News/Research

E-lit #selfie poetry and Alex Saum Pascual in Berkeley News

01 Aug, 2016

E-lit #selfie poetry and Alex Saum Pascual in Berkeley News

Assistant Professor Alex Saum-Pascual, Spanish and Portuguese, has been featured in Berkeley News! The article "Sensitive but unclassified: Alex Saum-Pascual on selfies, electronic literature and creativity on the Internet" written by Joel Bahr highlights not only her academic studies in electronic literature, but also her creative e-lit poetry projects, which have received international attention and been exhibited across the globe.

From the article:

"Maybe the best way to think about Saum-Pascual’s work is to picture a moving digital collage on your screen. Some elements are familiar — there are words (both Spanish and English) that are broken into lines and stanzas. Poetry says your brain. Along with the words are images and embedded videos — which is normal enough, you think. Then there are some things that are a bit stranger. Looping .gifs, audio files of a computer reading Walt Whitman’s Wikipedia entry out loud, the sounds of crashing waves, a distant singer and birds cawing overhead. Some pieces have instructions for viewing. Some require the viewer to click around the page to activate a voice. Sometimes there are errors on the page, sometimes there are broken links. Those are part of it too."

"The thing about Saum-Pascual’s work — both academically and artistically — is that it makes us reconsider our relationship with the Internet, and, perhaps, shows us that the boundaries of digital art are further from us than we realize."

Read the rest of the article here

Read Alex's incredible poetry (and more about her projects) here