xxnft
Ana Caballero
When did you start using digital/new media for your creative practice? (in your case placing your poems online)
For years I felt that the life of a published poem was too insular, too quiet, too short, so I shared my poems as spoken-word video pieces on social media. When I read about
NFTs and Web3, it seemed like a natural jump for me as I already had digital versions of many of my poems and was inspired by how people connected with these audiovisual pieces. I also felt very deeply that poems were works of art and was certain that this value could finally be expressed via blockchain provenance.
What was your first ever NFT?
The first NFT I created is a poem called “Productivity.” It was part of the Etherpoems project, which minted verse directly onto the Ethereum blockchain.
Most recent one?
My most recent crypto poem is “thin lace,” a work from my newest manuscript Mammal, which works to rip the veil off of romanticized motherhood. This poem was exhibited at @FauveParis.
How/why did you begin to upload your work on the blockchain?
When I read about NFTs, I immediately knew I wanted to create a poetry gallery, where I could sell my own poems, but also those of my poet friends. This gallery eventually became theVERSEverse.com.
Meanwhile, I fell deeply in love with the crypto art ecosystem. It’s such a radiantly alive place to be. In my first few months in the NFT space, I experimented with OpenSea, Foundation, KnownOrigin, Async, and Hic et Nunc. I found very valuable help and information in the Crypto Writers’ Discord community, founded by Kalen Iwamoto. It’s a great landing place for writers looking to get started in Web3.
How would you recommend we can increase the involvement of women in the NFT and Web3 space?
I think it’s important for more women artists to be collected and at higher prices. The gender divide is disheartening, to say the least. Very few collectors actually make an effort to address this, but the ones who do shine bright and will be rewarded and regarded as visionaries.
What is your most recent project?
I’m currently working on a collection for GAZELL.iO Gallery in London, based on a lyric essay I wrote called “Ways to Misspell Obsidian,” which was a finalist for Ploughshare’s Emerging Writers Contest. This collection also includes a poem called “Juan,” which is a precursor to the essay. The collection will be an exploration of intertextuality and a tribute to language, as I’m eschewing visuals or background music. Through these works, I want to celebrate the power of words and voice in transmitting multiple layers
of intention.
What are the main guiding principles behind your work? Can you step
outside yourself for a moment and let us know what you see?
My poetry is rooted in the deeply intimate details of my day. Our desires, regrets, quests for purpose are inseparable from the logistics of living. We rip envelopes, answer emails, towel children, boil eggs, all while pondering the ultimate meaning of our existence. I tend to be very direct in my writing. When we over embellish what we’re feeling, it’s often because we’re afraid of feeling it. I believe that only brutally honest and personal
writing can be relatable–much less universal. Language doesn’t need to adorn itself to be powerful or beautiful.
Much of my work explores how biology determines heteronormative societal rites, ripping the veil off romanticized motherhood—particularly notions that package female sacrifice as virtue. My poems are moments of observation, but also resistance. I like to employ rhyme, which, in conversational texts, becomes a marked departure from our normal speech patterns and adds intention, play, and subversion to a text. Sometimes, I feel like a conceptual artist, drafting poems borne of ideas, of messages I want to communicate, putting my tools at the service of concept. Other times I feel like a landscape painter, making suggestions based on what I see.
Do you get any particular source of inspiration for the visual/literary styles of your works e.g. do they arrive in relation to the place (physical, psychological, or situational) you were located at the time?
I'm heavily influenced by poets such as T.S. Eliot, Lucille Clifton, Louise Glück, and Sharon Olds—authors with unmistakable poetic voices. Beyond the form and diction of a poem, the soul of the poet must be palpable in order for the poem to communicate emotion. I seek to drench my verse with my soul. To this effect, and believing that few things are as intimate as the sound of our voice, my digital poems include a spoken-word component, combining poetic and physical voice to create a highly immersive experience. My work fits within a long trajectory of text-based art, much of which could be considered performative--as the use of language implies an active rather than passive exchange with the work’s audience. From Ed Ruscha, to John Baldessari, to Tracey Emin, text in art overtly presents words as vessels of meaning. In doing so, such works touch upon the instability of language itself as a mechanism of storing and transmitting meaning. Words mean different things to each of us; meaning can evolve over time. It is precisely this vulnerability that draws me to words. To borrow Derridean sentence structure: within the limitation lies the limitless. I believe words and their intended/unintended evocations remain the best tools we have to voice our private worlds.
My poems accompany the moments of my life in which I write them. They reveal to me what I am feeling as I am feeling it. As such, my first book, written in Spanish, is about my raucous twenties in Bogotá, a harshly urban but very fun city. It’s a book about resisting the pressure to settle down and about the loneliness of not doing so. It also documents my years working with the Colombian government, during which I saw, first-hand, the dark shadows of violent truth.
A Petit Mal, a book that is coming out in Spring 2023, documents my family's collision with disease, following my son’s epilepsy diagnosis. The poems in my current manuscript, MAMMAL, occupy the complex layers in the conversations we have with those to whom we are closest.
Can you dive a bit into the technical aspects of the work - both written and when online? Software or hardware used (in the wide sense; it could be thoughts and bodies), as well as the editing process? What are some of the particular challenges you and your team have faced in realizing the works?
As an artist plumbing the frontline of blockchain poetics, technology informs every decision I make related to my work's presentation and publication. I now imagine how my poems will occupy analog and digital spaces, searching for ways that they may thrive in both. I'm also interested in connecting poetry to creative coding and AI, not to illustrate verse, but to bring it into reciprocal dialogue with these technologies.
Via technology, poems can be exhibited, curated, and collected in the same way as digital art. I believe this will provoke a revolutionary shift in the way poetry engages with and seduces audiences, sparking long overdue conversations about poetry's cultural agency. To this effect, I recently published an article in Right Click Save in which I posit that to curate poetry as art is to disrupt, inviting readers and lovers of poetry to participate in this disruption by collecting it. I also cofounded literary gallery theVERSEverse.com, where texts by traditional poets are paired with crypto native artists to create genre-defying works of art.
Beyond notions of value, I am very much inspired by how technology can connect people to poetry and around poetry. Spoken-word art, by virtue of its immersive nature, is a powerful bridge between our offline and networked selves. I'm committed to solidifying this bridge, to making it wider.
I continue to write using paper and pen, before entering into an editing process that can
take months, even years. I take my time with each poem, enjoy its craft.
If I plan to digitize a poem, I indulge in its recording, going through dozens of takes until I consider that the spoken-word version captures the emotion I felt while writing it. I then envision how it will live on a screen and commission this vision to a graphic designer who can carry it out, though I always lay out the words as I’m very particular about spacing and line breaks. I also love working with artists across various mediums–from dancers, to traditional painters, to photographers, to musicians.
Can you tell us about the relationship you want or aim to have with the viewer/reader/listener? What is the underlying approach to this relationship?
I believe the act of reading is the closest form of communion between two minds. When individuals converse, there is mediation, interpretation, negotiation. A mind before an image engages in an inner dialogue of interrogation, comprehension, valuation. But a mind deeply engaged with a text allows the language of the text to become its own. Thus, poetry’s power can extend beyond that of the aesthetic because words enter our mind to become indistinguishable from our thoughts, revealing emotions, ideas, beliefs we didn’t know we shared.
It never ceases to amaze me how people connect with my work. I think people want more poetry in their lives but perhaps don’t know where or how to find it. Literary journals and traditional publishing haven’t always done the greatest job at connecting with younger, digital audiences. I’m very inspired by the way the crypto space, as well as some of its key curators, are embracing poetry as art.
It might seem a paradox of Web3 that to disrupt the way in which poetry is valued, and to carve its own niche in the art world, poetry requires curation. Why? Because curation legitimizes disruption.
I think that poems, both in books and on the Internet, deserve all the love in the world. I also picture poetry as a flourishing art form to be exhibited and transacted. I believe this will happen both via disruption and via curation.
I want listeners, readers of my work to enjoy poetry. I also want for them to regard and, if they can, collect poems as art.
How can we increase the involvement of women in web3/NFTs/digital art sphere?
I think it’s important for more women artists to be collected and at higher prices. The gender divide is disheartening, to say the least. Very few collectors actually go out of their way to help correct this, but the ones that do shine bright.
It’s curious to me that many of the top curators in the space are actually women, so I don’t think it’s a problem of making women artists more visible, but rather a problem of misstated valuation. Web3 presents a very unique opportunity to break toxic patterns. A project that immediately comes to mind that addresses the gender divide is UNSIGNED, by Operator and Anika Meier.