I am honored and humbled to be part of the ELC (Vol.4) with my project The Offline Website Project!
The Electronic Literature Collections are arguably the most influential e-lit anthologies in the world, capturing the ethos of a time (as well as the state of the discipline worldwide), and although all previous volumes have been amazing, Vol. 4 definitely stands out *and not bc I am in it, ok?*. Conceived during the pandemic, the editors of volume 4 (Kathi Inman Berens, John T. Murray, R. Lyle Skains, Rui Torres and Mia Zamora) made the important choice of centering equity, diversity and inclusion in their selection process, including 132 literary works from 42 author nationalities in 31 languages, with more BIPOC, queer, and female or female-identifying authors than any volume before. You can read more about their curatorial statement here.
ELC Vol. 4 is featuring two works from The Offline Website Project (TOWP), “beauty routine: a burning desire” and “Room #3.” The latter is a crossover piece between TOWP and Corporate Poetry, written in direct response to the COVID19 lock down, and our increasing reliance on video conferencing software like Zoom. My use of the multiple video grid and the medium-close up shots of me as speaker point to that world.
However, when I wrote “beauty routine” back in 2019, I did not know that a global pandemic was about to change our lives forever, and even though the aesthetics of the works are quite similar, and the local-global matrix is still very much in place, I was thinking about something different. I wanted to talk about the violence behind our conceptions of beauty, as a supposedly universal idea or experience that has always varying local manifestations, and in this way I thought about it as a sort of hyperobject. I was thinking about how these kinds of universal ideals are behind the exploitation of local environments and beings (what, following modernity’s logic, we have come to understand as “nature”), and I created “beauty routine” as a commentary on climate damage, trying to establish a poetic link between these concepts. Yet, the piece features me applying lipstick (and taking out my braces), changing how I look to be prettier, and in that way the work has also become a commentary on the violence we exert over our bodies in order to change them, manipulating matter to fit a certain beauty ideal, now promoted on social media as the contemporary distributor of modernity’s violent universals. This is what the editors of the collection have focused on, explaining that
“Saum unmasks the illusion of effortless, ‘natural’ beauty in the specific medial context (YouTube) where makeup tutorials, streaming Influencer hijinks, and the direct-address vlogging style are common, and profitable for Alphabet which owns YouTube. Saum deconstructs the tropes and conventions of makeup tutorials. Her refusal to host these vlogs on the web draws attention to technical infrastructures that profit from the confected intimacy of watching people in their bedrooms and bathrooms. “Beauty Routine” is thus a feminist infrastructural critique”
https://collection.eliterature.org/4/beauty-routine
The whole collection is truly fantastic and I do hope you browse through it! I would recommend playing around the different categories they offer, because their metadata work is state of the art!
