spanish

This presentation will explore random e-poetry and interspecies based on two electronic works: one that intersect humanity and insect-like robotics titled “Robot-poem@s”, and an eproject/poem based on a performance with sheep: “Negro en ovejas/Black on Sheep.” Robotpoem@s consist of insect-like robots (five quadrupeds and a bigger hexapod) whose legs and bodies are engraved with the seven parts of a poem written from the robot’s point of view in bilingual format (Spanish and English). Binary constructs such as creator/creature are questioned by these creatures purposely chosen from open-source models resembling insects and spiders, thus emphasizing anxiety and removal from humans while underlying the already problematic relation between humans and technology. The final segment of the poem, number VII, rephrases the biblical pronouncement on the creation of humans, as perceived by the robot: “According to your likeness / my Image.” With this statement, the notion of creation is reformulated and bent by the power of electronics, ultimately questioning its binary foundations. An interface to explore these robopoem@s can be found at tina.escaja.com (requires Flash): http://www.uvm.edu/~tescaja/robopoems/quadrupeds.html. This interface shows the original quadrupeds with options for listening to the poems in three different languages (English, Spanish and Chinese), interacting with 3-D models of the quadrupeds, and experiencing Augmented Reality components triggered by the panels that served as matrix of the robot-poets. On the other hand, “Negro en ovejas” is a digital “ovine poem” which intersects words and sheep in an interactive poetic project that allows random poetry as created by the sheep as they graze in the pasture, a performance enhanced and extended to the possible variants created by a digital interface: https://www.badosa.com/obres/ovino/index.html This project includes, therefore, various levels of poetic action and interaction. First there is the process of constructing the text, the base-poem formed by words which have meaning in and of themselves, but also acquire new meanings by contacting with other words (the noun “Sol” - “Sun”- and the verb “Es” -“Is”- become the plural “Soles” -“Suns”- through proximity or contact). Once the written pieces are constructed, they are assigned to sheep who will freely form poems in a performance of movements and bleating which will become its own entity. Finally, when the event is transferred to the digital artefact, any web surfer can access and reproduce the process in a cybernetic interaction and in an exchange which affords them creative authorship: the web user, just like the sheep, creates the poetic experience, joining forces with  the sheep as well. The presentation of the interface at ELO2019 would potentially capture some of the verses in a suggestion and proposal of new interactive dimensions. Both e-lit projects allow for a questioning of binaries and media-assumptions based on electronics, interspecies and random poetry.

EMBLEM/AS consist of three digital poetic artifacts created in Flash that present three emblem or banners (“Emblemas” in Spanish) related to three geographic-poetic/linguistic areas: 1. MORA AMOR 2. ARENA AL COR 3. UNITED ESTADOS The three artifacts allow interactive experiences based on words created with the acronym of each of the city/banner referenced. As you move the cursor, words and sounds lead new audiovisual and political constructions based on meanings that explore the author’s split sense of identity as a nomadic subject. The first banner, “Mora amor” (Love dwells), was published in 2017 and its record is archived at elmcip.net: https://elmcip.net/creative-work/mora-amor This artifact refers to the banner of the city of Zamora, the place of birth of the author. The interactive words and Spanish sounds explore her sense of disengagement and nostalgia towards this city, while pointing to the conservatism and religious constrains of this area of Spain: Ora, Roma, Mazo, Amor, etc. (Prey, Rome, Mallet, Love). The interface can be experienced here: https://proyecto.w3.uvm.edu/Emblem/as/ZamoraFinalVoice.php

“Arena al cor” (Sand in the heart), is visually based on the Catalonia banner. The voice now reproduces, in both Catalan and Spanish, words created with the acronym of the city of Barcelona, the area where the author grew up. Now, the meanings intersect semantics of the sea (Ona, Roca, Ancla –Wave, Rock, Anchor) with others related to work and pain (Labora, Lacera –Works, Wound). This interface can be experienced here: https://proyecto.w3.uvm.edu/Emblem/as/BarcelonaArena.php Finally, “United Estados” reproduces the emblematic flag of the United States. The words and sounds, now in English, Spanish and Spanglish, reflect political issues in the country of residence and co-citizenship of the author. The acronyms point now to notions of anxiety, division and pain (Ansiado, Dissent, Duelo, SOS), as well as longing (Deseado).

The life of man and his mental structure is the food for literary material. The vision of the world held by each group of humans, its cerebral conception of reality is what literature collates over the course of time. Society of the 21st Century is progressively changing its structures towards a global society brought about the enormous improvements in communications, particularly those related to the digital revolution. Taking this conception of literature as a baseline with respect to the world, these changes will be taken into account and affect literature in the digital era. One of the evolutions brought about by the hyper connectivity is globalization. It is possible to state that we are experiencing the birth of a global literature in the sense expressed by Damrosch and by Tabbi: it is a new way of getting closer to the world and communication that is growing without any spatial and time barriers and can reach any type of receiver. It is also possible to identify universal patterns that are repeated in the digital literature that converts it in global literature. The global virtual space itself is built on part of the collective imaginary of digital literature. Digital literature written in Spanish fits in perfectly with the set of artistic creations as part of a global movement. Another of the essential characteristics of this global literature is the possibility of recombining and reworking the materials into new formats. Examples of these in which the whole work consists in reworking of another analogue traditional work are Góngora Wordtoys by Belén Gache, or Don Quixote for iPad. On other occasions, one verse is sufficient as a starting point to build our digital creation (Ara vus prec) or well-known phrases by known writers and thinkers are inserted to support the post-it of suicidal and desperate people that are escaping from a reality in which communication seems impossible (Mitos muertos y suicidas). These resources of the active and dynamic cultural memory foment new formats and are adjusted to the concerns of the new generations. In this way they become attractive works to digital natives. In this sense, digital literature is disguised as a local phenomenon taking over and inheriting traits from traditional literature. We are witnesses of the first literary works of a literature without frontiers in which the creators and readers know they are immersed in a new global reality: the virtual world behind our screens is contagious and communicates in an osmotic fashion the rest of the information. At the heart of the LEETHI group of the Universidad Complutense de Madrid, we have created as a group of investigators that have been working since 2013 on setting up a repository of works of digital literature in Spanish called Ciberia. Currently it holds seventy works and has been exported to CELL. This in itself, constitutes an example of globalization of this literature through sharing metadata that facilitate the exchange and the will to promote universal access to this literature.

This idea came from an university project (2017) and thanks to the exchange students' program. 

This is an experiment of digital poetry written in 14 verses: it was asked to 10 people from 10 different countries to translate each of them from English to their mother tongue.

Every clips were recorded in different places in Bergen (NO).

The result is a multilingual digital poem about Bergen.

The installation "Las piedras del camino" is a representation of the landscape walked by Don Quijote in the first part of his journey. We converted literary fragments to rocks by calculating the magnitude of some confusions and mistakes that are narrated in the first part of the novel Don Quijote de la Mancha, written by Miguel de Cervantes. We can now use this rocks to make scultural representations of Don Quijote's landscape through the objectification of his mistakes.

The process 

The Spanish version of “stepping twice into the same river” would be "caer dos veces con la misma piedra" (which, literally means “to step twice with the same rock”). In this sentence the word “rock” functions as a sinonym for “mistake” or “error”, so that “to step twice with the same rock” means “to make the same mistake twice”. Considering this, we asked ourselves about the shapes of mistakes. Would it be possible to turn mistakes into visible forms that were recognizable as rocks in a path? To experiment with this, we took the novel Don Quijote de la Mancha, by Miguel de Cervantes, in which the main character is a self proclaimed knight (in a way that totally contradicts the law!) and tries to live all the adventures he had read in cavalry novels. In this process he has many confusions and makes a series of mistakes. We think of these confusions and mistakes as descriptions of the difference between expectations and reality. In other words: we know when Don Quijote is making a mistake because the author of the novel tells us what would have been correct.

For example, Cervantes tells us that there are windmills close to the path that Don Quijote and Sancho Panza are following (this would be considered as a correct description of reality or, at least, an expectation of what would reality be) and then the same author explains that Don Quijote is seeing giants instead of windmills and attacks them (this would be considered as a description of the confusion or what Don Quijote did in reality, against all expectations). In this example, the confusion is based on the difference between windmills and giants. At this point, we asked ourselves whether it would be possible to calculate this difference by means of substraction. So we invented a code: each letter of the alphabet would correspond to a number. "A" would correspond to "1", "B" to "2", "C" to "3"... and so on. By having this code, we could convert words into numbers and then substract, for example, "giants" to "windmills", so that we could know the difference between one and the other. First, we would substract "G" (7) to "W" (23). That would be: 23 - 7 = 16. Following this logic, the difference between "windmills" and "giants" would be the series of numbers: 16, 0, 13, 10, 7, 10, 0, 0, 0.We then selected 10 mistakes or confusions that characterize the first part of Don Quijote's journey and calculated all the substractions. We got 10 different series of numbers. Their longitudes depended on the longitude of the textual description of the mistake or confusion.

Then, we used these series of numbers to design shapes. How did we do that? We considered the sphere as a perfect shape because the distance between its center and all its ends is always the same. So we used the series of numbers that we got from substracting expectations to reality to determinate the very different distances from a point, which would be the center, to diverse ends (depending on the longitude of the series). We called these shapes "rocks" and each of these corresponds to a Don Quijote's mistake or confusion, as if these had been translated or converted to rocks with which the spanish knight stepped.

The poem is an interactive experience. You can play with the words and the spanish sounds to make your own audiovisual construction.

You can know more of her and her work on http://www.uvm.edu/~tescaja/home.htm

Poem 21 is based on a 1986 William Barton program (in English) called “The Mad Poet,” published in Commodore Power/Play but later redone with different Spanish words by Amìlcar Romaro. His Spanish version, Poema 21, was published in 1988 in the magazine K64. This is the first of two alternative sets of data given in that issue. The following are available: The original (Spanish) BASIC program, the translated (English) BASIC program, the original program as a PRG file, and the translated program as a PRG file. The PRG files can be run on Commodore 64 emulators; an in-browser emulator (VICE.js) is provided in the current publication. Translation to English by Nick Montfort.