I might still not quite believe it but I am a 2020 Poetry Fellow at the Arts Research Center. This fellowship will allow me to work with a group of fantastically talented and interesting Bay Area poets around the main theme of “emergency”. While this is a broad topic, our main goal will be to creatively explore how poetry may help us think through and within the current environmental, political and societal crisis. As they explain in their website: “‘Emergency’ implies urgency, sudden harm, life-threatening violence, and extreme circumstances, but embedded within it is the word ’emergence;’ suggesting rebirth and new beginnings. How can we understand moments of emergency as catalysts for renewal, as ruptures that signal massive—if painful—change?”
As some of you know, I am a digital poet. I build bilingual and multimedia, web-based poems conceived as interventions across different social media platforms. As such, all of my poetic practice emerges from the precarious relationship we have established with the digital technologies that shape most of our relationships and day to day activities, to the detriment of our minds, bodies and the Earth. My #selfiepoetry collections are interested in the perverse transformation of consumer subjectivity and representation through social media, looking at how the subject has turned into an object of massive amateur representation and commercial distribution. The poem 24_7, for example, follows Jonathan Crary in exploring how late capitalism, via digital technology, pushes humans into constant activity, destroying our health, communities and any possibility of political dissident. My #Youtubers series engages with early confessional videos and today’s influencers’ speech, considering the corporate video giant in terms of web visibility and discourse. By being driven essentially by amateur production, YouTube dismantles the prospect of the amateur being bound by the private sphere, and instead, it catapults it not only the public, but also the global, commercial sphere. My poems “Ashes to Ashes #YOLO” and “Bio Data Matter” explore this tension while dealing with topics related to climate change and political activism. Finally, my most recent work, The Offline Website Project (TOWP), is comprised of a series of websites meant to run locally only in the computer where these created and hosted, fundamentally disrupting the distributed logic of the global web. In order to experience the sites, TOWP users need to physically travel to my home and participate in a site-specific experiencing of these digital works. TOWP sites are thus unique material objects: non-replicable, non-sharable, non-transferrable; they are ingrained in a place and a concrete home computer. One of these sites, “beauty routine (a burning desire)” is a poetic commentary on the possibility of thinking beauty only in local terms, seeing beauty as always pertaining to a physical body. As most of my work, this involves thinking about my own displacement and beauty (as a foreign female body in the USA) and how this relates to the larger spaces I occupy, and the environmental impact of my occupation. 153 countries have declared a climate emergency, and digital technologies are an important, usually overlooked, agent of climate change.
As I meet, collaborate, help and get to know my fellows this year, I hope to be exploring these issues further. I am not sure yet what shape this may take, but I am optimistic (more hopeful than optimistic, perhaps) that something good will come out of this! I am also really fortunate to be teaching a creative writing and making class on electronic literature this semester as well, so I am feeling extra inspired (¡gracias, estudiantes!) Just this week I started working on a new project I am calling “corporate poetry” where I intend to explore how corporate language (via digital and standardized forms) relates to that other corpora consisting of our bodies. Check out my first poem *still as a work in progress*, “[room]“.
AlexXO
