Now that blogs and newsletters are back in style (and now that the storm has stopped), I feel compelled to update this blog with some news of what I have been up to lately so… Let’s see…
Last December I published a new article, “Literatura digital para el fin del mundo: ecología y algoritmos en el Capitaloceno” in a special issue of the Danish journal Diálogos Latinoamericanos (Aarhus University), looking at the relationship between art and activism in Latin America (Daniel Escandell Montiel, Vega Sánchez Aparicio and Juan Carlos Cruz Suárez Eds.). On this essay (which you can read OA here) I debut the framework for my upcoming book Earthy Algorithms, examining the relationship between digital technologies and climate damage by looking at a selection of works of digital literature that expose their entanglement within material networks of mineral extraction and energy consumption. I am super excited about this project so… please read the article and let me know what you think!?
Even though I have not been very active in the art/poetry making scene lately, I am so so so happy that some of my older work is still being read, enjoyed and studied by people! I had the honor (the honor of my life!) of attending an MLA 2023 session, “Electronic Literature and the Long Pandemic,” where two panelists discussed my work “Room #3”. Anna Nacher talked about it in the context of her documentary, and Abigail Moreshead and Anastasia Salter read it together with Sara Raffel’s performance, “Video Off: Zoom and Pandemic Productivity.” According to them, these two works take up “Maud Ceuterick’s argument that the pandemic has ‘increased the urgency’ with which the ‘binary separation of domestic and professional spheres… needs to be tackled’ (2020)”, and they analyze these two examples of “Zoom-based electronic literature as a crucial activist response to the pandemic labor crisis. These works both offer us a means to reimagine and push back against the platforms of pandemic pedagogy and to call for greater attention to the ongoing challenges of disproportionate labor divisions.” Honestly, listening to these brilliant talks was one of the highlights of my artistic career (and, because I am a creep, I took pics that I am sharing below).
Last semester I also taught a big lecture course on introduction to literary analysis in Spanish and, while it was really fun, it was also one of the biggest challenges I have faced as a professor. It coincided with the UC strike (about which I posted quite a bit here), that after 6 weeks of brave graduate student worker striking ended up with a new contract for my brilliant grads, but also exposed many unsettling things about our work at the University… and these things are hard to come back from! Nevertheless, I am teaching again this same large course, so let’s see how things go this time!
I am also teaching a graduate seminar based on the one I taught together with my wifa Élika Ortega at CU Boulder in 2020. This time, focusing a little bit more on race and gender, and making the connections between digital culture today and (pre)modernity a bit more explicit. Next week, our class will be experiencing Alejandro Iñárritu’s Carne y Arena (which they are showing at the Craneway Pavillion in Richmond for another more week or so… hurry!) and then going to engage with some artist books at the College of Environmental Design’s beautiful library… and this is just the first two weeks! Feeling pretty happy about this class as well.
I hope I find time to work on some exciting new projects, but I won’t jinx myself by sharing too much here now. This is all for now! The baby is up and I must run (to her).
