Poetry from Alex Saum-Pascual in The New River
How does corporate poetry relate to that corpora part in our body?
Checkout Alex Suam-Pascual’s latest “Corporate Poetry” published in The New River, where she explores online surveys and the language behind them. This series is made possible in part from support from the Arts Research Center, where Alex is a Fellow.
From the publication:
Earlier this year, I started corporate poetry as an exploration into how corporate language related to that other corpora that is our body. Through a series of interactive “rooms,” this work aimed to repurpose the language of a variety of familiar online forms and platforms (Google Forms, Survey Monkey, Zoom and Qualtrics, among others) in order to domesticate the neoliberal intent of these data gathering technologies. My original hope was to bring attention to their language and our embodied reality, by making visible the digital infrastructure that is unintentionally brought into our homes whenever we participate in an online survey or take a video conferencing call.
In this issue, I am sharing two rooms, #1 and #2, which are based on Google Forms and Survey Monkey respectively. They are both built around the utilitarian structures we have come to expect in these survey platforms, but they both subvert the language and intent of these forms. “Room #1” is an exploration into the materiality of life by discussing motherhood as creation and death, and “Room #2” talks about the materiality of life in genocidal terms, by presenting the case of the Spanish Civil war and its aftermaths. Although it may sound counterintuitive, the destruction of natural resources and human life is directly related to the evolution of digital technologies that project a perverse sense of immaterial existence.
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