English

In an empty landscape a storm is announced by uprising sand, moving objects, silent people and a traffic jam on a narrow road. 

During the winter of 2017, a tree died in my front yard. Afterwards, a gale uprooted it and smashed it into lumber. But before the fire, new trees emerged. Árboles de mi Desierto: Wind Songs is a recombinatory video poem shaped by my dead tree as it was documented misusing a panoramic camera in order to generate impossible landscapes of bark, wood, assorted detritus and desert sand. The words, sometimes fleeting and otherwise stark, work together with the images to create something akin to a palimpsest of reflections on the human penchant for unnatural progress, growth, vertical lifestyles and upward mobility. It uses espanglish as the lingua franca of the MX-US border where I reside in San Agustin, a small, very much under developed rural town outside of Ciudad Juárez.

This is a Covid, no touching, rethinking of the digital version of the Trajectory Cabinet, which, in physical form, transforms the 32 drawers/key presses of a library card catalogue into an interactive artwork. Pulling the drawers open and pushing them closed is how the work is read. And each drawer connects to a place on a map of Brisbane, triggering poetic elements. Overall, the Trajectory Cabinet tells the story of environmental destruction and consequences in Brisbane Australia. There are 32 drawers/key presses total, each with their own poetic/artwork element. And there are 10 hidden artworks, generated by secret combinations of drawers.

Not For You is an “automated confusion system” designed to mislead TikTok’s video recommendation algorithm, making it possible to see how TikTok feels when it’s no longer made “For You.” The system navigates the site without intervention, clicking on videos and hashtags and users to find the nooks and crannies TikTok’s algorithm doesn’t show us, to reveal those videos its content moderators suppress, and to surface speech the company hopes to hide. Through its alternative personality-agnostic choices of what to like, who to follow, and which posts to share, Not For You should make the For You page less addictive, and hopefully steer users away from feeling like the best path to platform success is through mimicry and conformity. Perhaps most importantly, Not For You aims to defuse the filter bubbles produced by algorithmic feeds and the risks such feeds pose for targeted disinformation and citizen manipulation. Finally, the work stands in opposition to letting corporations opaquely decide what we see and when we see it, to their intentional crafting of addictive user interfaces, and to the extraction of profit from the residual data left behind by users. Ultimately, Not For You asks us to think about who most benefits from social media’s algorithmic feeds, and who is made most vulnerable.

“Still I Rise: Remix” is a visual, lyrical, digital interactive fight song for civic action for the #BlackLivesMatter social justice and social change movement. Created during and by the stressors intensified from the global pandemic, this JavaScript interactive poetry remix embraces the digital activism made exponential during the pandemic through the platformization of counternarratives. The remix blends multiple digital mediums with cultural artifacts of the past and present to weave together a rhetorical and semiotic interactive experience that enlightens society and uplifts the human spirit. Through multimodality and intertextuality, “Still I Rise: Remix” exploits the aesthetics of the digital interactive experience through multiple artistic forms of expression, including code, video, audio, and hypertext. This COVID E-Lit interactive exhibition is a multimodal expression and declarative statement for the #BlackLivesMatter movement which embodies the spirit of change, inclusion, and social justice. “The medium is the message.” Experience “Still I Rise: Remix.”

In every step of this interactive game-poem find the point-and-click trigger, to make the dialogue evolve. The game consists of approximately forty screens/events, which you may read or explore until you get to the end. Some times you may be asked to write down an intimate thought. All answers typed and submitted by players are collected to create a collective think-tank of the overall game experience.

The proposed work is an ode to the struggles of human communication. It reflects on the hardships of unfortunate dialogues, the splendor of reaching to the other side, the rise and fall of human connectedness, the agonies of stray meanings and words. Expressed through the poetics of weather phenomena, this conceptually driven interactive work represents the mental landscape between two lovers, a parallel metaphor for the contemporary digitally mediated condition. Early cyberspatial theories referred to an erotic ontology of digital experience. Michael Heim described the platonic dimensions of an augmented Eros. Roland Barthes on the other hand described language as the skin with which we struggle to touch the 'other'. In this game-poem, senses, meanings and ideas appear to be all permeated by the ‘spell’ of technology, a rhetorical as well as an erotic act of mediation through different worlds. The reader/player is asked to become part of the dipole, to meander through poetic texts and tormented emotions, at times linear, other times bifurcating, while exploring a dialogue ‘atmosphere’ inspired by visual poetry. Endeavoring to reach the 'other side' through the use of spoken language, this piece of work is an affective journey to the tempests of a fallen dialogue.

This poetic experience uses Twine and operates like a hypertext choose-your-own-adventure. The player must navigate a map to unlock clues about the nature of the landscape - a process called "medicating." Throughout this hellish roadtrip, the player's navigation depends on choices in cardinal directions, character interactions and even dictionary definitions. This work was created as one half of my graduate thesis. Collectively, the work on the page and the hypertext poem is known as Educational Materials for Mostly Mitigated Maidens. I completed this graduate program in 2019, obtaining a Masters in poetry. Since then, I spend my time writing, exploring other digital spaces, and teaching college composition at Solano Community College. Here is the link to Directional Pilgrim. It will launch in your browser and, for the full experience, requires speakers or headphones. Use the mouse to click and point - no other buttons are required. Google Chrome is recommended browser.

Utopia is a state which allows for a certain amount of resolution - a period or space which exists in equilibrium. Dystopia, then, is a state in which nothing can be resolved. A solution is needed, but every effort to balance opposing forces results in a renewal of already overbearing systems in control. To me, it is this repetition of effort that characterizes a dystopia. Landscape comes as an afterthought, and can take many forms. In 2018, fires ravaged the state of California. This was the space that I began my work in. Although the natural world around me expanded in all directions, the feeling was one of claustrophobia. Our yearly cycle revolves around our wildfire season - there is no way to avoid it, and each year it gets worse. This, coupled with my own anxieties surrounding mental health and addition, inspired the dystopian space of Directional Pilgrim. Just as medieval pilgrims circled Jerusalem, hitting holy waystations and reading (and therefore reenacting) the Bible passages relevant to the particular place, so does the player as pilgrim revisit the passages in this apocalyptic landscape. By redoing (and often repeating) these experiences, the player may come to find meaning in the journey itself - even though the resolution to the narrative remains elusive.

Ted van Lieshout developed the "Poetry Compressor," which is an app that analyses text and systematically rearranges letters and text structures. It was their answer to the question whether the internet can contribute to pen, paper, and word processors.

'Describe the route you take from your parental home to your bed, where you slept as a child.' That was the question Vanhauwaert asked people who have lost their parental home. Vanhauwaert was inspired by five extraordinary stories of people whom she changed into characters. She created a mental room in which these five characters wander. 50 routes are hidden in the audiotour.