01 — the premise
In a near future, your personal data flows from three streams — what you do online, what others contribute about you, and what sensors overhear — and is processed by artificial intelligence into personalized, persuasive media in real time. Big Data speaks in the voice of that apparatus: a "we" addressing "you," offering statistical omniscience as if it were care. The work embodies the mechanism it critiques — it, too, regenerates itself from rules, never the same twice. It is the third work in a twenty-year exploration of modular form.
Generative video poem·Spanish with English translation·Countless sequencings·30 readers·Electroacoustic score·With Rodolfo Mata
02 — the film
Each regenerated sequencing is performed by thirty readers in Mexico City — their faces, voices, and gestures a database made human, and the ones who do the persuading. A continuous edit hides the machine's seams; Carole Chargueron's electroacoustic score is regenerated with every run. And the fractal — cubes made of cubes made of cubes — is the database itself: landscapes of millions of points that expand and contract, seeming to breathe.
In English — ARTS & Sustainable Development Goals Festival, Brooklyn, 2020.
En español — Festival de Cortometraje Universitario UVAQ, México, 2020.
03 — the map
Every line of the poem is a node. The arrows are the moves the algorithm may make between them — five kinds of transition, zones where the randomness narrows, a single entrance and a single exit. This chart is the poem's score: the rules that keep every regeneration grammatical.
04 — the run
Set how many lines, or how long. The apparatus assembles a version — a path through the map, lit below — and the poem re-sequences in front of you. Read it in Spanish and English at once.
Above, the film's actual pre-rendered versions — the poem re-sequenced and re-timed, performed by the thirty readers. Below, the poem in its published order: the text every version draws from.
05 — the reception
Shortlisted — Robert Coover Award for a Work of Electronic Literature, Electronic Literature Organization (2021) · selected for the Electronic Literature Collection, Volume 4 (2022).
Criticism
Tania Favela, “Big data: líneas poéticas dentro del enjambre digital” — Letras Libres (2021): a reading of the poem through Byung-Chul Han's “digital swarm,” the hollowed-out you and we, and the algorithm's religious rhetoric. The Coover jury praised a voice that at once imitates and criticizes big data's power to persuade — one of five works shortlisted the year Leise Hook's The Vine and the Fish won.
Museums
Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento — CSUS Arts & Letters Faculty Exhibition, its premiere (2019) · Istanbul Contemporary Art Museum — Web Biennal Apeiron (2020) · Reece Museum, East Tennessee State University — The FL3TCH3R Exhibit (2020) · FILE — International Electronic Language Festival, São Paulo (2022).
Festivals
Newlyn PZ International Film Festival (UK)·ARTS & SDG Festival (Brooklyn)·Cadence Video Poetry Festival (Seattle)·Hello World / Transcultural Exchange (Boston)·Athens Digital Arts Festival·Festival ECRÃ (Rio de Janeiro)·The Banality of Evil in Our Daily Lives (Berlin)·International Poetry Film Festival of Thuringia / Bauhaus Weimar·Film & Video Poetry Symposium (Pasadena)·Festival de Cortometraje Universitario UVAQ (Morelia)·Festival Fotogenia (UNAM)·Videobardo (Buenos Aires)·9th International Video Poetry Festival (Athens)·Experiments in Cinema 16 (Albuquerque)·Formula Mundi (Fulda)
Publication & talks
FLAT Journal, UCLA Department of Design Media Arts & Carnegie Mellon (2020)·Sorbonne Université, CRIMIC (Paris, 2019)·Feria Internacional del Libro del Estado de México (Toluca, 2019)·Platforming Utopias, Electronic Literature Organization (2021)·Association for Computers and the Humanities Conference (2021)·Antología Lit(e)Lat, Vol. 2
credits
Diego Bonilla — concept, poem, programming
Rodolfo Mata — concept, poem, sequencing
Miguel Ortiz Ulloa — cinematography
Carole Chargueron — electroacoustic composition
Madeleine Stratford — English translation
The thirty readers
Eduardo Urueta · Iván Méndez González · Andrés Cisneros de la Cruz · Gerardo Montiel Klint · Pedro Mata Crespo · Ana Franco Ortuño · Marcela Arévalo Contreras · Frida Librado · Regina Crespo · Yunuen Díaz · Cristina Arévalo Contreras · Guillermo Arreola · David Rojas Azules · Carlos Saldaña Ramírez · Mariana Contreras · Christian Díaz · Susana Carreras · Rocío Cerón · Honorato Magaloni · César Cortés Vega · Yamil Narchi Sadek · Elisa Díaz Castelo · Ana Cervantes · Nina Maroto (bebé) · Julia Santibáñez · Mariana Castro · Carole Chargueron · Mohsen Emadi · Rodolfo Mata · Mayra Rojo.