Cluster

GeoSemantics II / Terms of Service: Untitled (rock) form 3

By Alex Saum-Pascual
Terms of Service: Untitled (rock) form 3

Poetic Statement: In early 2020, before the COVID 19 pandemic hit our Californian shores, I was working on a digital poetry project at UC Berkeley’s Arts Research Center. Corporate Poetry was intended to explore how corporate language related to those other corpora that is our bodies, through the creation of a series of interactive poems that mimicked online survey forms. I built a few digital poems that aimed to defamiliarize our dialogue with platforms like Google Forms, Survey Monkey, and Zoom, and I subsequently used the data that these survey-like poems generated to build even more survey-like digital poems. “Terms of Service: Untitled (rock) form 3” is an analogic expression of the same ideas, this time focusing on the tension between survey logics, created to gather and analyze user data, and the stasis and impermeability of a printed page, where survey rhetorics are flattened and dated in an inoperative manner. My interest in digital materiality here expands to an exploration of the larger material networks that make digital objects possible, casting a large web of connections that link early modern mining to the contemporary race to control rare earths and build synthetic diamonds to build computers and cellphones. “Terms of Service: Untitled (rock) form 3” is the third part of a hand-drawn/written tryptic poem structured around Google Forms templates. “Report Abuse: Untitled (tree) form” was published in Emergen/cy (Arts Research Center, 2021) and “Privacy Policy: Untitled (atom) form 2” appeared in the Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies, vol 24.1 (2023). 

: :

: :

  • Alex Saum-Pascual

    Alex Saum-Pascual is a digital artist, poet, and professor. She is author of #Postweb! Crear con la máquina y en la red (2018) and numerous articles, special issues, and book chapters on digital art and literature in the Spanish-speaking world, being featured in The Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies, Comparative Literature Studies, The Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies, Revista de Estudios Hispánicos, and Digital Humanities Quarterly, among others. Her digital poetry has been exhibited in galleries and art festivals internationally, has been studied in specialized monographs, and is part of the Electronic Literature Collection Vol. 4 (2022). She is Associate Professor of Contemporary Spanish Literature and New Media at the University of California, Berkeley. She is also part of the Executive Committee of the Berkeley Center for New Media, and the board of directors of the Electronic Literature Organization.