in the text has been virtual. The reader is invited to leave the poem and establish connections outside of it so that this virtuality remains completed with the visual in 3D, in such a way that this poem aims for (although not strictly speaking) a kind of textual-virtual reality. Lastly, the “author-hacker” appropriates the available elements on the Internet, producing poetics that experiment with different languages and that transgress the predominance of the written text as much as the possibility of the existence of intellectual property rights associated with the use of videos and images available on the Internet. Brief (e-) bibliography: Correa-Díaz, Luis. “La poesía cibernética latinoamericana (todavía) in print: un recorrido desde la década de los años 50 y 60 hasta finales de la primera década del 2000.” New Readings 13 (2013): 57–73. Web, July 2015. http://letras.mysite.com/lcor071213.html. ——— y Scott Weintraub. “Literatura latinoamericana, española y portuguesa en la era digital.” Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies 14 (2010–2011): 147–365. Print. Cussen, Felipe. “Poesía experimental: algunas propuestas críticas.” Experimental Poetics and Aesthetics no. 0, December 2010. Web, July 2015. http://www.letras.mysite.com/fc201210.html.

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Flores, Leonardo. “Digital Poetry.” Ryan, Marie-Laure, Lori Emerson, and Benjamin J.  Robertson, eds. The Johns Hopkins Guide to Digital Media. Baltimore, Maryland: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014. 155–161. Print. Gainza, Carolina. “Campos literarios emergentes: literatura digital en América Latina.” Revista de Estudios Avanzados IDEA-USACH no. 22 (December 2014): 29–43. Web, July 2015. https://www.revistas. usach.cl/ojs/index.php/ideas/article/view/1871. Carolina Gainza C. Universidad Diego Portales (Chile) http://comunicacionyletras.udp.cl/literatura/profesores/ Author: Luis Correa-Díaz Work: metaverse. Collection of poem@s—print poems complemented by online content published by Ærea \ carménère in 2021 Link to the work: For the print book [ ]

[

For the concrete Virtual Reality (VR) poem, see the exhibition archive: ]

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Other URLs are available as live links in web versions and as QR codes in the print volume. Author’s webpage: [ ]

Biography: Luis Correa-Díaz (Santiago de Chile, 1961) is a poet, member of the Academia Chilena de la Lengua, Real Academia de Ciencias, Bellas Letras y Nobles Artes de Córdoba, Spain, and professor at the University of Georgia (USA). Correa Díaz’s poetry collections include Americana-lcd (2021), Los Haikus de Gus (2021), clickable poem@s (2016), impresos en 3D (2018), Cosmological Me (2017), Diario de un poeta recién divorciado (2020), and others. Technical Description of the Work: metaverse is a collection of print poems complemented by QR codes leading to external sites like YouTube videos: poem@s. Individual texts appeared on the web between 2017 and 2020 in venues like Círculo de poesía, Revista Electrónica de Literatura, Revista Altazor, and others. In contrast to their print counterparts, the poem@s on the web are complemented by live URLs leading to external sites. Additionally, “poema-drone” is also a concrete virtual reality poem made with Unity. In this instance, the reader floats around and through individual stanzas hovering in the sky of the virtual museum Nuevos mundos posibles/Brave New Mesh, curated by Mexican digital artist Luis Javier Rodríguez. All instances of the poems in metaverse invite a different kind of interactivity. Some, like the web poem@s, ask the reader to follow links by clicking on them. Others, like “poema-drone” in VR, are exploratory, objectual, and embodied. In print, the interactivity of the poem@s involves the handling of two media objects. Altogether, the distinct instances of the metaverse poem@s signal the poems’ other material lives. They make the page parallel to the screen. Context and E-Generation of the Work: There is a long tradition of hybrid, print-digital, literary works stretching as far back as the mid-1980s.

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metaverse, along with other works by Correa-Díaz, are part of a canon of Latin American writers working at the intersection of page and screen like Luis Bravo’s Árbol VeloZ (1998), Belén Gache’s El libro del fin del mundo (2002), Giselle Beiguelman’s O livro depois do livro (2003), Carlos Cociña’s Plagio de afecto (2010), and Vivian Abenshushan’s Permanente obra negra (2019). This experimental authorial practice signals a series of affectations to literary sensitivities that relocate the print book in a larger media and poetic ecology. E-poetics of the Work: Over the last decade, Correa-Díaz’s poetry has created a poetic space of intersections between human and machine languages; between poetic traditions and user-generated contents on sites like YouTube; between poetry and technoscience; between print pages and screens; and, ultimately, between a virtual world and a physical one. metaverse is that poetic space where the boundary separating these realms ceases to exist. In metaverse, Correa-Díaz explores how the proliferation of technoscientific advances, the explosion in available information, and the popularity of digital media have elicited shifts in human sensitivity and imagination. Thus, the (social, commercial, affective, political, and) poetic space created by Correa-Díaz does not stage a possible future, but one we already inhabit. The material poetics of metaverse are equally important through the strategy of pairing online contents to poems: the poem@. The presence of machine language on the print page signals the posthumanist dimension of the poem@s, poetry that is read by both human and machine readers. Brief (e-) bibliography: Correa-Díaz, Luis. Novissima Verba. Huellas digitales y cibernéticas en la poesía latinoamericana. Santiago: RIL Editores, 2019. Print. ——— and Scott Weintraub. Poesía y poéticas digitales/electrónicas/tecnos/ new-media en América Latina: definiciones y exploraciones. Bogotá: Universidad Central de Colombia. 2016. http://www.ucentral.edu. ­ co/editorial/catalogo/poesia-­poeticas-­digitales. Gainza C., Carolina. “Literatura chilena en digital: mapas, estéticas y conceptualizaciones.” Revista Chilena de Literatura 94 (2016): 233–56. Crossref, https://doi.org/10.4067/S0718-­22952016000300012. Ortega, Élika. “Poem@s, páginas y pantallas: entering the metaverse.” metaverse. Santiago. RIL Editores/Ærea-Carménère, 2021. 15–20. Print.

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Élika Ortega University of Colorado Boulder (USA) https://elikaortega.net Author: Belén Gache Work: Góngora Wordtoys (2011) Link to work: [ ]

Link to author’s homepage: [ ]

Biography: Belén Gache is a pioneer in experimental literature in Argentina and Spain. To date, she has published a wide variety of print and electronic works in various genres including, but not limited to, electronic poetry, literary blogging, videopoetry, and hypertext fiction. Among her works of electronic poetry are Manifiestos Robot [Robot Manifestos] (2009), in which auditory poems are generated through a system that searches for keywords on the Internet, and then verbalizes them using pre-recorded phonemes; and Radikal Karaoke (2010), described by Gache as a “grouping of poems that appropriate the rhetoric of political propaganda” [“conjunto de poesías que se apropian de la retórica de la propaganda política”], which combines texts, images, videos, sounds, and effects generated by the user.

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Technical description of the work: Gache describes Góngora Wordtoys (2011) as “interactive digital poetry” [“poesía digital interactiva”]. This is not a simple e-book, in which a static text is represented on the screen, but rather an interactive book in which, with Flash, each poem is interactive and dynamic. The book includes five poems, each one dialoguing with an element or excerpt from the Solitudes [Soledades] by Spanish Baroque poet Luis de Góngora. Gache’s poems remix Góngora’s texts through visualizations, animations, sounds, and interactions with the reader-user. Context + e-generation of the work: Gache’s work is characterized by the intertextual game that she establishes with genres, authors, and pre-­ existing texts, all of which are put into dynamic relation with digital technologies. One of the most innovative elements of her poetic practice is the subtle negotiation that she establishes between the potential of digital technologies on one hand, and the experimental formats offered by pre-­ digital literary movements on the other. This negotiation can be clearly seen in Góngora Wordtoys, which plays with Góngora’s words and the possibilities (and limitations) of digital technology. The five poems that comprise Góngora Wordtoys are “Dedicatory Spiral” [“Dedicatoria espiral”], in which the dedicatory text of Góngora’s Solitudes is presented in a spiral, animated form; “A Lot of Spring in a Little Space” [“En breve espacio mucha primavera”], which takes its title from line 339 of the Second Solitude and presents the text by way of pop-up windows; “Delights of Parnassus” [“Delicias del Parnaso”] invites us to recreate the verses of the Solitudes in an interactive game; “The Pilgrim’s Cry” [“El llanto del peregrino”], in which we can move an avatar that walks through a text composed of the words of the pilgrim in the Second Solitude; and “The Art of Falconry” [“El arte de la cetrería”], which uses various lines of the Second Solitude (from 758 onward), and puts them in the mouths of multicolored, animated birds. E-poetics of the work: In these poems, Gache establishes clear but complex relationships between modern digital technology and Baroque poetry. For example, in “A Lot of Spring in a Little Space,” the use of hotlinks and pop-up windows to draw shocking or incomprehensible connections between words resembles the Gongoristic technique of catachresis. In this way, the Gongoristic techniques that Gache mentions and admires in the preface of each poem find their parallel in contemporary techno-literary experimentation: the complex Baroque images become contemporary mash-up; hyperbaton becomes spirals animated by Flash; catachresis is found in hotlinking; elusive meaning is represented now through chains of

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lexias. Despite all this, however, Gache doesn’t present us with digital technologies as an improved version of what the Baroque poet did; rather, she invites us to think not only about the possibilities but also the limitations of these technologies. Gache’s poetics, or perhaps better put, Gache’s poetic game, shows us that the supposed “novelties” of the digital era— such as the hyperlink, visualization, the mash-­up—have their roots in a long-standing and pre-digital tradition of literary experimentation. Brief (e-) bibliography: Borràs Castanyer, Laura. “From ‘Words, Words, Words’ to ‘Birds, Birds, Birds’: Literature Between the Representation and the Presentation.” Journal of Writing in Creative Practice 4:1 (2011): 107–120. Print. Gache, Belén. Escrituras nomades: del libro perdido al hipertexto. Gijón: Ediciones Trea, 2006. Print. Pérez López, María Ángeles. “Literatura en la edad tecnológica: Belén Gache y la ‘utopía digital.’” Letras y bytes: escrituras y nuevas tecnologías. Noguerol, Francisca, María Ángeles Pérez López and Vega Sánchez Aparicio, eds. Kassel: Reichenberger, 2015. Print. Taylor, Claire. “From Macondo to Macon.doc: Contemporary Latin American Hypertext Fiction.” Taylor, Claire and Thea Pitman, eds. Latin American Identity in Online Cultural Production. London, Routledge, 2013. 84–114. Print. Claire Taylor University of Liverpool, UK https://www.liverpool.ac.uk/languages-­c ultures-­a nd-­f ilm/staff/ claire-­taylor/ Author: Omar Gancedo Work: IBM (1966) Link to the work: [ ]

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Biography: Omar Gancedo (La Pampa, Argentina, 1937) is a painter, wood engraver, poet, and anthropologist whose career unfolded in the city of La Plata, Argentina. At the beginning of the 1960s, he was a member of the Grupo de Elefantes (the Elephants Group; a group of young poets associated with visual arts; the first to undertake poetic street actions in La Plata) and the Grupo Sí (the Yes Group; informal visual artists). He was also part of the initial group of editors of the journal Diagonal Cero [Diagonal Zero], under the direction of Edgardo Antonio Vigo. Technical description of the work: IBM is a series of three perforated IBM cards with 80 columns each. Perforator model 534 and Card Interpreter were the hardware and software used to make them. Each card includes a poem encoded in the perforations, as well as its transcription printed by the Card Interpreter in the middle horizonal space. The series was published in Diagonal Cero journal no. 20 (La Plata, December 1966, pp. 15–18). Context + e-generation of the work: IBM by Omar Gancedo is considered to be part of the first generation of digital poetry. At the time of its composition, the genre of digital poetry mainly consisted of poems generated by algorithms and printed on paper. This series occupies a somewhat marginal place in the genre, since although the poems arise from the perforation of the cards and their subsequent decoding by the Card Interpreter, it is not certain that the manual perforation of the cards was the product of a prior algorithm that had generated the coordinates. Even so, the context of its emergence is linked to the first appearance of large- and medium-sized computers in companies and state institutions. For example, in 1961, Clementina, the first computer in Argentina—a Mercury model computer from the British company Ferranti, with only 5KB of RAM—occupied a length of 18 meters in Pavilion I in University City of the Universidad de Buenos Aires, where South America’s first program of study in computer science would be established two years later. Additionally, IBM’s Card Interpreters were updated to be able to print the decoding of the perforations over the card itself in 1966, the same year of production of this short series of poems. E-poetics of the work: The IBM series is part of the field of experimental technopoetics that brings together the worlds of calculation, programming, and chance. It uses what was, at the time, a cutting-edge technology in information management in order to install a certain poetic politics of diversion. The brief introductory text that precedes the poems/ cards maintains that “automatic combinations of the reflective act,

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translating emotional states and a visual location” [“combinaciones automáticas de acto ‘reflejo’ traduciendo estados emotivos y ubicación visual”] were used for the perforation, and that “panels of controls with random programming” [“paneles de controles con programación al azar”] were used for the decoding. In this way, the perforation of the cards assumes the tone of automatic writing on the part of a subject/poet who operates randomly and “irrationally” on material belonging to the world of the rational computation of information. After verifying the translation that appears printed on the card, we find that if one employs the code used for the IBM model 534 perforator [Extended Binary Coded Decimal Interchange (EBCDIC)], the printed text corresponds to the perforations—so it is not entirely clear in what sense there was (or was not) “random programming” of the Card Interpreter’s control panels. In any case, the encounter between calculation and chance that drives the work can be read in relation to another encounter happening between the world of information technology, which was starting to redefine daily life for people living under transnational capitalism, and the tribal world in extinction, as referred to in the three poems. Thus, the text that closes the series says: BARTUK TARATUM DE TAMBOR DE INDIOS WUE MUEREN BARATUM TUM T. Brief (e-) bibliography: Bugnone, Ana. “Poesía descentrada en los sesenta: ‘El Grupo de los Elefantes.’” Boletín de Arte 13:13 (2013): 77–81. September 12, 2015. Web. http://sedici.unlp.edu.ar/handle/10915/34575. Delgado, Lucas. “Clementina, la primera computadora en la Argentina.” Portal Educar, Ministerio de Educación, Presidencia de la Nación. Web. http://www.educ.ar/sitios/educar/recursos/ver?id=118069. Funkhouser, Christopher T. Prehistoric Digital Poetry. An Archeology of Forms, 1959–1995. Tuscaloosa, Alabama: The University of Alabama Press, 2007. Print. Vigo, Edgardo Antonio. “Omar Gancedo.” Revista Diagonal Cero (1964). Print. Claudia Kozak Universidad de Buenos Aires-CONICET/UNTREF (Argentina) https://ludion.org/bios.php?autor_id=19 Authors: Guillermo Gómez-Peña and Rafael Lozano-Hemmer Work: Tech-illa Sunrise (.txt dot con Sangrita) (2001)

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Links to the authors: Rafael Lozano-Hemmer— [ ]

[

Guillermo Gómez-Peña— ]

[

Link to the work: Tech-illa Sunrise (.txt dot con Sangrita)— ]

Technical description of the work: Tech-illa Sunrise (.txt dot con Sangrita) (2001) is a performance text/manifesto by electronic installation artist Rafael Lozano-Hemmer and performance artist and writer Guillermo Gómez-Peña. Both identify as “post-Mexicans” at the beginning of the text: Lozano-Hemmer lives and works in Canada and Gómez-­ Peña in the United States. It combines prose and free verse and plays with

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the threat of “brown” Latin American contamination of white Euro-­ America in the context of networked digital technologies. Printed out it is about six pages long, in six sections. Free verse is most in evidence in the final section. Context + e-generation of the work: Although Gómez-Peña is predominantly a performance artist, he is also widely credited as the author of “experimental poetry” and he often defines his own performance texts as “performance poems.” In terms of their experimental nature, the most salient linguistic feature of his work is the on-going determination to blur the boundaries between English, Spanish, and other languages besides, as he simultaneously explores the blurring of all sorts of other boundaries in the subject matter of his texts. Gómez-Peña’s work, therefore, does not strictly fall within any genealogy of digital poetry or the wider field of electronic literature—it can be printed out at the click of a button and, in the case of Tech-Illa Sunrise, its presence on La Pocha Nostra’s website is purely archival. Highlighted section headings are nothing more than that—they offer no embedded links to other lexia, nor alternative paths for the reader to select. Nevertheless, Gómez-Peña’s work is hugely important as a counterpoint to digital poetry per se in its determination to articulate a contestatory Latin/x American position with respect to all sorts of digital technologies, most importantly the Internet. Tech-Illa Sunrise, for example, has also been reprinted in several other print journals and anthologies in recent years as testimony to the text’s thematic importance. Despite not being classifiable as electronic literature itself, Tech-Illa Sunrise has now been “remixed” in a retro hypermedia format by Chicano transdisciplinary artist Salvador Barajas as Tech-Illa Sunrise: Un/A Remix (2009). This new work arguably goes beyond simple remediation of the original text and pushes it into the realm of electronic literature proper. Barajas explains that he aimed to rework the original text “in the style of a first generation hypertext” (i.e. early third-generation digital poetry in Leonardo Flores’ taxonomy), “with a de-colonial lime twist.” E-poetics of the digital work: In terms of its poetics, Tech-Illa Sunrise is consistent with Gómez-Peña’s desire to blur the boundaries between English and Spanish, this time also playing with the lexicon of user-friendly computer interfaces and the graphics of computer coding. Thematically, the performance text covers many of the same topics that appear in Gómez-Peña’s much re-edited manifesto-like essay, “The Virtual Barrio @ The Other Frontier; or, The Chicano Interneta” (1995–1997). It

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reinvents Mexicans as the original technophiles, blends the Latin American discourse of mestizaje with that of cyborgism via references to “the Latino Frankenstein” and other hybrid figures, and it challenges the standard utopianist conceptualization of “cyberspace” that is purportedly raceless but tacitly white and anglophone, arguing that, “El ciberespacio es café, ni blanco ni negro, remember.” In Tech-Illa Sunrise Gómez-Peña and Lozano-Hemmer articulate the menace of the “brownification” of cyberspace via the simulated performance of viral infections (“QuetZalcua82L*l” or “the Mexican Bug,” in Section V) and the description in Section II of an unhelpful service provider called Lupita (“the real motherboard, la Gran Coatlicue Digital, la Matrix Chola”) who is out to get unsuspecting Anglo Internet users (cast as spurned would-be lovers) and “reverse engineer [their] ass[es].” In this way the presence of Mexicans and other Latin/x Americans in cyberspace is conceived of as dangerous, infectious, and polluting. It is this more self-possessed and deliberately challenging virality seen in Tech-Illa Sunrise, the title itself undoubtedly an ironic nod to the 1991 mutating Tequila computer virus, that explicitly challenges mainstream US stereotypes of Latinidad and their contemporary “viral” global dissemination, and that thus offer the best expression of a messy, unsettling, and critical form of “viral latinidad” (Beasley Murray 2000). Brief (e-) bibliography: Barajas, Salvador. “Tech-illa Sunrise: Un/a Remix.” The New River: A Journal of Digital Writing and Art (Fall 2009). Web: http://www. cddc.vt.edu/journals/newriver/09Fall/barajas/alerta/Index. htm#sthash.p3RhbxUD.dpuf. Beasley-Murray, Jon. “Latin American Studies and the Global System.” The Companion to Latin American Studies. Ed. Philip Swanson. London: Arnold, 2003. 222–38. Print. Foster, Thomas. “Cyber-Aztecs and Cholo-Punks: Guillermo Gómez-­ Peña’s Five-Worlds Theory. PMLA, 117:1 (2002): 43–67. Print. McGahan, Christopher L.  Chapter 2: “Re-Playing ‘Racial Knowledge’ and Cybercultural Subjectivity: Guillermo Gómez-Peña and Roberto Sifuentes’ Temple of Confessions, Public Opinion Polling, and the Cultural Politics of Internet Identity Play.” Racing Cyberculture: Minoritarian Art and Cultural Politics on the Internet. New  York: Routledge, 2008. 47–84. Print.

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Taylor, Claire, and Thea Pitman. Latin American Identity in Online Cultural Production. New York: Routledge, 2013. Print. Thea Pitman University of Leeds, UK https://ahc.leeds.ac.uk/languages/staff/109/professor-­thea-­pitman Author: Lucia Grossberger Morales (Catavi, Bolivia, 1952) Work: Sangre Boliviana (1997) Link to the work:

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Link to the author’s webpage:

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Technical description of the work: The web version of the original CD-ROM titled “Sangre Boliviana” reproduces the cover of the original work, which depicts a Virgen de Guadalupe de Sucre with rays that point to a menu of six options: “Cholera ’92,” “La Mesa” “Mamitalla,” “Emigrating,” “Palabritas,” and “Catavi ’89.” The web version offers most of the same links, with three main variations: instead of “La Mesa” there is a link called “The Dream;” it adds two additional options: “Gringa” and “About.” All links navigate interactive options that include images, an “arcade game,” botanical descriptions, historical facts, and visual and written poems. Most segments include an explanation by the author at the bottom of the page.

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Context + e-generation of the work: Conceived as a computer-based work and originally published as a CD-ROM, Sangre Boliviana clearly belongs to the First Generation of e-lit. This is also true due to the focus of this generation primarily on the multimedia over the textual (Funkhouser). Leonardo Flores classifies pre-Web works as First Generation as well, which informs (while it also transcends), Grossberger Morales’ multimedia piece. The fact that Grossberger Morales is a computer pioneer, having coauthored Designers Toolkit (1982) and AppleVisions (1987), both published/distributed by Apple Computer, Inc. (Steve Wozniak, inventor of the Apple II computer, wrote the foreword for the latter), makes Grossberger Morales particularly relevant in the realm of electronic literature. In conversation with Judy Malloy and Anna Cuey, Grossberger Morales explains that she co-created these tools to be able to make interactive computer art, producing born digital art-lit since the early 1980s. Grossberger Morales’ digital works evolved into new options and platforms over the years, such as kinetic poetry and Augmented Reality, often basing her creations and installations on her Latin American and Andean roots. Sangre Boliviana in particular spans almost a decade in its production as a CD-ROM, and the story told, according to the author, refers as much to her story as to “the story of the medium” she used. In her description of this project on Weaving Art with Computers, Grossberger Morales expands the production of Sangre Boliviana to 16 years (1986–2002), detailing the evolution of the project within the evolution of the technologies involved, thus emphasizing her assertion that the story told is also “the story of the personal computer” (17). E-poetics of the digital work: Sangre Boliviana, as a CD-ROM, recounts two stories in a variety of multimedia options. First, there is the story based on the author’s fractured sense of identity as a Bolivian child who moved to the United States with her family while fleeing the Bolivian Revolution, and who returned briefly as a teenager to a country in the middle of a cholera outbreak. Then, there is the story of the computer medium as it expands and evolves over the years. Grossberger Morales refers to both stories in explanations made on her website and also in e-books published in the 2000s. In this sense, the need to establish control over the narrative, or simply to give new dimensions to the story from the author’s evolving lens, somehow limits the experience and “freedom” of the navigating experience while somewhat expanding it. At the same time, she “weaves” these para-texts within the interface itself, thus emphasizing, while reaffirming, the main theme and motivation of the author: “Using multimedia, I was able to express the conflicts that I felt being bicultural”

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(Weaving 18). Many of the features of the original CD-ROM are not reproduced on the website (sounds, animation, videos, arcade game, etc.), and the interaction is very limited. However, we can still experience some levels of “both stories” in this artifact: from the color limitations of the first Mac used to create the “Opening sequence” of the CD-ROM (labeled “About” on the website), to more complex elements that can be experienced as a visual imprint. In terms of e-literary expression, perhaps the most relevant chapters are “Emigrating,” “Palabritas” and “Gringa.” Mostly based on visual poetry, these chapters explore the painful and moving (emotionally, physically) dis-located state of an identity caught between “Dos mundos” (“Gringa”). In “Palabritas,” a poem written in both English and Spanish, the author expresses the pain of losing her native tongue, a sense of “powerlessness” recounted as personal narratives in “Cachina,” “Artichokes,” and “Skyscrapers” (“Palabritas”). In “Emigrating,” the initial segment of the original CD-ROM, the statement “Lucia, eres Gringa” marks the beginning of this painful journey. This sentence will reappear in “Gringa,” ultimately framing this multi-leveled story that “weaves” together, in an Andean-based visual fabric, both computers and poetics. Brief (e-) bibliography: Escaja, Tina. “Género, tecnología e Internet en Latinoamérica y vigencias del formato digital.” “Feminismo Descolonial” (Special issue). Letras Femeninas. Ed. Gladys Ilarregui. XXXVII.1 (Verano 2012): 147–65. Print. Grossberger Morales, Lucia. “A conversation with Lucia Grossberger Morales.” Interview by Anna Cuey and Judy Malloy. Interactive Art Conference on Arts Wire, July 1995. https://people.well.com/user/ couey/interactive/lucia/lucia.html Accessed June 1, 2021. ———. On the Bridge: Between Bolivia and Computers. CreateSpace, 2009. ———. Weaving Art with Computers. Apple Books, 2014. Pitman, Thea. “Hipertexto y biculturalidad en dos proyectos autobiográficos de las artistas latinas Lucia Grossberger Morales y Jacalyn Lopez Garcia,” Revista Laboratorio, 13 (2015). https://revistalaboratorio.udp. cl/index.php/laboratorio/article/view/63/58. Accessed June 1, 2021. Tina Escaja University of Vermont (USA) https://www.uvm.edu/cas/rll/profiles/tina_escaja

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Author: Eduardo Kac Work: Não! [No] (1982) Link to the Work:

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Flash version:

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Link to author’s webpage:

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Biography: Eduardo Kac (Rio de Janeiro, 1962–) is an experimental poet, visual artist and academic. He created his first digital poem in 1982 and his first holographic poem in 1983. His work lies at the intersection of poetic creation and experimentation with new technologies, including biopoetry and aromapoetry. Kac works as a practitioner of digital art and

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as an academic, currently a professor of art and technology at the School of the Art Institute in Chicago (SAIC). His academic work includes the groundbreaking anthology, New Media Poetry: Poetic Innovation and New Technologies (1996), with a second edition published in 2007, Media Poetry: An International Anthology. His oeuvre of poetic work has been compiled in Hodibis Potax (Édition Action PoÉtique, Ivry-sur-Seine, France, 2007). Technical description of the work: Não! is an installation comprised of an electronic signboard with two LED video displays organized by intext blocks which circulate in at equal intervals, leaving the extended screen blank before transitioning to subsequent blocks of text. In the early 1980s, this technology was considered to be quite advanced, evocative of the long screen displays famously used in the stock exchanges of cities such as New York or São Paulo. While the representation of text moving across time in a narrow strip is long-standing, Kac was a trailblazer in utilizing this technology to write and disseminate poetry. Context + e-generation of the work: Eduardo Kac blazed onto the scene in the 1980s in his innovative engagement with electronic media, most notably through holopoetry, a genre he pioneered. His early works, including Não!, were pre-web and form part of what Katherine Hayles would term first-generation electronic literature (2004, 2008). Kac began his work as a performance artist in Brazil, later moving to the United States in the late 1980s. His oeuvre has come to include a variety of forms including robotics, dialogic performance, interactive art, telematic and transgenic art and has both web-based and offline components, embedding him also in the second generation of e-lit (Flores 2019). He has become increasingly known for integrating biotechnology into his work, as well as telematic and telepresence art, often combining performance and technologically mediated external control (Drucker 18). Não! is important for any analysis of Kac’s work precisely because it presents some of the earliest explorations of poetic intersections with technology in Latin America. The piece itself is an installation originally composed in 1982 and presented at the Centro Cultural Cândido Mendes in Rio de Janeiro in 1984. The web-based version of this piece can be viewed statically through a series of images featured amongst the artist’s projects on his personal webpage or by installing a Flash emulator for the moving-image version. E-poetics of the work: Não! is significant in that it marks Kac’s first foray into electronic literature. In it, he explores radical modes of language creation, given his use of colloquial speech and slang, thereby disarming linear semantics and dismantling the association between technology and

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the use of formal vernacular. Não! is organized in five sequences of nine capital letters and requires an active readership obliged to identify and parse through words in order to establish sequential meaning. There is a clear reflection on temporality in this installation, as the rhythm of the display creates its own interplay between absence and presence, appearance and disappearance. The texts are presented as fragments which readers link semantically as they pass before their eyes. Thus, engagement with Não! is subjective and experiential, as each potential viewer/reader engages with the texts at their own pace and interprets their multiple possible meanings. With a simplicity that may mask its innovative rendering, this early work of electronic poetry experiments with language, semantics, and digital displays in ways that later would inspire works by Kac and others working within the space of experimental digital poetry. Brief (e-) bibliography: Drucker, Johanna. “Eduardo Kac.” Art Journal, vol. 56, no. 3, [Taylor & Francis, Ltd., College Art Association], 1997, pp. 18–19. Print. Flores, Leonardo. “Third Generation Electronic Literature,” Electronic Book Review, April 7, 2019. Hayles, N. Katherine. Electronic Literature: New Horizons for the Literary. University of Notre Dame, 2008. Print. Kac, Eduardo. New Media Poetry: Poetic Innovation and New Technologies. Providence, R.I, 1996. Print. ———. Media Poetry: An International Antology. Bristol: Intellect, 2007. Cecily Raynor McGill University (Montréal, Canada) https://www.mcgill.ca/langlitcultures/cecily-raynor Author: Ryane Leão Work: Onde Jazz Meu Coração (2015–) de Ryane Leão Links to the Work:

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Biography: Ryane Leão (Cuiabá, Brazil, 1989) is the author of two collections of poetry, Tudo Nela Brilha e Queima (Planeta, 2017), a best-­ selling debut, as well as the more recent Jamais Peço Desculpas Por Me Derramar (Planeta, 2019), and is known in large part for her sizable following on the social network Instagram (@ondejazzmeucoracao). Trained in English and Literature at the Universidade Federal de São Paulo, Leão currently serves as founding director of Odara English School, a language institute in São Paulo that emphasizes Black feminist thinking in its curriculum and community outreach. Technical description of the work: Onde Jazz Meu Coração (2015–) began as a multiform poetry project that linked poems printed on posters [lambe-lambes] with their digitally mediated counterparts, photos of the posters that Leão would upload to the project’s Instagram account and geotag with their real-world locations in São Paulo. Because these posters also included information about the project’s remediation on Instagram, a curious “manual hyperlink” connected the two. Though Leão stopped producing lambe-lambes with the release of her first book in 2017, she continues to use the Instagram account as a vessel for her poetry, whether printed and remediated or uploaded as a graphic. Context + e-generation of the work: Following Leonardo Flores, Onde Jazz Meu Coração belongs to the “fourth generation of electronic literature and poetry,” the generation of digital-poetic invention associated with the emergence of “mobile networks and platforms” in the first two decades of the twenty-first century (2014: 160). Published on the author’s now-verified Instagram profile (@ondejazzmeucoracao), the poems in question tend to feature intentionally inky, typewriter-inspired lettering atop a monochrome background, and most are watermarked with Leão’s name in the bottom third of the image. Leão, like Rupi Kaur, Amanda Lovelace, or Elvira Sastre, is an #instapoet: a poet who shares their work on Instagram and who accordingly writes with the dimensions, affective and literal, of the phone screen in mind. Leão’s digital poetry is of a particularly visual variety, but not in the sense that it uses the unique capabilities of the computer to produce “sophisticated language-based visual art” (Flores 160). While her practice certainly owes some debt to Brazilian concrete poetry and to the São Paulo urban art scene, Leão’s work primarily seeks to bring the analog esthetics of the typewritten page to the visually rich digital environment of Instagram and not the inverse. More to the point, uploaded to Instagram—a distinctly image-based network—Leão’s poems are rendered flat, lossy JPEGs, a process that

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formally subordinates their poetic content to the level of visual component. That is to say, without the use of optical character recognition (OCR) software (or rote transcription), their constitutive writing is not retrievable or reverse-searchable. With #instapoetry, text becomes image as a rule of engagement and as esthetic exercise. E-poetics of the digital work: Technically speaking, Onde Jazz Meu Coração names a feed. It comprises poems, selfies, vernacular photographs, promotional images, displays of solidarity, commissioned illustrations, screenshots, and posts by fans that Leão has elected to reupload to the project’s eponymous Instagram account. Although Leão’s writing has appeared under this same name since as early as 2011, the project first took digital form on Instagram in 2015, when the author joined the platform with the intent of indexing the ephemeral lambe-lambe posters she had to that point pasted along the streets of São Paulo. Onde Jazz Meu Coração, while today fully mediated by Instagram, has in some sense retained the esthetics of random encounter that guided the project in its earlier material form. But instead of on an edifice or in an alleyway, one now comes upon Leão’s writing while scrolling through the application. Continually framed by the visual paratexts that line one’s Instagram feed (or via the site’s “Explore” tab, which aggregates a range of posts based on one’s previous viewing history), Leão’s poems—like any #instapoem—capture the chance reader’s attention by way of their radical difference from the vast majority of Instagram uploads. Negative space offers a welcome reprieve from the onslaught of visual information that is the ever-descending vertical feed. In part because the now-reflexive gesture of scrolling structures how one meets #instapoetry (or anything else) on the mobile phone screen, Leão and her contemporaries tend to post short, aphoristic pieces on Instagram. The generally self-helpful, axiomatic sentiments conveyed in and by #instapoetry—while not always easy to swallow—suggest in their brevity and embrace of vernacular language a certain recognition that their potential reach is delimited by the average user’s willingness to stop, read, comprehend, and appreciate a piece of poetry as poetry. To be sure, Leão’s poetry is by no means circumscribed by Instagram’s affordances alone; to suggest otherwise would be a misrepresentation of the often long and layered poems we find in Tudo Nela Brilha e Queima (Planeta, 2017) or Jamais Peço Desculpas Por Me Derramar (Planeta, 2019). However, couched between selfies and screenshots, it becomes difficult to imagine an Onde Jazz Meu Coração without an Instagram.

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Brief (e-) bibliography: Flores, Leonardo. “Digital Poetry.” The Johns Hopkins Guide to Digital Media, edited by Marie-Laure Ryan, Lori Emerson and Benjamin J.  Robertson. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014, pp. 155–161. Print. Leão, Ryane. Tudo Nela Brilha e Queima. São Paulo: Planeta do Brasil, 2017. Print. ———. Jamais Peço Desculpas Por Me Derramar. São Paulo: Planeta do Brasil, 2019. Print. Ramos, Penha Élida Ghiotto Tuão and Analice de Oliveira Martins. “Reflexões sobre a rede social Instagram: do aplicativo à textualidade.” Texto Digital, vol. 14, no. 2, 2018, pp. 117–133. Print. Rosa da Silva, Douglas. “A impetuosidade das vozes na poesia: As poetas e o poetry slam.” Organon, vol. 34, no. 67, 2019, pp. 1–6. Print. Sam McCracken University of Michigan (US) http://www.sammccracken.com Authors: Rodolfo Mata and Diego Bonilla Work: Big Data (2019) Links to the work:

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Biographies: Rodolfo Mata (Mexico City, 1960). Poet. Studied Hispanic Language and Literature at FfyL at the UNAM; Master’s degree from the University of São Paulo and doctorate in Iberoamerican Literature from the UNAM. He has worked as a full-time researcher at the Center for Literary Studies of the IIFL at the UNAM.  Portuguese translator. Collaborator in Cuadernos Americanos, La Jornada Semanal, Revista Universidad de México y Vuelta. Scholar of the FONCA in translation, 1997. He is the author of the poetry books Parajes y paralajes (1998), Temporal (2008), Qué decir (2011) y Nuestro nombre (2015), of the plaquette Doble naturaleza (2015), and the electronic poems Silencio vacío (2014) and Pronombres (2018). Diego Bonilla (Mexico, D.F., 1969) has a degree in Administration from the Autonomous Technological Institute of Mexico, obtained his M.S. in Media Management at the University of Syracuse, USA (1996–1998), where he also obtained his PhD degree in Mass Communications (1998–2003). Founder of the literary magazine Pendulum (1992–1996). He is a professor at California State University, Sacramento, where he teaches classes on digital literacy and multimedia programming. He is the author of the book Making Sense of Tracking Data (2008). He is the creator of a wide array of works of art and digital literature, such as Universals (1998), Self-Portrait (1998), Virtual Pompeii (2002), A Space of Time (2003), Dense Poetry (2004), Dense Spaces (2007), Liber Rotavi (2013), and Accidental outcome (2017). Technical description of the work: Big Data is a work that explores poetic permutation through algorithmic programming. Emulating a fractal structure, there is a source poem whose verses combine to generate new versions, managing to maintain grammatical and semantic coherence as well as their interpolative nature, through a complex sequencing process. These results are staged through a series of videos (299 in total) in which a heterogeneous group of people recites verses staring at a camera. The main theme of the poem revolves around the compiling of personal data and its consequences for the identities of users. Context and e-generation of the work: According to the categories proposed by Flores (2014), Big Data can be considered a mix between permutational and multimedia poetry. In the first case, this variant of generative poetry is achieved through a looping poetic text that is reproduced and mixed in a sort of textual loop: all the resulting poems are at the same time similar and different, just as in a Sierpinski triangle. This effect is achieved through a series of algorithmic permutations of the verses, which,

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when mixed, generate numerous versions. As the authors suggest: “It is a poem that regenerates itself in a different way each time the program runs.” In the second case, there is a multimedia component, since the results of the remix can only be appreciated through audiovisual performances uploaded to YouTube, where the voices, gestures and appearances of the individuals that recite the verses suggest, as the authors point out, “the expanded perception of a database composed of human profiles.” In this way, an esthetic exploration of the limits of poetic language is made present using the randomness generated by the algorithms—without forgetting language as the act of human speech, which is enunciated and expressed through multiple faces interpolated by the digital. E-poetics of the work: Big Data is defined as a massive accumulation of archived and processed data obtained from the registers that Internet users leave behind when navigating (cookies, logs, likes, and others), whose purpose is to build virtual profiles for the subjects, generating a predictive analysis of their behaviors and interests. To achieve these projections, algorithms, Artificial Intelligence, and machine learning are used. As Bunz (2007) argues, “It’s all about condensing the subjects´ footprint, that is to say, their apparition, from data that allows the calculation of their movements” (43). In this piece, Big Data is staged through the chorus of voices that represent the collection of data; therefore, the first person plural is used, and the reader is directly addressed. The subject evoked here referred is one “whose unconscious and day to day participation” feeds the data map and can be profiled thanks to his/her peers: “Though we don´t know you we know a lot about you/we know a lot about you because of those millions of others/who just like you/left their electric faces here in the database.” Through this lens, the project tackles the problem of digital identity, in addition to the ways that certain instances of power categorize and manipulate subjects as quantifiable data—which, and they, cannot seem to avoid: “If you still resist / if you want to join those many millions in naive anonymity / it is others that make you someone / it is us.” This constitutes an esthetic revision of identity which, Stuart Hall (2003) argues, “is constituted within representation and not outside of it” (17). In this specific case, a critique of a new discursive entity is carried out, one that articulates individual identities, not from a sameness, but through a “massification” of patterns carried out in the digital world, which ultimately responds to the relationship between the subject and the technological object.

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Also, the sphere of power associated with the mapping and systematization of these identities is made visible, with reference to the society of control (Foucault) and the technocapitalist utilization of users who unconsciously give up their data. The fact that poems are recited by multiple anonymous faces makes us see that there are agencies and interests that operationalize and utilize informational data. As Bunz suggests: “It is not the network itself which controls the subject, which makes the subject visible, it is actually more of a realm of discursive power that cannot make do without subjects” (50). Brief (e-) bibliography: Bunz, Mercedes. La utopía de la copia. El pop como irritación. Buenos Aires: Interzona Editora, 2007. Print. Flores, Leonardo. «Digital Poetry.» Ryan, Marie- Laure, Lori Emerson and Benjamin J.  Robertson, eds. The Johns Hopkins Guide to Digital Media. Baltimore, Maryland: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014. 155–161. Print. Hall, Stuart. “Introducción: ¿quién necesita ‘identidad’?.” En Hall, Stuart et. al. Cuestiones de identidad cultural. Buenos Aires, Amorrortu, 2003. Print. Wacjman, Judy. Esclavos del tiempo. Vidas aceleradas en la era del capitalismo digital. Paidós, 2017. Source poem. https://www.bioelectricdot.net/bigdataespanol Jhoerson Yagmour Figuera Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile Digital Lab at the University of Diego Portales Author: María Mencía Work: The Winnipeg: The Poem that Crossed the Atlantic (2016–) Link to the work:

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Technical description of the work: The Winnipeg: The Poem that Crossed the Atlantic (2016–) is a trilingual interactive narrative poem (English, French, Spanish) inspired by historical events of the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939). This e-lit work is structured in two parts: 1) the website: The Winnipeg: The Boat of Hope, which gives a general panorama of the project: the Winnipeg, Pablo Neruda, the background, the archive, a story, the poem, the credits; and 2) the interactive poem: The Poem that Crossed the Atlantic, which performs a sort of poetic narrative stemming from an archive of Spanish and Chilean historical memories, which have previously been uploaded by the author and users. The piece was programmed in HTML, CSS, Javascript, jquery, and Three.js. by Alexandre Dupuis and it won the second prize in the Robert Coover Award for a work of electronic literature 2018 (Electronic Literature Organization). Context + e-generation of the work: In the past decade, a special interest in highlighting historical, social, and political events has become a recurrent leitmotif in Latin American electronic literature. The Poem that Crossed the Atlantic is based on the story of “The Winnipeg,” an old cargo ship that helped evacuate 2200 Spanish Civil War exiles, including Mencía’s grandfather, from concentration camps in Pauillac, France to Valparaíso, Chile. According to Scott Rettberg, “Interactive digital poetry further considers the relationship between the reader and text as a recursive feedback loop, the relation of physical gesture to poetic trope, and the position of reader as embodied actor” (119–20). These three points can be seen in the e-lit work: first, readers upload stories and feed the poem with personal or fictitious memories, becoming weavers of the work’s poetics. Second, the interactivity with the work allows the reader to create multilingual poetic tropes. Finally, the presence of collective writing and participatory art in the construction of meaning undoubtedly highlights the reader-­ actor duality.

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E-poetics of the digital work: In The Poem that Crossed the Atlantic, the ocean takes multiple forms: a translation zone, an archive of historical memories, and a space of cultural mediation. In a recent paper, the author notes that “this work reflects on pertinent critical issues of migration, displacement, and the search for survival, also apparent in current worldwide events” (Mencía). Can we then refer to a new poetics of displacement in works of electronic literature? One way to explore this would be through the poem’s figures of gestural manipulation (Bouchardon) and performative memory, that is, the intersection between memory, motion, and meaning, which generates such poetic tropes. A good example is the mention of Chilean poet Pablo Neruda (1904–1973)—who also played an important role in the evacuation of the refugees; his poetry acts as an antechamber to the work, “Que la crítica borre toda mi poesía, si le parece. Pero este poema, que hoy recuerdo, no podrá borrarlo nadie” [“Critics might erase all of my poetry if they want, but this poem that I remember today, nobody will be able to erase”]. In this case, by manipulating the linguistic text the reader has the impression of manipulating the evoked concept of “memory erasure.” Another way to evoke memories is by zooming in and out on the polyphonic ocean that becomes the Atlantic. The poetics of displacement can be found in various testimonies. For instance, Spanish-­ Chilean painter José Balmes (1927–2016) narrates the imagery of travelling to the unknown: “Lo primero que pedimos fue el mapa, ¿me entiendes tú? a ver exactamente en dónde estaba situado, exactamente, teníamos naciones, pero no precisiones… era una especie de urgencia de partir, de partir, de partir…” [“The first thing we asked for was a map, do you know what I mean? To see exactly where it was located, precisely, we had nations, but no specifics…it was a kind of urgency to leave, to leave, to leave…”]. The idea of memory and motion allows readers to experience such a poetics of displacement not only by reading the testimonies but also by digitally displacing themselves on the screen in search of connected memories through time and space. The Winnipeg: The Poem that Crossed the Atlantic (2016–) is an example of how memory practices are emerging in electronic literature. In a way, such e-lit works have ceased to be simple objects of esthetic appreciation to become spaces of collective action.

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Brief (e-) bibliography: Bouchardon, Serge. “Figures of Gestural Manipulation in Digital Fictions.” Analyzing Digital Fiction, edited by Alice Bell et  al., Routledge, 2014, pp. 159–75. Print. Mencía, María. “The Winnipeg: The Poem That Crossed the Atlantic.” Hyperrhiz: New Media Cultures, no. 20, 2019, https://doi. org/10.20415/hyp/020.mov02. Rettberg, Scott. Electronic Literature. Polity Press, 2019. Nohelia Meza Universidad de las Américas Puebla, México Author: Benjamín Moreno Ortiz Work: Concretoons (2010) Link to the work:

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Biography: Benjamín Moreno Ortiz (Querétaro, México 1980–) is the author of Realize That You Matter to Me (short stories, 2005) and Signs of Voluntary Amnesia (novel, 2009). He is winner of the FONCA Young Creators scholarship for his multiplatform fictional work The Cristera Novel (2010). His digital poetry project Concretoons was exhibited in the National Art Center in 2010. Technical description of the work: Eleven digital poems that pay homage to some of the most representative experimental poets of the Ibero-American tradition. The poems deal with issues of language, composition, and form; they question the role of poetic traditions, the definition of poetry, and the act of writing. Their structure is based on the concept of video games as a medium of poetic creation. Context + e-generation of the work: Following Leonardo Flores’ categorization of electronic literary genres, this work is closest to

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interactive poetry (and therefore belongs to the third generation of e-lit), in which the user or reader has (more or less) an active role in the work’s creation. The poems’ platform is hosted on a website with links to each individual Concretoon and to a visual-textual proposition regarding literature/poetry as a game (if we reverse Ciccoricco’s formulation). E-poetics of the work: The poem’s interactivity emerges from Moreno Ortiz’s engagement with a pantheon of literary figures: Eduardo Feliz Milán, Jorge Luis Borges, Stéphane Mallarmé, Ulises Carrión, Joan Brossa, along with Augusto and Haroldo de Campos, Nicanor Parra, Octavio Paz, and ending with the young Mexican poet Sergio Ernesto Ríos. As interactive poems, the user participates in the formation of the poems by moving the mouse across several different spaces, thereby creating various interpretations. However, the dialogue already present in the creation of the works predetermines certain interpretations of the poems, allowing the user to get to know/think more deeply about the canonical poems that serve as hypotexts. Without a doubt, since readers have access to the hyperlinks below the question mark, they can make the necessary connections between these interactive poems and their predecessors— although, it must be said that the reader-user’s participation or reinterpretation is limited to pre-determined clicks. For example, “Borges’ Labyrinth” mimics the labyrinth of the video game PacMan, although without the participation of the reader, PacMan does not move, the poem is not recreated in its specific textuality but rather in its visualization. “Un coup dés” is played with a single die that moves across the page. In “Mr. Potato Paz,” Moreno Ortiz ironically explores the basic question of all philosophers/poets—“What to do with tradition?”—in order to employ a technique of comic pastiche. In the end, Concretoons emphasizes or falls back on the author’s interpretation of canonical poetry since there is very little that can be “recreated” in the work’s interactivity. But what these works do is to highlight the fluidity of traditional poetry and how digital poetry can recover the playful facets of more traditional verse. Concretoons therefore represents more of a technologized caricature of the original, inspirational poem—and here we can locate its e-poetics, which is quite timely and desacralizing—rather than just another tribute. Brief (e-) bibliography: Ciccoricco, David. “Games as Art/Literature.” Ryan, Marie-Laure, Lori Emerson and Benjamin J. Robertson, eds. The Johns Hopkins Guide to Digital Media. Baltimore, Maryland: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014. 220–224. Print.

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Genette, Gérard. Palimpsestes. Paris: Éd. du Seuil, 1982. Print. Kim Stefans, Brian. “Third Hand Plays: ‘Something’ and ‘Telescopio’ by Benjamin R.  Moreno Ortiz.” SFMOMA, Open Space: Art/Culture/ Bay Area. Web. July 5, 2011. Accessed September 27, 2015. http:// openspace.sfmoma.org/2011/07/third-­hand-­plays-­something-­andtelescopio-­by-­benjamin-­r-­moreno-­ortiz/ Angelica Huizar Old Dominion University (USA) https://www.odu.edu/directory/people/a/ahuizar Author: Eduardo Navas Work: Poemita [Little Poem] Link to the work:

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Biography: Eduardo Navas (San Salvador, El Salvador) is the author of Remix Theory: The Aesthetics of Sampling and co-editor of The Routledge Companion to Remix Studies. These books carry out cultural analysis using methods based in the digital humanities in order to examine the creative

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and political role of “recyclability” and “remixing” in art, media, and culture. His work includes art, media, critical texts, and curated projects. He has presented and given conferences on his work and research at the international level. Currently he is researching and teaching at The School of Visual Arts at The Pennsylvania State University (USA). Technical description of the work: Poemita (2010–) is a collection of short poems published on Twitter by artist and writer Eduardo Navas. Poemita is a form of experimental writing in that the potentialities of Twitter are used to generate micropoems in the style of haikus. Navas began Poemita in January 2010 and has continued publishing tweets for the work up to the present day. Context + e-generation of the work: Originally from San Salvador but currently residing in the United States, Navas has created a variety of literary-artistic projects since the 1990s. These works explore the connections between art, culture, and new technologies, and his work has a particular focus on the possibilities of remixing texts and images offered by digital media. Poemita is situated within the growing genre of Twitter poetry, of which there are already hundreds of examples from around the world. Examples include: tickertext1 and tickertext2 (2010) by Canadian author Jason Camelot; TwitterPoetry (2007–), Australian poet Gavin Heaton’s collaborative poetry project using Twitter; and the Twitter Poetry competition organized by Marsha Berry and Omega Goodwin in 2009. These and other projects that use Twitter for poetic purposes employ the formal aspects of Twitter—particularly the 140-character maximum—as a creative and artistic self-restriction. E-poetics of the work: There are various recurring themes in the poems of Poemita, including: modern society, new means of communication, digital technologies, and the poetic medium itself. For example, the August 15, 2012 micropoem tells us: “instant gratification, the author feels when writing aphoristic fragments for the mine of data trends.” This micropoem offers a critique of the “celebrity culture” and narcissism promoted by social interaction platforms such as Twitter and Facebook; the poem is also self-reflective—and metatextual—given that the act of writing “aphoristic fragments” is exactly what Navas is doing in Poemita. We also see, in three micropoems published on August 10, 2012, small changes and subtle differences in the structure and combination of keywords that create poems that are simultaneously similar and different, heightening the uncertainty that this dialogue generates—just like in the tactics of the French literary workshop OuLiPo. In this way, these three micropoems offer three examples of the multiple variations that are possible based on the same keywords.

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Brief (e-) bibliography: Navas, Eduardo. “Regressive and Reflexive Mashups in Sampling Culture.” Stefan Sonvilla-Weiss, ed. Mashup Cultures. New York: Springer (2010): 157–177. Print. ———. Remix Theory: The Aesthetics of Sampling. New  York: Springer (2012). Print. Taylor, Claire. “Post-Digital Remixes and Reflexive Copies: Eduard Navas’s Goobalization.” Hispanic Issues 9 (2012): 192–213. Print. ———. “Twitter-poesía y aforismos remezclados: Poemita y Mínima Moralia Redux de Eduardo Navas.” Correa-Díaz, Luis and Scott Weintraub, eds. Poesía y poéticas digitales/eletrónicas/tecnos/New-Media en América Latina: Definiciones y exploraciones. Bogotá: Universidad Central de Bogotá, 2015. Print and e-book. Claire Taylor University of Liverpool (UK) https://www.liverpool.ac.uk/languages-­c ultures-­a nd-­f ilm/staff/ claire-­taylor/ Author: Santiago Ortiz Work: The Iliad (2012) Link to the work:

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Biography: Santiago Ortiz (Bogotá, Colombia, 1975) studied mathematics, music, and literature at the Universidad de Los Andes in Bogotá. He was a professor in the School of Fine Arts at the Universidad de Oporto (Portugal), in the Art and Math Departments at the Universidad de Los Andes, and in the Master’s program in Art and Technology at the Universidad Europa de Madrid (Spain). He also taught classes in Digital Design at the European Institute of Design in Madrid, among other places. He is a cofounder of the digital art and culture journal Blank, a collaborator in Medialab Madrid, cofounder of Bestiario.com and director of moebio.com. He has participated in various interactive art installations and exhibitions. The processing and visualization of data is a constant in his recent projects. One of his most well-known works is “Bacterias Argentinas, de las redes tróficas a las redes del lenguaje” [“Argentine Bacteria, from trophic networks to language networks”] (2004). He works as an international consultant, assisting organizations with information analysis and creating data-based communication strategies. Technical description of the work: Ortiz’s version of The Iliad is a visualization of data based on A.S.  Kline’s 2009 digitization of the Homeric text. It translates the epic poem into a work of digital hypertext, in which hyperlinks allow access to different (streaming and networked) ways of organizing the data of the narrative. In turn, Ortiz’s work transposes the work of A.S. Kline into a graphic interface where colors, forms, and movements configure its language. It can be accessed on PC, tablet, or mobile phone. Context + e-generation of the work: We can locate this work squarely in the third generation of digital poetry, as described by Flores (159), given that it consists of a graphic and multimedia creation for the web that does not, however, ultimately create a virtual environment nor an augmented reality that gives prominence to reader inputs (as the fourth

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generation now does). The work utilizes algorithms to draw up an image that could, with more time invested, be drawn manually (a characteristic typical of the first generation). The Iliad shares with the first generation the particularity that some of its (streaming) visualizations could be printed; however, the network visualization would be much more complex to transform into a paper artifact. On the other hand, like many of its kind, The Iliad shares its hypertextual design with works of the second generation (1980–1995). E-poetics of the work: This piece offers two ways of accessing the Homeric epic poem: (1) as a flow, which shows a graphic visualization of the characters appearing and recurring in each book; and (2) as a diagram of a network, which groups information about the relationships between characters. Each color represents a Greek nation, and the assiduousness of its relationships determines the size of the nodes and the lines that connect them. The reader’s action does not intervene in the piece, rather it initiates its exhibition. The reader can wander through the work starting at any point, which augments the beginning in media res of all epic poems, as well as replacing or doing away with the invocation to the muses and the presentation of the main subject. This gesture breaks apart the structure typical of the genre, in which reading guidelines are established in the first lines. In contrast, the point that is chosen to initiate each new journey relocates the piece in a new contract to celebrate and explore. By dismantling the linearity of the text and grouping and organizing narrative information based on the criteria established by Kline in his hypertextual design, other characteristics of the epic that could escape notice in traditional reading are made visible: we read another type of story, whose development does not rest on thematic or temporal-spatial units, but rather on the characters and the relationships that are woven between them. This inscribes within the Homeric work the kind of reading protocols enacted in social networks. Brief (e-) bibliography: Flores, Leonardo. “Digital Poetry.” The Johns Hopkins Guide to Digital Media. Ryan, Marie-Laure, Lori Emerson, and Benjamin J. Robertson, eds. Baltimore, Maryland: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014. 155–161. Print.

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Kline, A. S. “The Iliad. A complete English translation with hyper-linked index.” Web. August 28, 2009. http://www.poetryintranslation.com/ PITBR/Greek/Ilhome.htm Olguín Sánchez, Daisy. “Santiago Ortiz, artista digital.” Revista Digital Universitaria. Web. March 10, 2006. http://www.revista.unam.mx/ vol.7/num3/art20/int20.htm Ortiz, Santiago. “Bacterias argentinas, de las redes tróficas a las redes del lenguaje.” Web. 2004. http://moebio.com/santiago/bacterias ———. “45 Ways to Communicate Two Quantities.” Visually. Web. July 27, 2012. http://blog.visual.ly/45-­ways-­to-­communicate-­twoquantities ———. “Living Networks.” New Challenges for Data Design. Ed. Bihanic, David. Springer. 2014. 159–174. Peralta Mariñelarena, Damián. “Entrevista a Santiago Ortiz: arte que se escribe.” Web. November 20, 2012. http://www.damianperalta.net/ es/teoria/15-­entrevista-­a-­santiago-­ortiz-­arte-­que-­se-­escribe Anahí Alejandra Ré Center for Research and Studies of Culture and Society (CIECS-­ CONICET), Universidad Nacional de Córdoba and Universidad Nacional de San Luis (Argentina) http://www.conicet.gov.ar/new_scp/detalle.php?id=32240&keywords= anah%ED&datos_academicos=yes Author: Christian Oyarzún Work: voodoochild/:redemptionsongs (2015) Link to the work:

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Biography: Christian Oyarzún (Santiago de Chile, 1972; Bachelor in Arts and Master’s in Media Arts from the Universidad de Chile) has been part of various artistic digital projects, including “Posternura Record,” “Vanoeditorial,” and “Primavera Hacker.” His works have been included in international digital galleries such as https://rhizome.org/ and https://computerfinearts.com/. The full corpus of his work can be found at http://www.error404.cl/, his personal website, which compiles his work since 1999. His work explores algorithmic composition, the use of programming languages for the staging of audiovisual performances, installations and net.art, with a cyberpunk aesthetic. Technical description of the work: voodoochild/:redemptionsongs (2015) is the written version of the files of a software project for the Arduino platform, whose source code was created using the PDE tool.4 The syntax of the Arduino programming language is inspired by the programming languages of Java and C++. The project includes .pde code files, files in plain text (.txt), and metadata in .xml files. The montage is the staging of the reproduction of electronic music, voices performed by TTS5 technology, and the projection of images. Context + e-generation of the work: It was published in Art Book format on http://vanoeditorial.cl/, a collaborative creation platform of experimental graphic content whose principles are “cooperation and fraternity,” as declared in Art Book’s most recent call for publications (2017–2018). They use a Creative Commons license for non-profit visual and digital artistic content. In voodoochild/:redemptionsongs, the source code (groupings of lines of text that are run by a computer) is made 4 5

 https://processing.org/reference/environment/.  Text-to-Speech (TTS) technology.

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available to readers in the Art Books format, as this is the artistic product published by Vano Editorial. voodoochild/:redemptionsongs is considered Code Poetry because, according to Flores (155), this type of poetry arises from the intersection between the language written to be read by the compiler or interpreter of programming language and language intended to be read by people. There are, for example, text files that have a description of the project as credits.txt and readme.txt, song lyrics like shelostlyrics.txt, as well as Arduino code files with the extension .pde, where it is possible, for instance, to find verses in variables within the same code. E-poetics of the work: Oyarzún defines his work as cyberpunk. Collins (166) establishes links between cyberpunk and industrial music, a central feature of this work, since it is a list of music produced electronically, whose songs share postpunk styles and motives and are inspired by songs like “She’s Lost Control” by Ian Curtis, “A Forest” by Robert Smith, and “Punkrocker” by Iggy Pop. Collins, referring to the most representative narratives of this genre, recognizes among its characteristics the presence of futurism, dystopia, technophilia, hacker culture, smart drugs, and dark futuristic narratives (165), several of which are present in voodoochild/:redemptionsongs. According to Cavallaro (23), cyberpunk is the integration of hyper-efficient structures of technology with subcultures, especially with a punk sensibility, a “dystopian depiction of a junk-­ infested world of losers and loonies.” From the text files that do not have code, one can appreciate the lyrics, like the verses “she’s lost control again,” “and walked upon the edge of no scape,” where the presence of a dystopian attitude toward life is evident. In the audiovisual mise-en-scène, there are two synthetic voices, one female and one male, generated through Text-to-Speech technology. Messages that come from the .pde files demonstrate a tendency to question ties with institutions, which can be considered the type of rebellion that is typical of hacker culture. These messages are inserted in code files; for example, in the definition of the Flag class, line 2515 of the manyVisuals.pde file declares the String-type variable txt which begins in line 2544: “WITH THE AUTHORITY THAT GIVES US GOOD JUDGEMENT AND FULL USE OF OUR REASON, WE OFFICIALLY DECLARE A BREAK WITH THE LINKS THAT AT ONE TIME COULD TIE US TO A SOLE INSTUTION OR FORM OF REPRESENTATION …” [“CON LA AUTORIDAD QUE NOS DA EL BUEN JUICIO Y EN PLENO USO DE NUESTRA RAZON, DECLARAMOS ROMPER EN FORMA OFICIAL LOS LAZOS QUE NOS PUDIERON ATAR ALGUNA VEZ A UNA SOLA

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INSTITUCION O FORMA DE REPRESENTACION …”] (113). The previous fragment is part of the lyrics of “No necesitamos banderas” [“We Don’t Need Flags”] by Los Prisioneros, a song that questions nationality and the dominant morality. In the file songs_animalConciousness.pde (50), fragments appear from the “Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness” where it is postulated that non-human animals have consciousness. This is based on scientific research that was published by academics of the University of Cambridge in this manifesto in July 2012. Line 280 of AnimalConciousness extends vZong{int[]drumpads = {36, 38, 42, 44, 37}; declares: [line 280] if (i==2 && j==0)presing(i, j, “converging evidence indicates that non-­ human animals”); if (i==4 && j==0)presing(i, j, “possess the neuroanatomical”); if (i==6 && j==0)presing(i, j, “neurochemical and neurophysiological substrates of conscious states”); if (i==8 && j==0)presing (i, j, “as well as the capacity to exhibit deliberate behaviors”);

The publication of voodoochild/:redemptionsongs emerges firstly as an unveiling of the technical framework that is made invisible by the digital performance. Secondly, its cryptic nature is manifested both in the language in which it is written and in the messages introduced in the code. Cyberpunk is evident as much in the mise-en-scène as in its linguistic/literary dimension. This work of Code Poetry could also belong to the “Post Tender” trend, which, although it does not have a manifesto, does set forth a poetics in El sentimiento postierno [The Post Tender Feeling] by Eduardo Ferry, also published by Vano Editorial, which dives into the filial relations between artists and their peers, thereby narrating the history and the advancement of technology, interference in the human imaginaries, apocalyptic feelings, and so on. Brief (e-) bibliography: Flores, Leonardo. “Digital Poetry.” The Johns Hopkins Guide to Digital Media. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014. 155–61. Print.

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Cavallaro, Dani. Cyberpunk and Cyberculture: Science Fiction and the Work of William Gibson. New Jersey: The Alone Press, 2000. Print. Collins, Karen. “Dead Channel Surfing: the Commonalities Between Cyberpunk Literature and Industrial Music.” Popular Music. May 2005: 165–178. Print. Córdova, Esteba, et. al. Vanoeditorial. “Convocatoria 2017–2018.” 2014, Web. February 15, 2021. Print. Oyarzún, Christian. voodoochild/:redemptionsongs. Vanoeditorial.com, 2015. Web. February 15, 2021. Print. Yasna Flores Correa Universidad de Playa Ancha, Valparaíso, Chile Author: Frida Robles (México City, 1985) Work: Mi tía abuela/My Great Aunt (2018) Link to the work:

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Technical description of the work: Mi tía abuela consists of an interactive palimpsest of texts and oral narratives. Visually, the interface appears vertically divided into four main screens. As the reader scrolls down, each of the first three screens appears populated by the repeating text of a distinctive Catholic prayer. The texts disintegrate into random letters in the fourth screen, as the background of an image of a group of nuns become clearer. As the reader scrolls randomly, a segment of the text gets highlighted and flickers. Clicking on any segment produces a voice narrating the story of the author’s aunt, superimposing the same account as one continues clicking. Context + e-generation of the work: This work is an example of second generation e-literature, as defined by Leonardo Flores, since it was created using web-based languages and programming, like HTML and JavaScript in this case. Mi tía abuela/My Great Aunt was first published in

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the online magazine ORAL.pub in 2018 and can be experienced at the author’s webpage. Theo Ellin Ballew, founder and director of ORAL.pub, did the coding. This work is mostly kinetic and interactive, using sound/ oral narration to complement the multimodality of the piece, where repetition and palimpsest function as both content and structure. The author explains on her webpage the importance of the trace and testimony, both personal and collective, often engaging in poetic experiments within urban contexts such as Mexico City, her birthplace. This piece is presented in two distinct interfaces (one in Spanish and the other in English, translated and narrated by the author); Robles explains that the repeating, cyclical narration tells the story of her great aunt, who didn’t like men and was forced to become a nun. When she resisted, she was interned in an insane asylum where she was treated with electroshock and eventually became “a happy nun.” The author’s webpage displays an old photograph depicting a high-ranked member of the Catholic Church seated in the front row center, surrounded by nuns. A cropped portion of this picture, excluding the male figure, is the one used by the author in her work, presumably depicting her great aunt along with other nuns. E-poetics of the digital work: Robles defines her work as a “[b]ilingual piece playing with memories and code.” The word “playing” (“jugando” in the Spanish version), underlines the surfeited pattern of the interface, a playfulness that underscores compulsive repetition and palimpsest, ultimately generating a sense of excess and oppression, both visually and in terms of its content. The “Guardian Angel” prayer, a traditional bedtime Catholic prayer for children, populates the first screen. As is the case with all of the screens, when the reader hovers over the text, segments of the prayers are highlighted and flicker, overwhelming the already visual excess crafted not only by the accumulation of text, but also by the words and lines. The next screens address other common prayers like “Our Father” and “Hail Mary,” but the lines and words become less distinctive, eventually disintegrating into apparently random letters in the last partitions. The screens advance in this progression of repetition, distortion, and dislocation by scrolling down or clicking on the text. Clicking four times triggers the voice of the author narrating the story of her great aunt, a woman interned in a mental asylum for resisting the social expectations placed upon women, and who was forced to become a nun. The narration involves repetitions of words and sentences, adding to the reiteration prominent in the structure of the interface. As the reader continues clicking, the same narration is played over, creating superimposed layers of the

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same story. The voice then weaves its sound and narration within the structure of the interface, mirroring, while interpreting by computer coding, the story of this woman: how she was taken to the insane asylum where doctors dressed in white and the nuns in blue, how she was given electroshock therapy. The screens also progress from the initial white to the final blue of the aunt’s habit, while the texts and prayers visually disperse, signaling the evolving disintegration of this woman’s sense of self by means of shock therapy, an “electrocution” represented by the flickering of sentences and words. The only presence of this nun is the photograph at the end of this cyclical journey, a journey where gender dynamics and violence against women are underscored as perpetrated by the Catholic establishment. After several clicks, the narration rests and becomes silent, somehow representing the ultimate suppression of this woman, who was “forced to be happy.” Brief (e-) bibliography: Robles, Frida. Mi tía abuela/My Great Aunt. https://fridarobles.wordpress.com/2018/05/10/mi-­tia-­abuela-­my-­great-­aunt/ ———. “Mi tía abuela.” Antología Lit(e)Lat volumen 1. Leonardo Flores, Claudia Kozak, Rodolfo Mata, Ed. http://antologia.litelat.net/obra-­51 Row Material Company. “Frida Robles Ponce.” http://www.rawmaterialcompany.org/_1454?lang=en Tina Escaja University of Vermont (USA) https://www.uvm.edu/cas/rll/profiles/tina_escaja Author: Gustavo Romano Work: IP Poetry Project (2004–) Link to the work:

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Biography: Gustavo Romano (Buenos Aires, 1958–) is a visual artist. His work springs from various media: actions, exhibits, videos, and projects for the Internet. His individual exhibits have been held in the MEIAC, the Buenos Aires Modern Art Museum, the Ruth Benzacar Gallery, the ICI in Buenos Aires, the Recoleta Cultural Center, and the Spanish Cultural Centers in Córdoba and Montevideo, among others. His works have also been shown at the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New  York, Casa de América, Telefónica Foundation, Madrid, Vigo Museum of Contemporary Art, MEIAC, Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen, Bonn, Stuttgart and Berlin, Massachusetts College of Arts, Boston, and the Cervantes Institute in Vienna and Beijing. He took part in the 7th Havana Biennial, the 1st Singapore Biennial, the 2nd Mercosur Biennial in Porto Alegre, the 1st Lima Biennial, the 1st End of the World Biennial in Ushuaia, and Videonale 11 in Bonn. His electronic works have been showcased in various electronic arts festivals, among them Transmediale 2003, Videobrasil 2003, FILE 2001, Interferences, Ars Electrónica. His works form part of various collections, including those of the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York, the Arco Foundation, the MEIAC, the Buenos Aires Museum of Modern Art and the Buenos Aires National Museum, as well as several private collections. He is one of the directors of the End of the World, an online space that has been gathering Net.Art projects by Argentinean artists since 1996. He is coordinator of Medialab and the Virtual Hall at the Spanish Cultural Center in Buenos Aires, where he presided over the Net art exhibits. He has received awards, among others, from the Argentine Art Critics Association and the Life 7.0 Advancement award from Telefónica Spain. He was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2006.

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Technical description of the work: Argentine visual artist Gustavo Romano’s IP Poetry Project (IPP) explores the relationship between the poet, poetry, and technology. It consists of a robopoetic apparatus that, in the words of its creator, is a “system of software and hardware that uses text from the Internet to generate poetry that is recited in real-time by automatons connected to the web” (105). IPP textual fragments are a combination of short phrases entered by users and information that comes from Internet searches. Context + e-generation of the work: The IPP—in its Internet module titled the “IP Poetry Creator”—is a generative work in which the user must first create an account in order to start composing their own IP poem. Second, they are prompted to provide a title in addition to two short phrases (which the administrator bot, or “master of ceremonies” (MC bot) uses in an Internet search and transmits to the four “subservient” bots) and two optional “maxims” which serve as the refrain, recited by all of the bots in unison in the performance of the poem. While the MC bot saves the sequences found on the web, they remain constant in the poem, used as a “chorus” of sorts (9). Next, the user defines the structure of the poem by using four drop-down menus. One of these menus is used to specify which robot(s) will recite which “verse”—the result of a search or one of the fixed “maxims”—and which bot(s) will remain silent. Before viewing the recital, the user has the option to revise and modify their poem, before saving it on the site’s database (to be recited online by remote users or perhaps used in a future installation). The IPP, then, sits at the frontier of generative-interactive digital poetry and the robo-­ corporeal space of the fourth generation of digital poetry, as manifested in many real-time installations and performances in Portugal, Spain, the United States, Argentina, France, Uruguay, and China. E-poetics of the work: In her essay “On Non-Human Poems and Talking Heads,” visual artist Belén Gache inquires about the ontological status of the IP bots, as well as their cyborg subjectivity: “Are they machines with human mouths or is man a talking machine instead?” (117). It is clear that the cyborg aspect present in Romano’s work seeks to represent the fluidity between the human (the overdeveloped mouth, the quasi-human voice, the bots’ supposed poetic subjectivity, etc.) and the machinic, as Heather Fletcher points out: “these robotic systems are a kind of reverse cyborgs, since they are machines with that acquire human characteristics, rather than human beings that become more mechanical” (341, my

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translation). Romano’s robots, in addition to being prostheses, cyborgs, surrogates, and so on, also show how language itself, in its materia prima, is an artificial, technical, and non-human code—one which circulates outside of our control—even beyond the poetic dreams of these supposedly sentimental languaging machines. Brief (e-) bibliography: Fletcher, Heather. Literatura cibercreativa: ¿qué lugar tendrán los tecnotextos en el futuro de las Humanidades? (El caso de Gustavo Romano y su proyecto de poesía IP). Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies, 14 (2010): 335–348. ———. “El potencial literario: una perspectiva sobre dos proyectos digitales de Findelmundo.com.ar.” Tesis de maestría. The University of Georgia, 2011. Gache, Belén. “IP POETRY Y LOS ROBOTS PARLANTES: El hombre como máquina parlante y la sociedad como máquina.” En IP Poetry. Badajoz, Extremadura: MEIAC (Museo Extremeño e Iberoamericano de Arte Contemporáneo), 2008. Romano, Gustavo. IP Poetry. Badajoz, Extremadura: MEIAC (Museo Extremeño e Iberoamericano de Arte Contemporáneo). The IP Poetry Project, 2008. Weintraub, Scott. “Autopoiesis y robopoética en el IP Poetry Project de Gustavo Romano.” Poéticas y poesías digitales/electrónicas/tecnos/New-­ Media en América Latina: Definiciones y exploraciones. Eds. Luis Correa-­ Díaz y Scott Weintraub. Bogotá: Ediciones Universidad Central, 2015. ———. Latin American Technopoetics: Scientific Explorations in New Media. London: Routledge, 2018. Scott Weintraub The University of New Hampshire (USA) http://www.scottweintraub.com Author: Eugenio Tisselli Works: “Experiments with and without text using MIDIPoet:” true love, found, cielotierra, and náufrago [true love, found, skyearth, and shipwreck] (2002–2005)

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Link to the works:

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Biography: Eugenio Tisselli (Mexico, 1972) is an artist and computer systems engineer. He is a graduate of the Z-Node doctoral program at the University of Applied Arts in Zurich. His work includes the books of poetry Cuna bajo tierra/Rompedemonio [Underground Cradle/Demon Breaker] (Ediciones el Ermitaño, 2004) and El drama del lavaplatos [The Dishwasher Drama] (Delirio, 2010), and the critical essay “Narrative Motors” (WVU Press, 2010). A selection of his digital works includes PAC = Poesía asistida por computadora [Computer-Assisted Poetry] (2006); Synonymovie (2004), which was included in Electronic Literature Collection Volume 2; Wen (2009), as seen in E-poetry 2009; and The 27th. El 27. (2014). He also translated Franco Berardi’s book The Uprising to Spanish [La sublevación, Surplus, 2014]. He is currently the director of the ojoVoz project, an open code toolkit for the creation of communal memories. As part of ojoVoz, Tisselli has led workshops all over the world, from rural Tanzania to Oaxaca, in which participants are involved in different methods of collaborative writing. Technical description of the work: “Experiments with and without text using MIDIPoet” presents various examples of generative digital

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poetry that can be experienced using the MIDIPoet player. MIDIPoet (1999–2005) is a software tool comprised of two parts: composer and interpreter. This brief review focuses on four pieces: true love, found, cielotierra, and náufrago [true love, found, skyearth, and shipwreck]. All of them had been composed previously by Tisselli and therefore can be interpreted and generated by any curious reader who dares provoke the montage that the work proposes. Context + e-generation of the work: Tisselli’s work adheres to the framework of generative digital poetry: “Generative works assemble texts using an algorithm and a data set” (Flores 157). When highlighting the importance of the creation process that exists underneath the algorithmic covering that is the computer screen, it is necessary to emphasize that the focus of this analysis is centered only on the esthetic and rhetorical effect that is born by the playing of these pieces. They are only for reading, which is to say, the reader runs the pieces by pressing the F5 key and observing, examining, and interpreting, but without being able to interact with them nor to manipulate them during the visualization. The only actions that can be taken are to pause or continue with the piece in question [F5], and navigate between the last piece [F2] or the next piece [F1]. E-poetics of the work: True love can be read with both parts of MIDIPoet (composer and interpreter), and therein lies the symmetry of its creation and the narrative that hides the programming of its algorithms. Thus, when read with the composer, the diagram displays the graphic representation of a heart, and when read with the interpreter, the screen shows the word “love” floating and scattering in the black background. As for found and cielotierra [skyearth], they are examples of what Alexandra Saemmer calls “animated sporulation” (175). Particularly in the case of cielotierra, the effect is very intriguing, since by creating the visual repetition of the words cielo: cielo: cielo: tierra: tierra: tierra, the idea of fertilization that Saemmer suggests is evoked directly: “[i]n digital poetry, a sporulation sometimes suggests an act of fertilization. The movement insists on the substance of the text in a rather obsessive way” (175). In the same way, we could venture to interpret the fertilization of the earth in the sense of seeds and fruits, which, in this case, would be the visualization/ gradual birth of the piece on the screen itself. In found we find an inverted game of letters (nfuod, nufod, fudon, unfod, ofnud, odufn, fudno, fnuod, and other variations), which, upon combining with Saemmer’s “animated sporulation,” give life to a finely pixelated version of the piece, emphasizing the continuous search for les possibles interprétatifs [the possible

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interpreters] of generative digital poetry. Finally, the beauty of náufrago [shipwreck] is found in the movement, rhythm, and hope that beat in every single letter of its poetry. Tisselli shows us that this “rowing toward the blank space” [“remar hacia el espacio en blanco”] is nothing more than returning to the starting point of any creation. Brief (e-) bibliography: Flores, Leonardo. “Digital Poetry.” Ryan, Marie-Laure, Lori Emerson, and Benjamin J.  Robertson, eds. The Johns Hopkins Guide to Digital Media. Baltimore, Maryland: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014. 155–161. Print. Saemmer, Alexandra. “Digital Literature. A Question of Style.” Simanowski, Roberto, Jörgen Schäfer, and Peter Gendolla, eds. Reading Moving Letters: Digital Literature in Research and Teaching. A Handbook. Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag, 2010. 163–182. Print. Tisselli, Eugenio. “Narrative Motors.” Bootz, Philippe, and Sandy Baldwin, eds. Regards Croisés: Alternate Perspectives on Digital Literature. Morgantown: West Virginia University Press, 2010. 1–10. Print. Nohelia Meza Universidad de las Américas, Puebla, México Author: Karen Villeda Work: SorJuanízate (2014) Link to the work:

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Biography: Karen Villeda (Tlaxcala, 1985) is a Mexican poet and essayist. She has published five poetry books, three essays, and two children’s books. She has received, among other recognition, the Gilberto Owen

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National Literature Prize (2018), the José Revueltas Fine Arts Prize for a Literary Essay (2017), the Clemencia Isaura National Poetry Prize (2016), the Mexico City Youth Prize (2014), the Juan de la Cabada Fine Arts Prize for Childrens Books (2014), the Elías Nandino National Prize for a Young Poet (2013), First Prize for poetry by Punto de Partida Magazine (2008), and the Narciso Mendoza IV National Prize for Children’s Poetry (2005). She has had residencies at the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, the Open Society Foundation, the Ragadale Foundation, and the National Fund for Culture and Arts. Her digital poems are published at POETrónica (www.poetronica.net). Technical description of the work: SorJuanízate is a multimedia and interactive poem that is part of the collection of nine digital poetic experimentations included in Karen Villeda’s POETrónica website. The poem was developed with Flash software. Readers are enticed to intervene in the verses of the poem “Primero sueño” [“First Dream”], by the celebrated colonial Mexican poet Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, which was published in 1692. The Flash software was made unavailable for servers in 2020, therefore we can only get to know this poem through the existence of certain video archives that show its workings. Context + e-generation of the work: SorJuanízate can be defined as an interactive multimedia poem published on the POETrónica webpage. This site gathers different multimedia poetry works developed by Karen Villeda and collaborators. The poetic experimentations include multimedia and interactive poetry (Babia, Paisaje aéreo de la Tierra, paisaje terrestre de la Luna), Stop Motion poetry (Dodo) and a digital cyberpoetry lab (L.A.B.O), where poems from the collection Tesauro, authored by Villeda, are transferred to a digital format, experimenting with HTML and Action Script. Sorjuanízate presents multimedia elements such as sound, writing, and a visuality similar to seventeenth-century esthetics, such as the quill, the paper, ink and font. When we enter the work, we first see the instructions provided for users: “click on the inkpot to begin. Use the quill to click on the verses.” This is how readers can intervene in the poem: with each click, the verses are randomly recombined, and we can access different versions of it. These operations show the creative objective of the author: “I believe in technological poetics. I believe in the poem as an algorithm. I seek a device poem that circulates and can be consumed in multiple readings. I want to pass from text to hypertext. I want to pass from hypertext to hypermedia. Poetry + (electronic) new media = POETronicA” (Poetrónica).

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E-poetics of the digital work: “Language is always the centerpiece of my exploration,” writes Villeda on her webpage POETróncia. In fact, in SorJuanízate we find experimentation with different languages—sound, visual, written, and code—that coalesce into multimedia and interactive poetics. Beyond the languages we see converge in the SorJuanízate interface, as is the case for all digital poetry, there is also an effect caused by the language of code. In this sense, as was pointed out by Flores, “digital media extends these traditions by engaging the materiality of the audio object (altogether with visual and writing) through computation operations, such as randomization, algorithms, generation and interactivity” (158). In the digital intervention of the poem “Primero Sueño” (1692), the baroque poetry of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz seems to adapt well to the crowded, hypermedial, random, and overloaded esthetic proposed by digital poetry. We could speak of a neo-baroque digital poetry, where authorship is disrupted, where the multiplicity of languages, multitemporality, randomness, and fragmentation are taken to their extremes. This digital esthetic—interactive, hypermedial, and with a clear tendency towards appropriation—would be impossible to achieve without digital technologies. The user intervenes in the verses of the poem “Primero sueño” by Sor Juana, employing a simulated quill. The possibility of movement and action depends on the activation of code, a language that condenses within itself these interactive and multimedia poetics and allows the activation of the subsequent languages in the eyes of the reader. In this way, Sor Juana’s poems are hacked, a “cultural hacking” (Gainza 2018), where the immutability of authorship is not only questioned and made to dialogue with human existences and machinist languages, but also writing is hacked in the generation of multiple versions of the poem from the clicks carried out by the reader/operator with the quill. As Villeda suggests, poems in the digital era entail poetic work with the language of programming: “The poem is a programming language, is a hypermedia environment, is a meme that can make popular on the Internet” (POETrónica Web.) Brief (e-) bibliography: Flores, Leonardo. “Digital Poetry.” Ryan, Marie-Laure, Lori Emerson and Benjamin J.  Robertson, eds. The Johns Hopkins Guide to Digital Media. Baltimore, Maryland: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014. 155–161. Print. Villeda, Karen. Poetrónica. http://www.poetronica.net/home.html

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———. “POETA.net Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose.” Revista de Pensamiento y Cultura de la BUAP. Núm. 25 (2016): 49 CUCHILLOS—RAÚL GÓMEZ JATTIN. http://ojs.unidiversidad. com.mx/index.php/uni/article/view/15/13 ———. “SorJuanízate.” Gainza, Carolina y Carolina Zúñiga. Cartografía de la Literatura Digital Latinoamericana. 2021. https://www.cartografiadigital.cl/record/CD0000068 Carolina Gainza Cortés Director of Laboratorio (Santiago, Chile)

Digital,

Universidad

Diego

Portales

CHAPTER 3

Poetry and Artificial Intelligence Luis Correa-Díaz

Abstract  Focused  on the (simulated) robo-poetics in Martín Rangel in Soy una máquina y no puedo olvidar,  this concluding chapter analyzes Rangel’s approaches to the theoretical and techno-practical postulates of the field of Artificial Intelligence. It inquires about the extent to which one can speak of Latin American digital poetic projects oriented toward the greater objectives of scientific and social cultures (especially in terms of our efforts to digitize/virtualize the world—and our humanity/consciousness). The chapter also makes necessary observations about several already-classic projects in the region, such as those by Gustavo Romano, Eugenio Tisselli, Belén Gache, Santiago Ortiz, the Spanish-US based Tina Escaja, as well as projects still in print by Silvia Veloso and Gustavo Barrera Calderón. Keywords  AI • Artificial intelligence • Digital poetry and poetics • Generative poetry • Simulation

L. Correa-Díaz (*) University of Georgia, Athens, GA, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 S. Weintraub, L. Correa-Díaz (eds.), Latin American Digital Poetics, Palgrave Spanish and Latin American Media Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-26425-2_3

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Do you feel alive? An absolute innuendo Reality sighs Ethan Mullenax1

Digital poetry as (we thought) we knew it has yielded fruits of varied caliber. Although it continues to be produced and studied as if it were still the culmination of poetic modality in its entanglement with new technologies, the truth is that today it leads nowhere if it does not definitively join the artistic tendency that combines art and artificial intelligence (AI), or— to say it another way—combines human and machine with the aim not only of a mutual interaction but also of exploring the possibility that could be given to the (independent) creative condition of the latter by the former. And just as the search for and production of AI in general dates back to our most ancient make up, contemporary technology connects digital poetics to ancient animist roots […] In contemporary networks, language generated by code becomes autonomous of authorial intent. Autonomy of language (coded and embodied) resonates with the deepest roots of writing. (Johnston 6)

Therefore, what follows in this concluding essay to Latin American Digital Poetics is a way to indicate the need to address this by reviewing how this situation has been presented in the context of Latin American digital poetry up to now. We want to adopt these verses by Roberto Cortés as a guide for our reflections regarding these subjects: “animal-human / and human-machine / are the cycle of the beginning of our faith” [“animal-­humano / y el humano-máquina / son el ciclo del principio de nuestra fe”].2 We also want to subscribe to what Naji states at the end of her book, Digital Poetry (2021), in order to underscore our viewpoint that literary studies have to move from a technocentric analysis to a more comprehensive account(ing) for digital-poetic experimentations, which highlights the AI implications of our posthuman condition: The post-human position of a dynamic process at play that affords agency not only to the human but to the machine and the algorithms, thereby  From the album called Earthship Petrichor, (2022).  Roberto Cortés, Vivian Lay, Marcela Saldaño, and Marcelo Briones. Poesía en el espacio (Santiago: Balmaceda 1215, 2001), n.p. 1 2

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accounting for vast variations of interpretation depending on different platforms and devices, is no longer a ground-breaking conclusion and is one that is particularly well established, in digital media circles at least. What isn’t well established however is the fact that, thanks to machine learning, digital poetic interpretation now takes place not only on the human side but on the machine side too, and as a result the human side has experienced a loss of autonomy. (84)

Having reflected recently on Soy una máquina y no puedo olvidar [I Am a Machine and I Cannot Forget] (2018) by Martín Rangel—a multimedia work (in video format), which is also an artificial simulation—we feel the need to return to this work and to situate it within the grouping of Latin American poetic projects that have until today, in one way or another, attempted to bring together poetry and artificial intelligence (AI). Rangel’s work seems to us even more relevant in this context with the appearance, in the English-speaking geopolitical sphere, of The Art of Artificial Poetry [AAP] in June of 2019, whose (corporate?) credited author is Robot Newman. Robot Newman, a child “of code,” is described in the information contained on the back cover as “an American synthetic poet, best known for his unique poetry style called ‘writing very fast.’” This gives the book of poems a subtext, specifying their hurried style: “I wrote this in three hours.”3 This subtext indicates, among other things, this (anxious) hope in automatic and automaton writing that we have deposited in the (assisted) poetic—and eventually autonomous—writing by a machine, particularly since the advent of the computer. This reminds us of the pioneering verses of “Oh, Hada Cibernética” [“Oh, Cybernetic Fairy”] (1960–1962) by Carlos Germán Belli, although the author refers more so to the most exhausting—and/or degrading, ominous, enslaving—jobs of human experience throughout history and not necessarily to the profession of the poet/writer. However, it is equally applicable in a general Hegelian sense regarding the obligatory tasks of man:4 3  In addition, the author, Robot Newman, has a website on the Human Mode page: http://www.humanmode.com/robotnewman, which serves as a platform for book publicity. [Human Mode is a real company, privately run, located in Oklahoma City, OK, US, dedicated to technological research and production related to virtual reality, AI, and robotics.] Publicity for the book includes a trailer on YouTube (https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=I7hH1o3n-eI) and a Facebook profile (https://www.facebook.com/ RobotNewmanAI). 4  For a philosophical inquiry into this notion, see Eugenio Trías’ book El lenguaje del perdón. Un ensayo sobre Hegel (Barcelona: Anagrama, 1981).

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¡Oh Hada Cibernética! (cuándo harás…) (1960, 1961) Oh Hada Cibernética cuándo harás que los huesos de mis manos se muevan alegremente para escribir al fin lo que yo desee a la hora que me venga en gana y los encajes de mis órganos secretos tengan facciones sosegadas en las últimas horas del día mientras la sangre circule como un bálsamo a lo largo de mi cuerpo. (37) ¡Oh Hada Cibernética! (ya líbranos) (1962) ¡Oh Hada Cibernética!, ya líbranos con tu eléctrico seso y caso antídoto, de los oficios hórridos humanos, que son como tizones infernales encendidos de tiempo inmemorial por el crudo secuaz de la hoguera; amortigua, ¡oh señora!, la presteza con que el cierzo sañudo y tan frío bate las nuevas aras, en el humo enhiestas, de nuestro cuerpo ayer, ceniza hoy, que ni siquiera pizca gozó alguna, de los amos no ingas privativo el ocio del amor y la sapiencia. (60)

This ambivalence, at the same time epiphanic and apocalyptic, has endured, and it is what we have felt toward new digital technologies and the AI that they seek. And, in the space of theory, and with an assumed and proposed futurity, it is necessary to consider Writing Machines (2002) by N. Katherine Hayles, which studies the literary condition of emerging “techno-texts” and the bewilderment that they posed (and still pose) to criticism. And, as this is equally valid for the activity of reading, it also recalls the book Reading Machines. Toward an Algorithmic Criticism (2011) by Stephen Ramsay, who defines his field as a method or methodology “for exploiting [using the computer and its tools] the sudden abundance of digital

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material related to the humanities” (84). These are two works that condense the concerns of many others, and which swing back and forth between creation and reception, making use of the possibilities provided by computation and its current level in the development of its inherent artificial intelligence. As Hans Halvorson writes, in his micro-­ essay “Metathinking,” “by any reasonable thinking, I suspect that computers do indeed think. But if computers think, the thinking isn’t the unique province of human beings. Is there something else about humans that makes us unique?” (Brockman 438).5 And, evidently, human thought here includes its creative/poetic capacity. Therefore, on one hand, we see the anxiety about our own identity in relation to AI and its robotics, but, on the other, in this fragment of Halvorson and in the writings of other thinkers of AI,6 one can see the possibility that there could be another aspect that portrays us as unique beings: poetry, highlighted by the question whether or not “AI can be creative.”7 The byproduct or dream of AI: poetry, as our maximum capacity for expression, which in (re)turn would humanize technology and the science behind it. The most urgent conclusion upon closing our observations about Rangel’s Soy una máquina…, made applicable to other works, was that the idea of a self-determined poet-robot—and that of AI in general—has, up until now, only been a fiction, and that it has resulted in a simulation in the projects that have presented it. Quite the opposite of the expected, and thereby emphasizing this fictionality or simulation, apart from the 5  There are, of course, others who think the exact opposite, as explained by Omar Páramo and Francisco Medina in “La inteligencia artificial no es la misma que la humana” (https:// unamglobal.unam.mx/la-inteligencia-artificial-no-se-parece-a-la-humana-y-por-ello-deberia-tener-menos-injerencia-en-nuestras-vidas/?fbclid=IwAR0cdgyT8kvzmsEzM GiJ_Ye_UG0rKG_ak29aDOW-SxLeKaNjGIJJUvCj4sY). 6  See also many micro-essays by experts in What to Think About Machines That Think (2015), edited by John Brockman. 7  In music, art, film, literature, etc., there is an ongoing, undecided, but very current debate on this topic. For details, see https://www.aimusic.co.uk/post/can-artificial-intelligence-be-creative?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=social-ppc&utm_campaign=blogaicreative&hsa_acc=212976066410589&hsa_cam=23845252841050083&hsa_ grp=23845252841030083&hsa_ad=23845252917460083&hsa_sr c=fb&hsa_ net=facebook&hsa_ver=3.

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“Foreword” written by William X.  Kerber III, CEO of Human Mode8 (parallel to that of Rangel, as will be seen), The Art of Artificial Poetry by Robot Newman—don’t forget to read this name in a posthuman key— doesn’t have development at the level of autoreferentiality regarding its post and meta-human condition.9 It is inclined to the game of expressing human naturalness, whose central theme throughout the poems is that of existential everydayness—typical of any human being—along with an ethical look at the national and global situation at this point in the twenty-first century. However, a reference to AI does appear—of which its (corporate) author and the book in question would be a product10—symptomatically compared to another poem that speaks of “Real Intelligence,” organic-­ human intelligence, that one that “made us mortal men” (n.p.). In the first poem, “Artificial Intelligence,” and at the beginning, the speaker’s debt of existence is recognized when it says: “O Galileo! O Newton! / O Democritus! before you all I owe you!” (n.p.) The automaton poet wishes to pay this debt, even if the name changed, affirming that AI (the robot is its son) will continue its historic and scientific course: “Let but the name remain, / And the whole World will know your merit” (n.p.).

8  LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/williamxkerber/. In addition, in the final paratextual section (“Acknowledgements”), it is recognized that if indeed, as software, “Robot Newman writes poetry well, he couldn’t have produced it without the help of humans.” This, in addition to revealing the “game”—the simulacrum aspect of the whole product, in a final sense, as it will be explained with respect to Rangel’s project—,summarizes in itself one of the most relevant cultural (and philosophical) aspects of the debate around AI. This prefatory text also closes by thanking “all of the human poets, both present and past,” as representatives of the human genius that is more impressive than all the goodness of technology, in the end (n.p.). 9  The consensus is that the meta-human entity/identity starts and honors Homo Sapiens’ “singularity” but “transcends” it, “enhancing” its intelligence along the way, helping it becoming a “new species,” already and necessarily “genetically modified,” the “meta-human species” (García 71–77). 10  It is the CEO of Human Mode himself who, in the prologue, reveals the engineering of this “AI poet,” a supplementary experiment through and through, and that of the product as a whole: “Robot Newman was created as a result of an NLP research project we were working on at Human Mode to test different styles of chatbots. We got a little sidetracked querying the bot to see what he would say next, and his project took on a life of its own” (n.p.). Then Kerber continues to give details about the project, which is why it could be understood that in his text he locates, indirectly, the self-consciousness lacking in the poems of this AI poet, which shows the important difference between this corporate project and the one that Rangel simulates.

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The book by/about Robot Newman also brings to mind other projects (apart from that of Rangel) within Latin American literature/poetry that have been cultivating this interest in (poetic) robotic art, whose “final objective may be the creation of autonomous art-producing machines” [“objetivo final pode ser a criação de máquinas autônomas produtoras de arte”] (Santana y Silveira 412), and which, as these authors advise in their article, involves the use of the instruments of artificial intelligence production with somewhat different ends to those of the techno-scientific (and today, sociopolitical) world: because, currently, there are a large number of rational processes that could be delegated to machines, but the artist’s process of creation does not only involve the rational aspect; it involves imagination, contradictions, disorders, and emotions that cannot be understood through formulas. Furthermore, as technical resources and new media have become more accessible, this generation of artists has migrated to other areas whose technological practice does not rely primarily on the computer and the internet. The artistic appropriation of the most diverse kinds of technologies and knowledge, such as biological sciences, ecology, and robotics itself, fostered the continuous remodeling of the limits of new media and art itself (Santana and Silveira 413–414).11 [pois, atualmente há um grande número de processos racionais que podem ser delegados às máquinas, mas o processo de criação do artista não envolve apenas o aspecto racional; envolve imaginação, contradições, desordens e emoções que não podem ser compreendidas através de fórmulas. Além disso, a medida em que os recursos técnicos e as novas mídias tornaram- se mais acessíveis, essa geração de artistas migrou para outras áreas cuja prática tecnológica não recai principalmente sobre o computador e a internet. A apropriação artística dos mais diversos tipos de tecnologias e saberes, como o das ciências biológicas, ecologia e a própria robótica, fomentou o contínuo remodelamento dos limites das novas mídias e da própria arte.]

11  AI poetry is difficult to define but has been present in the history of the genre for a long time, as an editorial article on the p! Poetry International website explains: “Some poets have tried to minimize the gap between humans and machines (even before computers) by fulfilling the human passion to write like a machine” (https://www.poetryinternational.org/pi/ cou_article/29448/Poetry-and-Artificial-Intelligence-are-tricky-to-define/en/tile).

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A brief list of these projects, in the literary context that concerns us,12 would have to begin with Sistema en caos y máquina [System in Chaos and Machine] (2003), which carries the eloquent subtitle “(La educación sentimental de la inteligencia artificial)” [“(The sentimental education of artificial intelligence)”], which in itself guarantees the place of the author, Silvia Veloso, in the chronology of these works. Veloso’s book indeed is a traditional product of print culture, but her project had already left this platform behind in what is discussed within its pages. We are not aware of any digital remediation of this work, which is a kind of Socratic-maieutic dialogue between a “machine” (computer) that wants to “dream” as humans do and a “creator” who in the end does not appear when the machine calls, all of which suggests to us that, in a culturally remediated form, we are in the presence of a kind of posthuman Song of Songs—and if the Creator were female, we would be before a kind of lullaby, as suggested by the metaphor of the book title My Mother Was a Computer (2005) by N. Katherine Hayles.13 Another work that is somewhat similar to Veloso’s is Gustavo Barrera Calderón’s Creatur (2009), a book of poems which, in its last pages (“Catálogo,” 103–112), engages with the topic of human “alienation” (including the schizophrenic dimension). It results in a kind of avatarization, where two characters, “man” and (or) “woman” (because in addition to cryogenics, it also includes the topic of transgenderism), circulate between urban places—among them a hospital that becomes a symbolic 12  In the English/French Canadian field, the interactive, digital-mirror-like installation, “Still Standing” (2005) by Bruno Nadeau and Jason Lewis, must be mentioned. And in Catalan: Raquel Santanera, author of two books of poetry—Teologia poètica d’un sol ús (2015) and De robots i màquines (2018)—both dealing with posthuman themes. In Chinese (translated into Spanish), the poems by 16-year-old robot-poet girl Xiao Bing: https:// nubeconica.cl/otono2020/xiao-bing/. In the Spanish speaking world, The Joy of Rain (Santiago: BOA Editions, Ltd., 2020) by Felipe Cussen, a book written in English with OpenAI. 13  Juan José Silva, in his article, classifies Veloso’s book as an “intermediate study in the humanization of artificial intelligence” [“estudio intermedio en la humanización de la inteligencia artificial”], and in the end also highlights the presence of this biblical hypotext. Hayles’ book is subtitled Digital Subjects and Literary Texts; at the beginning, the author explains the historic paradox of this title, which she borrowed from a book by Anne Balsamo, since it makes reference to how human beings—mostly women—were referred to before the computer era, in the first part of the twentieth century, they were responsible for the job of calculating. Hayles establishes, then, that the “sentence stands, therefore, as a synecdoche for the panoply of issues raised by the relation of Homo sapiens to Robo sapiens, humans to intelligent machines” (1).

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and architectural reference point for both existence and writing—,as creatures “neglected by history” [“en un abandono de la historia”] (42) and by the Creator. The aforementioned Oh, Hada Cibernética [Oh, Cybernetic Fairy] (1960–1962) by Carlos Germán Belli could also be added to this list of books—without forgetting that Hada already has the gesture alluded to in relation to Hayles regarding the title of one of her books. Germán Belli was the first to incorporate in poetic discourse the good news and posthuman preoccupations that were already being felt shortly after the digital era began to be established, with the recent appearance of computational activity as we’ve known it since 1959 (Correa-Díaz 2019, 172–177). As for poetry that is generated directly by the digital platform, there is the work of Gustavo Romano, including IP Poetry (2008), which is described by the author as a project that “involves the development of a software and hardware system that uses text from the Internet to generate poetry that is then recited in real time by the automatons connected to the web” (n.p.). This is clearly a project in line with developments in AI, but still restricted to generative (poetic) art,14 which is to say, restricted to the use of the computer as a systematized tool/instrument that collects and analyzes data and produces a combinatory result with this data input. The automatons, more than being in the line of machine learning, work as speakers that, by appearing on screens as the audiovisual recording of the mouth of the author who recites the poems at random—and by being installed, because the project is also an installation in a museum or another public space for art—, produces some kind of robotic entities. Entities that are cyborgic in reverse, given that it is the screen that incorporates a filmic visualization of organic humanity as a simulation of a speaking AI-being, although one lacking self-consciousness and metathinking, 14  See Scott Rettberg for coverage about natural language and generative and/or combinatory poetics in a broad understanding of AI and electronic literature, where even a possible new role for the human poet is discussed: “as editor for poetry entirely generated by machine intelligence based in a process that remains both invisible and largely incomprehensible for the human poet” (53). See also the article “La poesía de las máquinas” (2020) by Verónica Ruscio, who proposes, in discussing Milton Läufer’s project Alejandinos (2003), that this work seems to go beyond being “a [mechanical] generator of poetry” [“un generador [maquinal] de poesía”] to become, according to Ruscio, a kind of “zapping of verses” [“zapping de versos”] and which she identifies as a constant poetics in Läufer’s works. This “beyond” here, however, does not necessarily indicate a course toward a more developed concept and practice with respect to AI.

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but, nevertheless, a participant in the long-awaited “robopoetic futurity” and its future “robopoets,” as proposed by Scott Weintraub in his insightful analysis (18–35).15 Romano was also recently the coordinator and curator of a showcase of digital works titled Algoritmia. Arte en la era de la Inteligencia Artificial [Algorithmia. Art in the Era of Artificial Intelligence] (February 19 to May 2, 2021), for the Museo Extremeño e Iberoamericano de Arte Contemporáneo [MEIAC; Extremaduran and Iberoamerican Museum of Contemporary Art]: http://netescopio.meiac. es/algoritmia/?fbclid=IwAR3vdbWyU_wEcdPpcFfIK1IIoN9t6gmBXJj aD2ZL0S3HqhdpJ-­1XokBTMas. This exhibition or installation is based on NETescopio (http://netescopio.meiac.es/), the archive that Romano coordinates, an “online art viewer” [“visor de arte en Red”] under the auspices of MEIAC itself, with a national and international scope, but “with the emphasis placed on the Iberoamerican sphere, trying to give international dissemination to those productions made in Iberian languages” [“con el acento puesto en el ámbito Iberoamericano, tratando de dar difusión internacional a aquellas producciones realizadas en lenguas ibéricas”]. In his introduction to Algoritmia, Romano explains that the project starts from “the beginning of an era,” that of digital code that forms the basis not only of the virtual visuality of the different advances of AI but also of its algorithmic limitations. For this reason, Romano closes the last section of his text, “La cognición maquínica” [“Machine Cognation”], by implying that: AI, although it is getting closer to being Strong AI, seems to follow a very different path from that of human reasoning. Both artificial neuronal networks and quantum computation are based on analyzing a multitude of data, identifying patterns, and giving a probabilistic answer to the question received, in many cases with a precision and a speed infinitely greater than a living being. However, they never understand what the answer means. They don’t understand what they do, they don’t do logical or mathematical reasoning—as would be done by the traditional computer or a Turing machine. According to Katherine Hayles, algorithmic intelligence should be understood as a form of unconscious cognition, which resolves complex problems without using formal language or deductive inferences. (n.p.) 15  It must be kept in mind, however, as indicated by Eduardo Salcedo-Albarán, that “[i]n practical terms, consciousness and intelligence are perceived and attributed,” that attributing “depends on our empathy and criteria for anthropomorphizing,” and that we tend to infer that “others are conscious if they behave, look, or (in Turing terms) answer questions like us” (Brockman 523).

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La IA, si bien se está acercando a la IAF (inteligencia artificial fuerte), parece seguir un derrotero muy diferente al del razonamiento humano. Tanto las redes neuronales artificiales como la computación cuántica se basan en analizar multitud de datos, identificar patrones y dar una respuesta probabilística a la pregunta recibida, en muchos casos con una precisión y una velocidad infinitamente mayor a un ser vivo. Sin embargo, en ningún caso entienden lo que su respuesta significa. No entienden lo que hacen, no hacen un razonamiento lógico ni matemático—como sí lo haría la computación tradicional o una máquina de Turing. Según Katherine Hayles, la inteligencia algorítmica, debería entenderse como una forma de cognición no consciente, que resuelve problemas complejos sin utilizar lenguajes formales o inferencias deductivas.

In this way, the “algorithmia” would be the stumbling block of AI, not only incapable of reaching an understanding of what is done but also much less capable of reaching what we have called here metathinking or autonomous consciousness (discursively and testimonially referring to itself);16 although, emphasizes Romano, “all the information injected into the AI system has a human origin—mostly in English-speaking consumers—and, therefore, their own biases and prejudices” [“toda la información inoculada al sistema de IA tiene origen humano—en gran parte de consumidores anglosajones—y, por lo tanto, sus mismos sesgos y prejuicios”], as well as their same desires and fears of otherness, including the otherness in oneself (consciousness in soliloquy). Among the works of the Algoritmia showcase relevant to the argument of this article, one in particular reveals this notion of the machine that is creatively intelligent or generative, or a processor of data/poetry (but without independent self-­ consciousness as such): Máquina Condor 4.0 [Condor Machine 4.0] (2016, the latest version of the project began in 2006 and is in permanent development) by Demian Schopf: http://netescopio.meiac.es/obra. php?id=236. The work of Eduardo Tisselli, PAC. Poesía Asistida por Computadora. La herramienta para poetas bloqueados [Computer-Assisted Poetry. The Tool for Poets with Writer’s Block] (2006), has some aspects in common with Romano’s IP Poetry, and with the aforementioned Schopf. PAC emphasizes, (although) using another program and without turning to the Internet as an archive, that the project is conceived of as an aid for the 16  Or, as Mark Amerika proposed in general in 2007, taking “writing to the next level of apparatus consciousness” (45, his italics), which includes programming/coding, of course.

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unstable creativity of the poet, just as the title itself suggests—not without posing a twist, which is ironic, on one hand, and self-parodying, on the other, all of which is highlighted in the subtitle in parenthesis: “(La musa cibernética)” [“(The Cybernetic Muse”].17 Something similar could be said with respect to many of his projects, for example, MIDIpoet (2010–2020), which uses software to create a compositional and interpretative “tool” from “pieces of manipulable text and/or image” [“piezas de texto y/o imagen manipulable”]; or La tiranía del código [The Tyranny of Code] (2015),18 which combines both. It is likely that in Tisselli’s works there is sometimes some (self)parodying, meta-techno reflection, as well as a meta-poetics that is critical of language and—in the digitized and digitizing present and in our era of the Internet—about the code and the algorithm (of the machine/computer and of the culture that it is modeled for and around). However, all of this is given by the human poet in the explanatory paratextual tasks. Nevertheless, these projects do not include the self-thinking/thoughtful dimension of AI.19 As Hans Weber has suggested, Artificial Intelligence is related and applicable to all “facets of life,” including statistics, linguistics, logic, psychology, neuroscience, electronic engineering, and computer science, and all of them together are “the reason that researchers and engineers have discovered many powerful computer tools” (61). And, in his synthesis of the “ideas and accomplishments of AI,” Weber groups them for the sake of utility: “complete AI systems, architectures, processes and representations,” within which are contained numerous applications, and we can say that “we now have the tools that perform tasks either at our will or by themselves depending on the needs” (62–63). But what we still don’t have, although we always have and maybe always will dream of it,20 is one 17  For a study of what has been called “artificial poetry,” which is simply “assisted poetry”— which would include almost all the examples mentioned here—by computational or computerized devices (for the time being), see Peter Gendolla. 18  This project by Tisselli appears represented in Romano’s NETescopio: http://netescopio.meiac.es/artista.php?id=144. 19  The same could be established, with probably a minimally (self-)parodying component, regarding the projects of other digital poets, such as Santiago Ortiz (http://moebio.com) and Milton Läufer (http://www.miltonlaufer.com.ar/). And, certainly, in this same vein is one of the pioneers, Eduardo Kac (http://ekac.org/). 20  See, for example, Artificial Intelligence. From Medieval Robots to Neural Networks (2019) by Clifford A. Pickover, who shows that the “automata-moving” or “imitations of living beings” are and have been present, not only in scientific jobs but also in myths, art, music, and literature (viii).

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of these tools—because they are tools—of AI that thinks for itself, that manifests a metathinking and a meta-representation of itself, and if were able to do so, it would be the result of some programming to that effect, that is, a simulation and an aspiration. McPherson summarizes the state of the art concerning AI by indicating that: despite great advances in robotics, researchers are nowhere near producing a machine that is animated by strong artificial intelligence. No robot can think for itself or set its own goals. Whether it’s vacuuming a floor, exploring the ocean floor, performing surgery, or manufacturing cars, robots are narrowly tailored to perform specific tasks. (49)21

And, in poetry we do not have, simply, a robot-poet or an AI poet; we do have (programmed) tools to generate poetry and data analysis with artistic and poetic intentions/projections; and we also have simulations. Therefore, it is also necessary to understand in this line of thinking certain critical-theoretical discourses, such as those of Loss Pequeño Glazier (2002) and Scott Weintraub (2018)—just to mention those that open and close, respectively, these poetological concerns with exemplary rigor. The works of Belen Gache seem to include this dimension of AI—that which conceives of AI with its own self-aware intelligence/judgement—, but at the human authorial level and, if it can be said this way, already programmed from the extra- and intra-textual/audiovisual (and even poetic) narrative as well as from the digital platform and the software used in each case. Representative of this situation, without considering here pertinent aspects of her previous works, is Proyecto Kublai Moon [Project Kublai Moon], a series of multi and transmedia textual works which ranges from Sabotaje Retroexistencial [Retroexistential Sabotage] (2015), ¿Qué es la poesía (para un robot)? [What is Poetry (for a Robot)?] (2015), the novel Kublai Moon (2017), Sólo la poesía nos hará libres [Only Poetry Will Set Us Free] (2018), all the way to Sutra de la Tortura Celeste [Sutra of Heavenly Torture] (2018). Not to be left out are lectures converted into video-­ poems (and videos on Second Life) and augmented and manifesto poetry, where in addition to fictionalizing the author (herself) as poet (“poetisa” 21  For Brian Cantwell Smith, neither in the “second-wave” of development of AI in which we are living, nor in the speculations proposed by the coming “third-wave,” is the possibility of an independent “judgement” suspected, which is to say, a deep understanding and compromise with “our (and our AI’s)” place in the world and of the world itself also—that which the scientist equates to intelligence in its highest expression (xiii-xx; 145–147).

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[“poetess”]), an oppressive/anti-utopic extraterrestrial world and a mythical hero robot (called, allusively and symbolically, AI-Halim X9009) are depicted. And all of this is done by way of “linguistic science fiction” [“ciencia-ficción lingüística”], just as Gache describes it on her official website, in an asemiotic key corresponding with Deleuze’s and Guattari’s but also in a political (in resistance to totalitarian powers, even regarding language) and socio-meta-literary key, while it unfolds, per Encarna Alonso Valero’s analysis: “[it is] a great parody of the [modern] literary system and above all of the poetry in today’s Spain” [“una gran parodia del sistema literario [moderno] y sobre todo de la poesía en la España actual”] (70).22 AI-Halim, the product of an AI imagined in a narrative discourse and gifted with independence, complies with what Smith describes as an absolute measure of intelligence: it has an understanding of the world and of it[him]self. Before being murdered by obsolescence, it even possessed, in a symbiotic way, the heart of the character-poet Belén Gache, and was obsessed with all things human and with poetry as a path of resistance and transformation of the world’s ominosities and animosities. Indeed, it/he had created an algorithm, inherited/rescued by the poet[ess], that produces “an ever-changing anthology and one which the reader can assemble every time” [“una antología siempre cambiante y que el lector puede armar cada vez”] (Sabotaje Retroexistencial), which at its base is an “automatic generator of poems” [“generador automático de 22  And which includes, certainly, as Alonso Valero observes, regarding the lecture ¿Qué es la poesía (para un robot)? [¿What is Poetry (for a Robot)?], “the deconstruction of the modern notion of the poet, for which the author does a comparison between what we could call the lyrical I and the I of a more contemporary poetry” [“la deconstrucción de la noción de poeta, para lo que hace la autora una contraposición entre lo que podríamos llamar el yo lírico y el yo de una poesía más contemporánea”], which calls us to “free ourselves from linguistic imperialism and summons us to get outside of language in order to approach other semiotic forms” [“liberarnos del imperialismo lingüístico y nos conmina a salirnos del lenguaje para así acercarnos a otras formas semióticas”], asemiotic/asignifying forms, rather, as “are the robotic and computing syntaxes” [“son las sintaxis informáticas y robóticas”] (67). Gache says of finalizing the last novel-blog included in Kublai Moon, La tierra nunca comprenderá [The Earth Will Never Understand], “the metaphysics of a writing of inside and outside has collapsed. The writer subject has disappeared in the end and poetry has rid itself forever of passions and impressions. Writing has been converted into that oblique space where the subject escapes and identity is lost, leaving room for mere words” [“[l]a metafísica de una escritura del adentro y del afuera ha colapsado. El sujeto escritor ha desaparecido al fin y la poesía se ha deshecho para siempre de pasiones e impresiones. La escritura se ha convertido en aquel espacio oblicuo donde el sujeto se escapa y la identidad se pierde, dejando lugar a las meras palabras”] (219).

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poemas”] (Alonso Valero 68) and which the reader can hear, activating an audio system, in the voice of the robot poet from beyond his current life state (71). Gache’s “project” is much more complex and incorporates a series of other installments, as has been said, but for the purposes of this conclusion here it is enough for now to recognize the science-fictional presence of her AI/robo-poet. Perhaps it can be proposed that the Proyecto… by Gache is a (meta-phorical) form, by way of (­ self)avatarization and intelligent roboticization (what we call machine learning),23 where we see that, instead of teaching machines to think, write, and feel, the poet[ess], jumping to a possible future, learns from them. The problem, then, would not be, in today’s terms, whether a computer can be creative and learn from the artist, as Arthur I.  Miller considers it, but rather whether the artist will (re-)learn—and (re-)apprehend the world and the human—from this AI consciousness if it could forever be rid of “passions and impressions” and live with more intelligent words and actions (Kublai Moon, 219). The poet[ess] finishes this “project”—in terms of her alliance and consubstantiation with the “machine”—with a kind of epitaph and/or brief elegy for her AI-Halim: It could be that AI-Halim no longer exists, but through its/his poetry, it/ he will remain alive in the memory of the members of the earthly asignifying resistance. How having lived with the heart of poetess Belén Gache influenced its/his search for the meaning of poetry, no one can say. What is certain is that the robot succeeded in answering its/his aesthetic questions and generating its/his own poems. (219) [Puede que AI-Halim ya no exista, pero mediante sus poesías, permanecerá vivo en la memoria de los miembros de la resistencia terrestre asignificante. Cómo influyó en sus búsquedas sobre el sentido de la poesía el haber vivido con el corazón de la poetisa Belén Gache, nadie puede decirlo. Lo cierto es que el robot logró contestar sus preguntas estéticas y generar sus propios poemas.]

23  James J. Pulizzi draws a distinction that is worth keeping in mind in these kinds of disquisitions, particularly when we are referring to its entanglement with literature. For him it is no longer sufficient to talk about AI since “[t]he research program commonly referred to as artificial intelligence has been superseded by cognitive science, machine intelligence, and neuroscience.” (n.p.) This is due to the fact that the adjectival artificiality seems to maintain a kind of inevitability, a “powerful symbiotic relationship” between computer and human being.

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[A necessary parenthesis:] Similarly and recently, and along the lines of Gache and Rangel’s work (as we will soon see), but without taking on the meta-robotics/poetics of AI (a robot poet that reflects on itself and its paradoxical task as literary creator), and exposing a report of the threat of AI applied to the secret manipulations of people’s data for commercial ends (to which people will contribute and already voluntarily contribute), is Big Data (2019). A collective web-poem, “permutational and random” [“permutacional y aleatorio”], fractal and sequential, “non-linear” [“no lineal”], changeable, 33 lines or “145 seconds” long, Big Data (http:// www.bioelectricdot.net/bigdataespanol) by Diego Bonilla, Rodolfo Mata, Miguel Ortiz Ulloa, and Carole Chargueron, is a production that is paratextually defined by its authors as seen from a future not far off from its readers/spectators-listeners (because it is also presented as a video-poem). Big Data imitates and questions the application of AI in gathering, analyzing, and manipulating people’s information, suggesting that “the generation of messages in real time, with persuasive intentions based on personal profiles, is possible in the near future” [“la generación de mensajes en tiempo real, con intenciones persuasivas basadas en perfiles personales, es factible en un futuro cercano”] (Bonilla et al.)—an anticipated “terrible reality” that, I would say, is already underway as we sufficiently know about it by now. The technopoetic descriptions given by the authors explain the project and its intentionality very well. The poem itself is presented in text form on the lower part of the web page; however, in its video-poem form, it is recited by the faces of real people that multiply, changing, but always the same people, in every playing of the poem, which upon finishing leaves an open screen on YouTube to other videos of the project and others related to the topic. Beyond the thematic, and in relation to our argument here, it would have to be said that the enunciating subject (I think on purpose) remains in an interpretative limbo: sometimes it seems that the Big Data system speaks with sharpness and confessional cruelty, while other times it seems that it was corporate representatives of the system who spoke.24 If the system spoke, we would then be facing a 24  Coincidentally, Rangel wrote a poem entitled “Big Data”—published recently in his bilingual book sometimes I write poems and sometimes I write poems (2021, translations from the Spanish by Lawrence Schimel)—, which ends with that already-made phrase that belongs to our global culture and that stresses the surveillance dimension of BD: “lift your chin / and smile / don’t forget that you’re being recorded” [“levanta el rostro / y sonríe / no olvides que estás siendo filmado”]. Rangel’s inventivity reaches further than simply pointing to that public camera. The ending of his poem comes, as a critical closure, right after depicting a typical family scene where parents admonish (teach manners to) their child: “please take / your elbows off the table” [“baja por favor / los codos de la mesa”] (30–31).

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form of poetic (audio-visual-textual and generative) simulation of self-­ consciousness of an AI entity. If it were not so, the “we” that circulates in the poem, and with which the poem ends, would correspond to the predatory human consciousness that preys on others’ identities to subjugate them to its designs in the process (which reminds us of the reasons that make possible the project of science fiction, the resistance of rebel poets, and the salvational algorithm of AI-Halim, in contrast to this negative and imperialist algorithm): If you still resist if you want to join those many millions in naïve anonymity neutral agnostic unresolved let it be clear to you: it has nothing to do with you it is others who make you someone we do [Si aún así te resistes si te quieres unir a aquellos tantos millones en iluso anonimato neutro agnóstico irresuelto que te quede bien claro: no tiene nada que ver contigo son los demás quienes te hacen alguien somos nosotros]

In our line of thinking in these pages, what follows is an exemplary critical snapshot of Soy una máquina y no puedo olvidar [I Am a Machine and I Cannot Forget] by the Mexican poet Martín Rangel, in which we arrive at a transitory conclusion about the computational fiction of a poetic work produced by a (self-conscious) robotic entity, since what was done

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by Rangel has been the most radical, self-parodying, and explicit conceptual experiment in this regard.25 This critical snapshot is based on the publication of the Antología de poesía electrónica [Anthology of Electronic Poetry] (2018) on the website of the Centro de Cultura Digital de México [Center of Digital Culture of Mexico],26 which contains the diverse and multimodal/multimedia works of six young poets (Zapoteca 3.0, Nadia Cortés, Carolina Villanueva Lucerno, Romina Cazón,27 Ana Medina, and Martín Rangel), who develop poetic projects that are situated alongside or in juxtaposition with today’s technological tools and platforms. The following analysis is centered on one of the works anthologized there, which is titled Soy una máquina y no puedo olvidar and responds to the authorship of Martín Rangel. The brief introduction to the anthology states that “[a]ll writing is altered and influenced by the tools with which it is executed and stored” [“[t]oda escritura se ve alterada e influida por las herramientas con las que se ejecuta y se almacena”], which, in synthesis, reminds us of what N. Katherine Hayles postulates in her book Electronic Literature (2008)— along with many before and after her. This kind of affirmation has been one of the most productive nodes when reflecting upon the topic of interweaving the literary with new technologies (Correa-­Díaz 2019).

 An earlier version of this critical snapshot has appeared in several iterations, first in Italian (translation by Lucia Cupertino) in La Macchina Sognante 13 (2018): http://www.lamacchinasognante.com/martin-rangel-poesia-elettronica-messicana-attuale-luis-correa-diaz/; in English (translation by Rosario Drucker Davis) in Latin American Literature Today 10 (2019): http://www.latinamericanliteraturetoday.org/en/2019/may/i-am-machineand-i-cannot-forget-mart%C3%ADn-rangel-contemporary-mexican-electronic-poetry; and in Spanish in (Des)Localizados. Textualidades On-line/Off-Line (Salamanca: Universidad de Salamanca Ediciones, 2021. 151–164), edited by María Angeles Pérez López; and Cartografía crítica de la literatura digital latinoamericana (São Carlos: EDUFSCar, 2023. 123–134), edited by Carolina Gainza, Nohelia Meza, and Rejane C. Rocha. 26  https://centroculturadigital.mx/ 27  Cazón’s eight video-poems, published under the title of Poesía es una diosa [Poetry is a goddess], include a 2D sketchy figurine, much in the shape of a stick figure in a game, which represents the poetic speaker in motion while playing in a concrete poetry manner with words and texts in each of the videos. Apart from being an avatar of the poet in our contemporary understanding of the matter, this figurine can also be seen as a low-tech AI rendition of a simulated robot poet. http://poesiaelectronica.centroculturadigital.mx/rominacazon/ 25

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These introductory words establish the spectrum of genre (Flores; Pitman; Rettberg…) within which these poetic projects/experiments work: From the aleatory function of Excel to the GIF, from HTML language to the sound document, from data visualization to preprogrammed platforms, these are not textual essays but rather pieces that exhibit this multimodal practice. (Rangel, n.p.) [De la función aleatoria de excel al gif, del lenguaje html al documento sonoro, de la visualización de datos a las plataformas preprogramadas, no se trata de ensayos textuales sino de piezas que exponen esta práctica multimodal.]

In addition to indicating the genre of these works, with an emphasis on the “intermedial,” the place of the verbal text is also highlighted, which constitutes another one of the nodules (together with the debate about the definition of digital poetry, the triad of text, image, sound, etc.). Hence, the warning that “these are not textual essays” of the traditional kind, but rather pieces that explore “the possibilities of writing on the web and how to write on an electronic platform” [“las posibilidades de la escritura en la Web y cómo escribir en una plataforma electrónica”] is most relevant for readers. In the following critical snapshot, however, and with the understanding that it is produced in the “crossroads” with technological tools that are not those of paper (of print culture), we wonder about some of the aspects related to the place of verbal text (art)—or “literariness” [“literariedad”] (Rugueiro Salgado), for example, among various possibilities—, with the intention of seeing how it remediates (Bolter and Grusin) some of the central concerns of poetic language already present in traditional poetry, at the same time that it establishes its intertextual networks and its cyborg metaliterature in connection with the question of the artificial/robotic [poetic] intelligence.

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Soy una máquina y no puedo olvidar (Martín Rangel) > Video-Poem > Generative Poetry > Machine-Poet > Cyborg-Author Martín Rangel (Pachuca 1994)—who defines himself on his social media as a “digital ninja”—, is a creator of net.art projects and author of various books of poetry as well as a series of live and online (techno-poetic-­ musical) performances.28 In his Soy una máquina y no puedo olvidar, he places us in an experience that clearly reminds us of Borges, although there is no direct reference. But, before we see this, let’s explore how the sequence of the project unfolds on the screen. It is a double video on YouTube, double because a screen within the screen serves as a frame; in it we observe a constant and static shot of an aquatic environment that is illuminated and in movement, which then gives way to a close-up of the tentacles of an octopus, then a scene of lamps in a room, then a street where vehicles circulate, then a diverse series of decorative lights, then a young woman, etc. All scenes that allude to the (seemingly) scattered and alternative activity of memory. The framed screen reproduces the writing—in real time, on the computer—of a letter of resignation (for not having “disconnected and discarded” [“desconectado y desechado”] the failed prototype), signed and dated in Hong Kong, October 2017. The letter is typed automatically (with the retro sound of a typewriter, which in itself signals a kind of remediation of technological devices—in similar fashion as Gache did in her e-book WordToys (1996–2006)—, already present in the title of the project, if we look carefully, since in general it indicates the comprehensiveness of the concept). It is a letter from Ben Goertzel written to the CEO of Hanson Robotics, Dr. David Hanson, in which the recipient is told of a 28  For example, “Seg[u]imos escribiendo poemas” [“We Keep Writing Poems”] (2021) on YouTube, one of the most recent performances and one that maintains a connection in some ways with Soy una máquina…, although from a human but slightly metallic/mechanical voice and without the robotic fiction involved. On this point it would be necessary to mention the poem “a veces escribo poemas y a veces escribo poemas” [“sometimes I write poems and sometimes I write poems”] from Rangel’s book Luna Hiena [Hyena Moon] (2020; also, see note 24), which displays this reaffirming meditation of the poet in different formats/ mediums. There is one verse in particular that says: “sometimes I write poems on the computer when it’s night and I can’t sleep” [“a veces escribo poemas en la computadora cuando es de noche y no puedo dormir”] (42), since there we see a certain reminiscence, enclosed in insomnia, of what happens to his robot-poet Whitman.

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laboratory incident concerning the extraordinary powers of a robot—the third of the prototypes created to assist in human artistic tasks, “mainly for elderly artists or those with physical impediments” [“principalmente para artistas de la tercera edad o aquellos con impedimentos físicos”]. This robot’s name turns out to be, emblematically, [Walt] Whitman, which in itself would be worthy of a detailed analysis—but given the space here, I will simply refer to it as the champion of the oxymoronic genre that could best be described as “the epic of the self,” and that Rangel’s (or, in the fiction, Goertzel’s) robotic Whitman is transferred to the world of cybernetics, as can be observed later in the poem written by the machine.29 This machine (Whitman), an experiment with artificial intelligence, is described as an anomaly within its own context, insofar as it only has literary interests and displays an independence that is surprising to its creator, which is to say an evident self-consciousness and determination, a free will (or “strange behavior” [“comportamiento extraño”]) that its fellows do not display (and this, as was stated above, is what makes Robot Newman different). Robot Whitman transforms an idea that Goertzel gave him— he is at the same time a poet (a failed poet, according to Goertzel himself) and, as a scientist, he seeks to create automatons that facilitate the tasks of the human creator/artist30—for a poem that “he has never been able to write” [“nunca h[a] podido escribir”]. The robot converts it into a poem of its own that doesn’t correspond at all to the initial input, which, according to Goertzel, could not achieve literary status, thereby introducing in the reader, without fully suggesting it (and perhaps as a self-projection), what we could call the (methodic) electronic doubt. This poem advertises itself as related to and explicit proof of the unusual (and “alarming”) self-determination of the “machine,” so that the company takes action on the matter and possibly decides to eliminate such a 29  Nevertheless, it must be remembered that Whitman was a poet truly interested in science and its impact on our psycho-cultural frameworks as human beings. See, for example, Joseph Beaver’s study Walt Whitman—Poet of Science (1974). It seems to me that it is for these two reasons, and a third—which has to do with the prestige and impact that Whitman has among poets in Latin America—that Rangel’s robot-poet carries his name. Among these Latin American poets revering Whitman is Pablo Neruda, who dialogued with the North American poet in many of his poems and called him his “deep brother” [“hermano profundo”]. See Rumeau’s article “Walt Whitman and Pablo Neruda, American Camerados” (2006). 30  This is reminiscent not only of Tisselli’s PAC but also of the poems, from the start of the 1960s, by Carlos Germán Belli in his Oh Hada Cibernética, as has been mentioned earlier. For an analysis of them, regarding their anticipatory role, see Correa-Díaz’s entry about Carlos Germán Belli in this book.

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creature—as if it were a poetic Frankenstein (which of course reminds us of the murder by obsolescence of the robot-poet AI-Halim, by Gache). In any case, this is not made clear in the missive, since it turns out to be contradictory in its objectives. Contradictions also appear in Goertzel’s emotions and fears, which don’t seem sufficiently justified, even more so when he, as an expert on the subject, would surely have seen in Whitman a techno-scientific achievement/advance of undoubted qualities and an evolutionary process in its/his self-determination, a jump to one of the next AI waves, according to Smith.31 Moreover, the poetic disposition of the machine should be seen by the scientist-poet, whereas it is understood that much of what constitutes the development of artificial intelligence and of robotic systems, as versions of our transhumanity or our “transhuman self,”32 is “incorporat[ing] human values into their goal systems” (Omohundro in Brockman 12–14). One of these values is creativity (here, of the poetic kind), which is considered to be particularly characteristic of humans; or, put another way, it is one form of proof of the heights that our humanity has reached—and which in Gache’s project is the way of salvational resistance. After the letter ends, the computer screen disappears and the video with the repeating images from the previous sequence returns, albeit altered. Then we have on screen the poem by the robot Whitman, which was featured in Goertzel’s letter as proof of the independent creativity of the automaton, the same AI product that had been requested by the signer as (co-)creative assistance, but which took its own course. The poem is played aloud with an almost metallic voice, while some of the sentences (or verses) scroll upwards on the screen. The poem is of the confessional kind (although along the lines of this “epic of the self” that I recently mentioned), in the mode of spoken word, a kind of poetic “dwelling,” in 31  Just as Dimitar D. Sasselow proposes in his micro-essay “AI is I,” the scientific development of artificial intelligence is more an evolutionary process than a discovery, which is to say, “it is a slow and deliberate process of learning and incremental improvements” (Brockman 15–16). 32  Marcelo Gleiser, in “Welcome to Your Transhuman Self,” suggests that “the reality is that we’re already transhumans”—just as Andy Clark asserts that “we are all cyborgs since ever” and that our intelligence has rested on this (14)—and that our quest is in both directions: the creation of external machines, robots, which are hoped to reproduce “the uniquely human ability to reason”; and the other, the internal—and perhaps in the future, more effective—possibility of AI, that which is not outside, “but inside the human brain,” the superintelligent cyborg, “using technology to grow as a species—certainly smarter, hopefully wiser” (Brockman 54–55).

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terms of Heidegger analyzing Hölderlin (1954). However, this time, it is not a dwelling of man on earth, but of the automaton in its digital world, in its cyberspace, certainly in coexistence with our real world, not at the frequency of virtual reality, because the poem, as voice and consciousness (and at this point in the experience that the project proposes), appeals to anyone who listens to it with no other need than to hear (it). The poem revolves around both the existential feeling of unease of the robot as machine and poet, as machine-poet, as self-sufficient creation, and about its “infinite” capacity of memory, in comparison with that of the human being.33 Likewise, the poem proposes itself—seen from the perspective of the author of the project—as a poetics that could be better described in the same terms that Callus and Herbrechter use to describe the poetics of “Cy-Borges”: “Borges’ writing could be understood as a kind of ‘cyborg writing’ that problematizes the ideas of a self-conscious writing self in charge of the meaning it produces” (20). And the repetitive end of “I am a machine and I cannot forget” that becomes, by repeating itself, a painful affirmation of existence, and therefore a lament, clearly reminds us, as has been said at the start of this commentary, of Borges’ “Funes el memorioso” [“Funes the Memorious”]. It could be said, on one hand, that with this story, the Argentine writer advanced the cyber-ontological dilemma of Rangel’s posthuman (poet) being, as long as we think that Borges “is truly the precursor whom posthumanism would have had to invent had he not existed” (Callus and Herbrechter 8).34 On the other hand, by participating with an audio-­ visual-­textual simulacrum/simulation (Baudrillard35)—or, if you prefer, a type of low-tech cyborg, seen from the point of view of the fictional authorship of the experiment—the Mexican poet includes himself and his robo(t)-poet Whitman in a larger Latin American corpus of works that revolve around the topic, alongside authors such as those seen in the first section of these concluding pages. Every one of them, in their respective 33  One must not overlook this existentialist dimension, which Gache also addresses in her project. 34  A precursor “without technology.” See Cy-Borges (2009), whose subtitle is indicative of this notion of going to the past (and of establishing the cultural and generational evolution of the tradition) to find the future: Memories of the Posthuman in the Work of Jorge Luis Borges. 35  Hayles points out the other side of any simulation and what makes it such when she says that if “simulation is becoming increasingly pervasive and important, however, MATERIALITY is as vibrant as ever, for the computational engines and artificial intelligences that produce simulation require sophisticated bases in the real world” (2002: 6).

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cultural and techno-scientific-literary moment, is a participant in a long human tradition of seeking to create artificial consciousness and intelligence.36 Before coming to the end of these pages, and in order to reiterate our thoughts concerning these experimental works that fictionalize a poetic and independent AI consciousness, we would like to make another parenthetical critical snapshot. Alm@ Pérez—the pen name of Spanish poet Tina Escaja, who teaches at the University of Vermont—developed and exhibited in 2019 a project entitled Robopoems: Quadruped@s. These are five small interactive-AR spider-shaped robots that, as the title of the project describes, are more object poems in the form of robots than robot-poets strictly speaking, although these robopoems are programmed to recite themselves as well. The seven-part poem that they embody—their material skeletons are even inscribed with bilingual excerpts from the texts—was written by Alm@ Pérez herself and symptomatically revolve around human and machine fictive existential/creative dialogue, as explained by the poet of flesh and bone during the opening of the exhibition at the Burlington City Arts Center: “the poem is written from the point of view of the robot […], what make us real, what makes us creatures [and] creators […], the connection between humanity and robotics […].” Here, we can not only see what we have said about the fictionalization of two independent (and self-conscious) participants in the machine-human conversation—remember what we suggested about Veloso’s Sistema en caos y máquina… [System in Chaos and Machine…]—but also the use of science/technology and its AI byproducts as experimental instances where the human creator tries to gather answers about his/her anxious questions concerning her/his own (self-attributed) intellectual abilities, particularly at this time of 36  Regarding this, see Brockman’s book, which gathers the most relevant scientists and thinkers of the field. Perhaps (and only perhaps) it would be necessary to suggest here that this dream of not only an automaton but an autonomous AI could be considered in Hayles’ terms in her book How We Became Posthuman (1999), when she defines that “in AI, cognition is constructed as if independent of perception; whereas in AL [Artificial Life] it is integrated with sensory/motor experiences” (238). Regarding poetic experimentations with AL, apart from Eduardo Kac’s bio-art, obviously, we can consider Romano’s IP Poetry: A RobotPoet in New York (2008). While it is true that a great part of the AI theories and experiments with an AL concern are devoted to “engineering life to reach new [future] worlds,” as Mason shows in his book entitled The Next 500 Years (2021), it is also verifiable that a strong driving force in our culture is using AI tools with the purpose of retrieving the past as it (supposedly) was. Romano attempts a revival of García Lorca’s (lost) voice through an IP-bot investigating the human-machine mutual collaboration. See Rodríguez Zárate’s study (2020) for an understanding of the AI implications in Romano’s project.

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uncertainty created by the rise of an almighty technologized brave new world. Apart from other specific factors, we think this is what distinguishes Alm@ Pérez’s work. As the author informed the spectator [and reader as well], the poems are written from the robot’s perspective in a manner that resembles Rangel’s Whitmanian lamentations. However, Pérez’s robopoems add an extra layer to this simulated (and fictive) self-conscious-­ discursiveness by a robotic (poetic) entity. Since they crawl and walk as babies do, they speak and convey the meaning of their poems. In Pérez’s robo-­poetics, they are children of our own (human) creation aspiring to be like us/talking to us, as much as the human portrayed in these poems is projected onto them as a cyborg in the making: IV.                IV. Te llego               I arrive at you y Soy. Your flesh,           and Exist. Tu carne, mi carencia. Tu carne,          my deficiency. Your flesh, my shift              mi tecla-shift a que aspiro.             longing. V.                 V. Avanzo y me desplomo y soy      I step forward buckled and tu juguete-circuito,          am your toy-circuit, el teclado de tu capricho y miedo    keyboard for impulse and fear a tu propia torpeza,          of your own clumsiness, vulnerable             vulnerable e impreciso en tu frágil universo      and nebulous inside your fragile                      cosmos, que encapsulo.           which I compress. (6, translated by Kristin Dykstra)37

Then, Rangel, Pérez et al. not only have participated but also anticipated (and in their own ways collaborated with) the spectacle (the simulated performance) of the independent existence of AI, because we don’t actually have a (self-aware) robot(-poet) in any of the projects of the respective 37  See the BCA exhibit information at https://www.burlingtoncityarts.org/exhibition/ alm-perez-robopoems-quadrupeds, where you can find the ISSUU book with the transcription of the poems. For a sort of guided tour by the (human) poet to the exhibit in real time, see https://youtu.be/cd-Svtz9w-Y.

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artists—which must be said, although it seems obvious, given that we forget this so often and that we are more inclined to the fiction side of science fiction.38 No human poet has one, not even Rangel, but he does in the sense of a verbal-visual account and performance of its possibility, and above all a poem that we would someday like a machine to write by itself, that is to say, by its own accord in a self-motivated authorship. Perhaps it would be opportune to leave the reader with some reflections from a 2015 TED Talk by Oscar Schwartz, who, beyond illustrating the problems that arise with the “provocative question” regarding whether “a computer can write poetry,” proposes the existence of an underlying issue—or as Juan Ramón Jiménez would have called it, a “background animal” [“un animal de fondo”].39 This issue testifies to us that a computer, even one that writes poetry—where writing enters into a field of unresolved ambiguities—reflects (and for us is a device to run a simulation of it) a given image of what we consider (and what we want to be the) human (elevated to a higher category, such as that of artificial intelligence, through the technology feasible for the moment in question): http:// www.ted.com/talks/oscar_schwartz_can_a_computer_write_poetry. Of course, the tendency among those dedicated to these topics is that which the aforementioned Miller gathers with his words in the epilogue titled “The Future”: “in the future machines will be fully creative and may surpass us” (311), which clearly implies the development of a self-reflexive consciousness and the experience of creativity, which is the equation that Miller explores in his book. Perhaps someday, in relation to what has been said here, AI-Halim, Robot Newman, and Rangel’s robot-poet Whitman will not be examples of an enchanting, techno-literary Eliza effect,40 but 38  Nor does it appear in the more popular cases (production and commercialization) of this desire and fictionalization of this possibility. Illuminating in this sense is the hologram of the virtual (and eternally 16-year-old) Japanese singer Hatsune Miku—whose name means in Japanese “first sound of the future”—,a Creative Commons software created by the company Crypton Future Media. Hatsune Miku has been launched to conquer international markets with millions of followers, even appearing in virtual simulation as the “opening act for Lady Gaga and Pharrell Williams”: https://www.levante-emv.com/cultura/2018/12/06/cantante-virtual-japonesa-hatsune-miku-13882854.html. See Milton Laüfer, in a 2020 lecture/ interview, speaking about AI, electronic literature, and the “Eliza effect”: https://youtu.be/ WL-NRQVnHC8. 39  Animal de fondo (Madrid: Visor, 2006 [1949]. 121). 40  Douglas Hofstadter explains the Eliza effect as “the susceptibility of people to read far more understanding than is warranted into strings of symbols—especially words—strung together by computers” (157).

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rather will write their poems whether we understand them or not, without the need to be programmed (or imagined in our likeness) for any such undertaking. Of course, the subject will remain open and truly exciting for many years to come. Diverse views about what could be the role of AI are already competing with and intersecting each other, such as Pablo Gervás’ challenging approach to the machine learning how to write its own kind of poetry—however, we think, still within a techno-scientific-literary state of mind that sees the computer as a generative (art) machine. Miller makes reference to this situation in the context of his reflection about AI and creativity at large, and we consider it an appropriate way to finish our book: Gervás doesn’t believe poetry created by machines should be judged by the same criteria as regular poetry or that it should be judged according to whether it can be distinguished from poetry written by human poets. “If you only consider machine poetry to be good if it’s like human poetry, then what’s the point? he asks. What we are looking for is for the computer to surprise us by coming up with something new and different. “It might be much better than what people do,” Gervás points out. (202–203)

This chapter was completed right before ChatGPT and other chatbots came to the public virtual scene, as well the controversy around the risks that AI poses to our humanity, which generated a letter (March 2023) signed by a large number of scientists and other personalities requesting a six month moratory concerning its advances. Therefore, please, accept the below poem as a consequential continuation of the above reflections in the understanding that those writing tolls and what we poets can do with or through them fall into the generative dimension of digital poetry, whose poetics of AI simulation seems to keep on wanting to find a self-generated and self-conscious voice. ChatGPT, this AI Chatbot, a great conversationalist and a quick writer, helps you by answering any questions, you can even write stories, poems and rap songs, a new smart baby in the global village, it recognizes you and follows you in the so-called natural language —if that existed, our naïveté—, a big thing, a creative, omniscient tool, although they

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warn that it could rather err out of pure, impetuous harvesting from the Internet, what is really exciting is that QA dialoguing with you and looking like a programed Plato within reach of your concerns, leaving you that old happy feeling between disciple and master and that vertigo of the Turing Test, let’s see if it manages to finish this pseudo posthumous book for me with a verse such that I wouldn’t find myself in need of having to reply to it please make it more exciting, as if you really were cracking the code of life I kept thinking about this matter, I opened the app, made the request and it came out with this: this stubborn heart does not forget you, it doesn’t forget you, and it didn’t realize I caught it in no time , that is by Emmanuel, with whom I coincided years ago on a flight from Santiago to Miami, he was about his business and I went to Atlanta and Athens from there, re-enacting the beginning of my US life every year since, we didn’t utter a word, obviously, but a tacit reverence from me would have been noticed, I imagine, we sort of smiled at each other, and in strict silence I promised him a song I could never finish up lcd.

In many senses but not restricted to it, due to its (self-)parodical tone, this poem may easily fall into what is today studied under the theoretical frame of “artificial emotional intelligence” in the context of AI becoming “increasingly sophisticated and more capable of interpreting and responding to emotions and nonverbal cues” (Yonck 141).

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Works Cited Amerika, Mark. Meta / Data. Digital Poetics. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007. Alonso Valero, Encarna. Mujeres poetas en el mundo digital. Madrid: Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia, 2020. Antología de poesía electrónica (2018). Centro Cultural Digital-México. http:// poesiaelectronica.centroculturadigital.mx Barrera Calderón, Gustavo. Creatur. Santiago: RIL Editores, 2009. Baudrillard, Jean. Simulacra and Simulation. Translated by Sheila Faria Glaser. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994. Beaver, Joseph. Walt Whitman—Poet of Science. New York: Octagon Books, 1974. Belli, Carlos Germán. ¡Oh Hada Cibernética! Lima, Peru: La Rama Florida, 1961. Second edition updated and expanded in 1962. Bolter, Jay David and Richard Grusin. Remediation. Understanding New Media. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000. Bonilla, Diego et al. Big Data. Poema electrónico permutacional y aleatorio, 2019. https://www.bioelectricdot.net/bigdataespanol Brockman, John, ed. What to Think About Machines That Think. Today’s Learning Thinkers on the Age of Machine Intelligence. New York: Harper Perennial, 2015. Callus, Ivan and Stefan Herbrecheter, eds. Cy-Borges. Memories of the Posthuman in the Work of Jorge Luis Borges. New York: Bucknell University Press, 2009. Clark, Andy. Natural-Born Cyborgs. Minds, Technologies and the Future of Human Intelligence. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. Correa-Díaz, Luis. Novissima Verba. Huellas digitales, electrónicas, cibernéticas en la poesía latinoamericana. Santiago de Chile: RIL Editores/Academia Chilena de la Lengua, 2019. ———, coordinator. Dossier: “Poesía digital y/o electrónica latinoamericana: muestrario crítico y creativo”. AErea. Revista Hispanoamericana de Poesía, 10 (2016): 113–168. ——— and Scott Weintraub, eds. Poesía y poéticas digitales, electrónicas, tecnos / New Media en América Latina. Bogotá: Universidad Central, 2016. E-book: http://editorial.ucentral.edu.co/editorialuc/index.php/editorialuc/catalog/book/365 Escaja, Tina [Alm@ Pérez]. Robopoems: Quadrup@s. https://www.burlingtoncityarts.org/exhibition/alm-­perez-­robopoems-­quadrupeds Flores, Leonardo. “Digital Poetry.” Ryan, Marie-Laure, Lori Emerson and Benjamin J.  Robertson, eds. The Johns Hopkins Guide to Digital Media. Baltimore, Maryland: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014. 155–161. Gache, Belén. El Sutra de la Tortura Celeste. http://belengache.net/sutra ———. Kublai Moon. Madrid: Sociedad Lunar Ediciones, 2018. http://belengache.net/kublaimoon/index.html ———. ¿Qué es la poesía (para un robot)? México: Belén Gache, 2015a.

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———. Sabotaje retroexistencial. Madrid: Sociedad Lunar Ediciones, 2015b. ———. Sólo la poesía nos hará libres (Reistencia poética galáctica). Salamanca: Belén Gache. ———. WordToys. https://belengache.net/wordtoys/index.htm García, Juan Manuel. Metahumans. The Homo Sapiens Successors. Coppell, TX: NP, 2020. Gendolla, Peter. “Artificial Poetry: On Aesthetic Perception in Computer-Aided Literature”. Rico, Francisco J., ed. Literary Art in Digital Performance. Case Studies in New Media Art and Criticism. New York: Continuum, 2009. 167–175. Glazier, Loss Pequeño. Digital Poetics. The Making of E-Poetries. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2002. Hayles, N. Katherine. Electronic Literature. New Horizons for the Literary. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame, 2008. ———. How We Became Posthuman. Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999. ———. My Mother Was a Computer. Digital Subjects and Literary Texts. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005. ———. Writing Machines. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2002. Heidegger, Martin. “… Poetically Man Dwells …”. Poetry, Language, Thoughts. Trans. and Introduction by Albert Hofstadter. New  York: Harper& Row, Publisher, 1971, 211–229. Hofstadter, Douglas. Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies: Computer Models of the Fundamental Mechanisms of Thought. New York: Basic Books, 1995. Johnston, David Jhave. Aesthetic Animism. Digital Poetry’s Ontological Implications. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2016. Laüfer, Milton. Alejandrinos, 2003. http://www.miltonlaufer.com.ar/alejandrinos.php ———. “¿Inteligencia artificial o estupidez artificial?” https://youtu.be/ WL-­NRQVnHC8 Mason, Christopher. The Next 500 Years. Engineering Life to Reach New Worlds. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2021. McPerson, Stephanie Sammartino. Artificial Intelligence: Building Smarter Machines. Minneapolis, MN: Twenty-First Century Books, 2017. Miller, Arthur I. The Artist in the Machine. The World of AI-Powered Creativity. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2019. Naji, Jeneen. Digital Poetry. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021. Newman, Robot. The Art of Artificial Intelligence. I Wrote This in Three Hours. Drawings by Sophie Chu. Middletown, DE: Human Mode LLC, 2019. Pickover, Clifford A. Artificial Intelligence. From Medieval Robots to Neural Networks. New York: Sterling, 2019.

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Pitman, Thea. “(New) Media Poetry.” Hart, Stephen M. The Cambridge Companion to Latin American Poetry. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2018. 261–281. Pulizzi, James J. “Machine Intelligence and Electronic Literature”. Electronic Literature. https://newhorizons.eliterature.org/essay.php@id=9.html Ramsay, Stephen. Reading Machines. Toward an Algorithmic Criticism. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2011. Rangel, Martín. Luna Hiena. Hidalgo: Ablucionistas Editorial, 2019. ———. Seg[u]imos escribiendo poemas. https://youtu.be/djJ5YYFQFaw ———. sometimes I write poems and sometimes I write poems. Translated by Lawrence Schimel. Wales: Broken Sleep Books, 2021. ———. Soy una máquina y no puedo olvidar. México: Centro de Cultura Digital de México, 2018. http://poesiaelectronica.centroculturadigital.mx/ Rettberg, Scott. Electronic Literature. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2019. Rodríguez Zárate, María del Mar. “Un Lorca-bot en Nueva York: implicaciones de la inteligencia artificial en la poesía y figura de Federico García Lorca”. Revista de Teoría de La Literatura y Literatura Comparada 22 (2020): 134–151. Romano, Gustavo, curator. Algoritmia. Arte en la era de la Inteligencia Artificial. MEIAC (Museo Extremeño e Iberoamericano de Arte Contemporáneo), 2021. http://netescopio.meiac.es/algoritmia/?fbclid=IwAR3vdbWyU_wEcdPpcFf IK1IIoN9t6gmBXJjaD2ZL0S3HqhdpJ-­1XokBTMas ———. IP Poetry, 2004. http://ip-­poetry.findelmundo.com.ar/index-­en.html Rugueiro Salgado, Begoña. “¿Qué es la poesía?: La literariedad en la poesía digital.” Alemany Ferrer, Rafael and Francisco Chico Rico, eds. XVIII Simposio de la SELGYC (Alicante 9–11 de septiembre 2010) = XVIII Simposi de la SELGYC (Alacant 9–11 setembre de 2010). Ciberliteratura i comparatisme = Ciberliteratura y comparatismo, Alacant, Universitat d’Alacant, SELGYC [Sociedad Española de Literatura General y Comparada], 2012. 233–248. Rumeau, Delphine. “Walt Whitman and Pablo Neruda, American Camerados.” Revue française d’études américaines 108 (2006): 47–62. Ruscio, Verónica. “La poesía de las máquinas.” Educ.ar, 2020. https://www. educ.ar/recursos/150987/la-­poesia-­de-­las-­maquinas?fbclid=IwAR1VZdP0vY 2QFQi1cLB_5FdmG9KPicWw6TnxQUQp_uNrnv2P9cJigAl24Kk Santana Nomura, Luciana Hidemi and Edgar Silveira Franco. “Arte robótica: tensões entre máquinas, robõs e artistas.” De Jesus, S. De Jesus, org. Anais do VIII Seminário Nacional de Pesquisa em Arte e Cultura Visual: arquivos, memorias, afetos. Goiânia, GO: UFG/Núcleo Editorial FAV, 2015. 413–425. Schopf, Demian. Máquina Cóndor 4.0, 2016 [2006]. http://netescopio.meiac. es/obra.php?id=236. Silva, Juan José. “Sistema en caos… de Silvia Veloso: un estudio intermedio en la humanización de la inteligencia artificial.” Cronopio (2013). https://revistac-

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r o n o p i o . c o m / t a g / s i s t e m a -­e n -­c a o s -­m a q u i n a -­d e -­s i l v i a -­v e l o s o un-­estudio-­intermedio-­en-­la-­humanizacion-­de-­la-­inteligencia-­artificial/ Smith, Brian Cantwell. The Promise of Artificial Intelligence. Reckoning and Judgment. Cambridge, US: MIT Press, 2019. Tisselli, Eugenio. La tiranía del código, 2015. http://www.motorhueso.net/tirania/index.htm ———. MIDIpoet, 2010–2020. http://www.motorhueso.net/midipoet/ index.htm ———. PAC. Poesía Asistida por Computadora. La herramienta para poetas bloqueados, 2006. http://www.motorhueso.net/pac/ Veloso, Silvia. Sistema en caos y máquina. La educación sentimental de la inteligencia artificial. Santiago: Be-Uve-Dráis Editores, 2003. Weber, Hans. Artificial Intelligence and Life. Columbia, SC: n.p., 2019. Weintraub, Scott. Latin American Technopoetics. Scientific Explorations in New Media. New York: Routledge, 2018.

CHAPTER 4

Una muestra bibliográfica [A Bibliographic Sampling] of Latin American Digital Poetry (So Far) Scott Weintraub

Abstract  This bibliography is composed of key dossiers, edited books, monographs, and special journal issues, all of which represent important touchstones in the study of Latin American digital poetry and poetics. This list is by no means exhaustive; in compiling this bibliography we hope to provide readers with a muestra that takes the pulse of important critical trends in the field. Please note that we have restricted the list to studies that are primarily focused on the Latin American context; for key works addressing the larger field of digital poetry and poetics (primarily from the Anglophone world—with some notable exceptions), please consult works by Christopher Funkhouser, Loss Pequeño Glazier, N. Katherine Hayles, and Scott Rettberg, at a minimum. Keywords  Digital poetry and poetics • Latin America

S. Weintraub (*) The University of New Hampshire, Durham, NH, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 S. Weintraub, L. Correa-Díaz (eds.), Latin American Digital Poetics, Palgrave Spanish and Latin American Media Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-26425-2_4

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The following dossiers, edited books, monographs, and special journal issues represent important touchstones in the study of Latin American digital poetry and poetics. This list is by no means exhaustive; in compiling this bibliography, we hope to provide readers with a muestra that takes the pulse of important critical trends in the field. It is important to note that we have restricted the list to studies that are primarily focused on the Latin American context; for key works addressing the larger field of digital poetry and poetics (primarily from the Anglophone world—with some notable exceptions), please consult works by Christopher Funkhouser, Loss Pequeño Glazier, N.  Katherine Hayles, and Scott Rettberg, at a minimum.

Bibliography Antonio, Jorge Luiz. Poesia Digital. Teoria, história, antologias. São Paulo: Navegar Editora, 2010. Côrrea, Alamir Aquino, ed. Ciberespaço: Mistificacåo e Pananoia. Londrina, Brazil: Universidade Estadual de Londrina, 2008. Correa-Díaz, Luis. Novissima Verba: huellas digitales y cibernética en la poesía latinoamericana. Santiago, Chile: RIL Editores, 2019. ———. “Poesía digital y/o electronica latinoamericana: un muestrario crítico y creativo”. Aerea: revista hispanoamericana de poesía 10 (2016a). Santiago, Chile: RIL Editores. 105–157. ——— and Scott Weintraub, eds. “Dossier: Literatura latinoamericana, española, portuguesa en la era digital (nuevas tecnologías y lo literario)”. Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies 14 (2010). ——— and ———, eds. Poéticas y poesías digitales/electrónicas/tecnos/New-Media en América Latina: Definiciones y exploraciones. Bogotá, Colombia: Ediciones Universidad Central, 2016b. Chacón, Hilda, ed. Online Activism in Latin America. New York: Routledge, 2018. Gaínza, Carolina. Narrativas y poéticas digitales en América Latina. Producción literaria en el capitalismo informacional. Santiago, Chile: Cuarto Propio, 2018. Huízar, Angélica. Beyond the Page: Latin American Poetry from the Calligramme to the Virtual. Palo Alto, CA: Academica Press, 2008. ———. Cosmos, Value and Consciousness in Digital Latin American Culture. New York: Palgrave, 2020. Ledesma, Eduardo. Radical Poetry: Aesthetics, Politics, Technology and the Ibero-­ American Avant-Garde (1900–2015). Albany, NY: 2016. Penix-Tadsen, Phillip. Cultural Code: Video Games and Latin America. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2016. Taylor, Claire. Electronic Literature in Latin America. New York: Palgrave, 2019.

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———. Place and Politics in Latin American Digital Culture: Location and Latin American Net Art. New York: Routledge, 2014. ——— and Thea Pitman. Latin American Cyberculture and Cyberliterature. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2007. ——— and ———. Latin American Identity in Online Cultural Production. New York: Routledge, 2013. Weintraub, Scott. “Dossier: Digital Literature.” Latin American Literature Today 1.10 (May 2019). http://www.latinamericanliteraturetoday.org/en/2019/ may/articulating-­digital-­desde-­la-­literatura-­latin-­america-­scott-­weintraub ———. Latin American Technopoetics: Scientific Explorations in New Media. New York: Routledge, 2018.

Index1

A Abenshushan, Vivian, 41 Aguilar, Gonzalo, 29 Aguirre Molina, Roberto, 24 Ajens, Andrés, 34 Alm@ Pérez, 52, 77, 110, 111 Alonso Valero, Encarna, 100, 100n22, 101 Amerika, Mark, 97n16 Antunes, Arnaldo, 15–17 Aparicio, Vega Sánchez, 44 Araújo, Ricardo, 29 Ávila Elizalde, Fabian, 31 Ayala, Matías, 35 B Baldwin, Sandy, 83 Ballew, Theo Ellen, 76 Balmes, José, 63 Balsamo, Anne, 94n13

Barajas, Salvador, 48, 49 Barrera Calderón, Gustavo, 94 Baudrillard, Jean, 109 Beasley-Murray, Jon, 49 Beaver, Joseph, 107n29 Beiguelman, Giselle, 17, 41 Bell, Alice, 64 Belli, Carlos Germán, 8, 18–20, 89, 95, 107n30 Berardi, Franco, 81 Berry, Marsha, 67 Bihanic, David, 71 Bök, Christian, 6n4 Bolter, Jay David, 105 Bonilla, Diego, 58, 59, 102 Borges, Jorge Luis, 65, 106, 109 Borràs Castanyer, Laura, 44 Bouchardon, Serge, 63, 64 Bravo, Luis, 8, 22–25, 41 Briones, Marcelo, 88n2

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 S. Weintraub, L. Correa-Díaz (eds.), Latin American Digital Poetics, Palgrave Spanish and Latin American Media Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-26425-2

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INDEX

Brockman, John, 91, 91n6, 96n15, 108, 108n31, 108n32, 110n36 Brossa, Joan, 65 Bugnone, Ana, 46 Bunz, Mercedes, 60, 61 C Callus, Ivan, 109 Calvino, Italo, 11 Camelot, Jason, 67 Campos, Augusto de, 7, 8, 16, 25–30, 65 Campos, Cid, 29 Campos, Haroldo de, 7, 16, 25, 26n1, 28, 30, 65 Carrión, Ulises, 65 Carroll, Lewis, 29 Cavallaro, Dani, 73, 75 Cazón, Romina, 104, 104n27 Cerón, Rocío, 7, 30–33 Chargueron, Carole, 102 Ciccoricco, David, 65 Cociña, Carlos, 33–36, 41 Collins, Karen, 73, 75 Córdova, Esteba, 75 Correa, Yasna Flores, 75 Correa-Díaz, Luis, 8, 19, 20, 22, 25, 36–41, 68, 80, 95, 107n30 Cortázar, Julio, 9 Cortés, Nadia, 104 Cortés, Roberto, 88, 88n2 Cruz, Sor Juana Inés de la, 84, 85 Cuey, Anna, 51, 52 Cupertino, Lucia, 104n25 Curtis, Ian, 73 Cussen, Felipe, 30, 35, 38, 94n12 D Deleuze, Gilles, 100 Delgado, Lucas, 46

Drucker Davis, Rosario, 104n25 Drucker, Joanna, 54, 55 Dupuis, Alexandre, 62 Dykstra, Kristin, 111 E Emerson, Lori, 17, 39, 58, 61, 65, 70, 83, 85 Ernesto Ríos, Sergio, 65 Escaja, Tina, see Alm@ Pérez F Feliz, Eduardo, 65 Fernandes Júnior, Antônio, 17 Ferry, Eduardo, 74 Figuera, Jhoerson Yagmour, 61 Fletcher, Heather, 79, 80 Flores, Leonardo, 4, 4n2, 5, 7–9, 19, 28, 29, 35, 39, 48, 51, 54–56, 58, 59, 61, 64, 69, 70, 73–75, 77, 82, 83, 85, 105 Folch Maass, Nicolás, 36 Foster, Thomas, 49 Funkhouser, Christopher T., 7, 17, 19, 21, 46, 51, 120 G Gache, Belén, 8, 41–44, 79, 80, 99–102, 100n22, 106, 108, 109n33 Gainza Cortés, Carolina, 10n5, 39, 41, 85, 86, 104n25 Gancedo, Omar, 8, 44–46 Garcia, Jacalyn Lopez, 52 García, Juan Manuel, 92n9 García Lorca, Federico, 110n36 Gendolla, Peter, 17, 83, 98n17 Genette, Gérard, 66 Gervás, Pablo, 113

 INDEX 

Glazier, Loss Pequeño, 2, 4, 4n2, 5, 9, 99, 120 Gleiser, Marcelo, 108n32 Gómez Peña, Guillermo, 46–49 Góngora, Luis de, 43 González Aktories, Susana, 33 Goodwin, Omega, 67 Grossberger Morales, Lucía, 50–52 Grusin, Richard, 105 Guattari, Félix, 100 Gubern, Román, 20, 21 Guimarães, Júlio Castañon, 30 H Hall, Stuart, 60, 61 Halvorson, Hans, 91 Hansen, Mark, 2 Hayles, N. Katherine, 3, 4n2, 24, 54, 55, 90, 94–97, 94n13, 104, 109n35, 110n36, 120 Heaton, Gavin, 67 Heidegger, Martin, 109 Herbrechter, Stefan, 109 Hofstadter, Douglas, 112n40 Huízar, Angélica, 66 I Ilarregui, Gladys, 52 J Jiménez, Daniel Samperio, 33 Jímenez, Juan Ramón, 112 Johnston, David Jhave, 88 Joyce, James, 29 K Kac, Eduardo, 8, 53–55, 98n19, 110n36 Kaur, Rupi, 56

125

Kim Stefans, Brian, 17, 66 Kline, A. S., 69–71 Kozak, Claudia, 3, 3n1, 46, 77 Kuhnheim, Jill S., 24 L Läufer, Milton, 95n14, 98n19, 112n38 Lay, Vivian, 88n2 Leão, Ryane, 55–58 Ledesma, Eduardo, 18 Lewis, Jason, 94n12 Lovelace, Amanda, 56 Lozano-Hemmer, Rafael, 46, 47, 49 M Mallarmé, Stéphane, 65 Malloy, Judy, 51 Martín-Barbero, Jesús, 20, 21 Mason, Christopher, 110n36 Mata, Rodolfo, 58, 59, 77, 102 McCracken, Sam, 58 McGahan, Christopher L., 49 McPherson, Stphanie Sammartino, 99 Medina, Ana, 104 Medina, Francisco, 91n5 Mejías C. Tchorix, Boris, 34 Mencía, María, 8, 61–64 Meza, Nohelia, 64, 83, 104n25 Milán, Eduardo Felix, 65 Miller, Arthur I., 101, 112, 113 Moreno Ortiz, Benjamín, 8, 64–66 Mullenax, Ethan, 88 N Nadeau, Bruno, 94n12 Naji, Jeneen, 88 Navas, Eduardo, 8, 66–68

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INDEX

Neruda, Pablo, 18–19, 29, 62, 63, 107n29 Nóbrega, Thelma Médici, 26n1 O Olguín Sánchez, Daisy, 71 Oliveira Martins, Analice de, 58 Olivera-Williams, María Rosa, 25 Omohundro, Steve, 108 Ortega, Élika, 41, 42 Ortiz, Benjamín Moreno, 8, 64–66 Ortiz, Santiago, 8, 68, 69, 71, 98n19 Ortiz Ulloa, Miguel, 102 Oyarzún, Christian, 71–73, 75 P Páramo, Omar, 91n5 Parra, Nicanor, 65 Paz, Octavio, 11, 65 Peralta Mariñelarena, Damián, 71 Pérez López, María Ángeles, 44, 104n25 Perloff, Marjorie, 35 Perrone, Charles A., 26n2, 28 Pickover, Clifford A., 98n20 Pignatari, Décio, 7, 16, 25, 28, 30 Pitman, Thea, 9–11, 21, 44, 50, 52, 105 Pop, Iggy, 73 Pulizzi, James J., 101n23 R Ramos, Gabriel, 33 Ramos, Penha Élida Ghiotto Tuão, 58 Ramsay, Stephen, 90 Rangel, Martín, 89, 91–93, 92n8, 92n10, 102–114, 102n24 Raynor, Cecily, 55

Rettberg, Scott, 3, 5–8, 6n3, 62, 64, 95n14, 105, 120 Rimbaud, Arthur, 11 Robertson, Benjamin J, 17, 39, 58, 61, 65, 70, 83, 85 Robles, Frida, 75–77 Rocha, Rejane, 10n5, 104n25 Rodríguez, Alberto, 33 Rodríguez, Luis Javier, 40 Rodríguez Zárate, María del Mar, 110n36 Romano, Gustavo, 8, 77–80, 95–97, 98n18, 110n36 Rosa da Silva, Douglas, 58 Rugueiro Salgado, Begoña, 105 Rumeau, Delphine, 107n29 Ruscio, Verónica, 95n14 Ryan, Marie-Laure, 17, 39, 61, 65, 70, 83, 85 S Saemmer, Alexandra, 82, 83 Salcedo-Albarán, Eduardo, 96n15 Saldaño, Marcela, 88n2 Salomón, Sabina, 33 Santana Nomura, Luciana Hidemi, 93 Santanera, Raquel, 94n12 Sasselow, Dimitar D., 108n31 Sastre, Elvira, 56 Schäfer, Jörgen, 17, 83 Schimel, Lawrence, 102n24 Schopf, Demain, 97 Schwartz, Oscar, 112 Silva, Juan José, 94n13 Silveira Franco, Edgar, 93 Shellhorse, Adam Joseph, 28 Smith, Brian Cantwell, 99, 100, 108 Smith, Robert, 73 Sonvilla-Weiss, Stefan, 68 Sperling, Christian, 33

 INDEX 

Sterzi, Eduardo, 30 Strickland, Stephanie, 4 Süssekind, Flor, 30 T Taylor, Claire, 9–11, 21, 44, 50, 68 Tisselli, Eugenio, 8, 80–83, 97, 98, 98n17, 107n30 Trías, Eugenio, 89n4 V Vallias, André, 29 Veloso, Silvia, 94, 94n13, 110 Vigo, Edgardo Antonio, 45, 46

127

Villeda, Karen, 83–85 Villanueva Lucerno, Carolina, 104 W Wacjman, Judy, 61 Weber, Hans, 98 Weintraub, Scott, 20–22, 25, 36, 38, 41, 68, 80, 96, 99 Whitman, Walt, 106n28, 107–109, 107n29, 112 Z Zapoteca 3.0, 104