literalex

statement: Are avant-garde practices still important to you?

When I first learned about the avant-garde in school I was asked to think about the shock a realist painter must have felt when encountering the first photographic camera. I know now this is a very common way of explaining the arrival of experimental painting at the turn of the 20th century, and it can be extrapolated to any other discipline such as music or literature. Understanding that the technological development of a medium forces us to look inwards, towards the medium itself rather than to the outside in search for representation, is a simple way to conceptualize any experimental play throughout history. I think about the role of technology today roughly along the same lines, and so the avant-garde interest in exploring and pushing the limits of any given artistic discipline is still deeply relevant to my art. That and play, of course. I think fun is something to take very seriously.

project: made to disappear

project description:

A few months ago I wrote a survey poem about loss, death, and governmental violence using the commercial data analysis service provided by SVMK Inc.

SVMK Inc. does business under SurveyMonkey.

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I sent the poem around.

44 people willingly, but unknowingly, participated in my data gathering poetry project. SVMK Inc. thanks them.

On July 22 I took some of those data points and created a new graphic poem. There is violence in the unknown. In graphs. And in poetry.

The poem travels as images, because images are impenetrable. I have only a vague idea of where the data came from or where it has gone now.

See Figs. 1-5 (below): “Made to Disappear” or visit http://www.alexsaum.com/made-to-disappear/

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Founded in 1999, the online survey development cloud-based software as a service company, SurveyMonkey, went public in 2018, with a revenue of $254.3 million that same year. Stocked launched at $12 and almost quadrupled by the end of the day.

Money, data, the stock market, and all their invisible violence times four.

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From 1936 to 1975 more than 400,000 people disappeared in Spain under the rule of dictator Francisco Franco. There are no official records. This data, unlike SVMK’s, is just my own estimate.

Most people can’t understand large numbers, that’s why we turn to visualizations. However, most images are impenetrable.

There are thousands of bodies buried under the soil of my country. Like a polished and hermetic graphic interface, it is impossible to see what lays under unmarked soil.

text: made to disappear [poem text]

“What does it mean to disappear?” I asked this question to a self-selected group of 44 anonymous participants during the months of February to June 2020.

40.91% of them understood disappearance to mean disintegrating into three short and consecutive dashes and, out of which

– – – or perhaps, in of which – – –

100% selected a single dot to contain the fleeting essence of what they mean by

void.

Unfortunately, the data revealed some discrepancies about which exact dot

[” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .”]

reflected best the respondents’ sense of disappearing. Alas, here lay the limitations of representing the incommensurable vastness of the universe

using dots.

Faced against the limits of human comprehension, 23 participants believed non-existence to take the shape of a fruit [i.e. a pear].

More significantly, 56.82% of respondents selected “mass graves” as synonym of disappearing, while 43.18% confirmed that there’s hundreds of thousands of

hands and feet buried

under freeways,

damns and

playgrounds in their country.

I never understood numbers. Thus, I can only confirm that:

– – – = mass graves.