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<meta property="og:site_name" content="Digital Vaiven"/><meta property="og:url" content=""/><meta property="og:type" content="article"/><meta property="og:title" content="Introduction"/><meta property="og:description" content="atlas was a puerto rican is a critical text that describes some of the relationships of digital embodiment with colonial identity. It also includes poetry that I have written about how I have navigated my Puerto Rican identity. I began my process by taking many digital humanities courses in the last two years. I had noticed that my interests leaned towards thinking about embodiment in relationship with technology and thinking about the body as archive. I have explored this through both critical scholarship and my own poetry throughout the years. In 2016 I was awarded the MacArthur-Leithauser Travel Award and used it to travel to Puerto Rico. Most of my family was born Puerto Rico, but it was my first time ever traveling to the island. There I filmed visually immersive and panoramic 360° video, which is a kind of photographic virtual reality technology. This is weeks before Hurricane Maria would drastically change the island. Learning the language of decoding space and how poetry acts in that process has been difficult but enriching. This project has been an example as to why I write and how I make sense of my existence. To have creative and critical work be in deep intimate relationship with one another in this project has, too, proved to me how important it is to make sense of my colonial identity. It is an identity that begs for critical scholarship and gentle story.
(Tato Laviera reciting his poem AmerRícan.)
The project is inspired by the poetry of Tato Laviera and Nayyirah Waheed, critical scholarship of embodiment and digital identity, and my own personal experience in navigating my Puerto Rican identity. Tato Laviera was a Nuyorican poet born in Puerto Rico, moving to New York City in 1960. His poetry focuses on transcultural identity with an emphasis on immigration and the Spanish language. Drawing from his 2014 complete collection Bendición, Tato Laviera explores the physical spaces that Puerto Rican people inhabit and the migration of bodies between cultures.
(Cover of salt. with fingerprint stains on it.)
Nayyirah Waheed is also an acclaimed poet who explores identity and race in her work. This project is inspired by her 2013 poetry book salt.. In the case of Waheed, I am deeply inspired by the form of her book. The book has a white cover that radiates ghostliness. Every poem feels as if it floats on each page, giving every one of the poems a skeletal, detached body. The “floating” of the poems on the pages, in a white book with the single word “salt” on the cover, gives salt. a minimal appearance that triggers in the reader a feeling of emptiness. The cover of Waheed’s book showcases the way memory of feelings, thought, and even people are tracked without necessarily knowing what precisely was that memory. A fingerprint stain on the white of the book shows that someone must have held it. To tell who could have held it, what stories they hold in their self, and what caused the fingerprint cannot be deduced from the print alone. The knowledge that someone must’ve held the book before is the only thing that marks the white cover of salt.. This is how ghosts work: you know something or someone must have existed because it is marked in environment and feeling, but can only exist suspended in a moment without context.
(Screenshot of 3D Tic-Tac-Toe for the Atari 2600.)
atlas was a puerto rican is also inspired by Atari Games and the Atari console. Founded in 1972, Atari Inc. is home to familiar games like Tetris and Pong. Their 8-bit, pixelated, virtual designs were a cultural turning point in how we navigate media in our society, forever revolutionizing the way we view and interact as people with a television screen. I focus on the form of 3-D Tic-Tac-Toe, released in 1978 for the Atari 2600. Consisting of four floating and gridded parallelograms over one another, the goal is to have your Xs or Os, like a regular tic-tac-toe game, in a row or diagonal of four to win the game. The catch, though, is that a player can also create columns of Xs and Os between the parallelograms to win, as the parallelograms give the illusion that they are squares floating above one another on the screen. Using the interface of 3-D Tic-Tac-Toe from Atari, we can see these parallelograms as a metaphor for layered planes of existence. It is in the in-between–the space created between two or more of these planes of existence–that Puerto Ricans navigate the multiple spaces they inhabit, traveling between those spaces to access different experiences of embodiment. I refer to this in-between as a type of liminal space. In atlas was a puerto rican, I use 3D Tic-Tac-Toe as a way to visualize this experience of traveling between those spaces. Like 3-D Tic-Tac-Toe, there is information that seeps between those grids to inform the user as they continue to play the game. The grid is interactive. By clicking a tile, a piece of information in the project is rewarded to the user. Instead of four-in-a-row like the original game’s mechanism, here the user has agency as to where to start and where to click. What the user does not know is how every click and interaction “breaks” the interface. The user’s continuous clicks for more information eventually breaks down the interface into a glitch: a jumbled collection of information where the user does not know where to end or begin. A “glitch” is a malfunction in the execution of a computer program. However, the glitch is deliberate in this project to show that it is the “malfunctions” that are truly defining. This is an allegory to how I navigate my Puerto Rican identity: as I learn more and more about myself and my history, it reveals more and more glitches in my existence that still are so wholly me.
Lastly, Laura Briggs’ work in Reproducing Empire, particularly “Ghosts, Cyborgs, and Why Puerto Rico Is the Most Important Place in the World” is helpful to think about the relationship between technology and identity. Briggs interrogates manufactured histories that shape Puerto Rican experiences. She also uses Donna Haraway’s “A Manifesto for Cyborgs,” which not only pushes on how we view experimentation of the Puerto Rican body and technology but also engages the reader to think critically on how the definition of “colonized” has changed in this day and age. “A Manifesto for Cyborgs” was written in 1984 and describes the idea of the “cyborg” as a “cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction” (Haraway, 1). By analyzing structural and physical violence along with Haraway’s conception of the machine body, Briggs questions the current narrative of Puerto Rican identity and what it means to have a manufactured body."/><meta property="og:image" content="https://66.media.tumblr.com/avatar_f6bcc875d019_128.pnj"/>
<meta name="twitter:url" content=""/><meta name="twitter:card" content="summary"><meta name="twitter:title" content="Introduction"/><meta name="twitter:description" content="atlas was a puerto rican is a critical text that describes some of the relationships of digital embodiment with colonial identity. It also includes poetry that I have written about how I have navigated my Puerto Rican identity. I began my process by taking many digital humanities courses in the last two years. I had noticed that my interests leaned towards thinking about embodiment in relationship with technology and thinking about the body as archive. I have explored this through both critical scholarship and my own poetry throughout the years. In 2016 I was awarded the MacArthur-Leithauser Travel Award and used it to travel to Puerto Rico. Most of my family was born Puerto Rico, but it was my first time ever traveling to the island. There I filmed visually immersive and panoramic 360° video, which is a kind of photographic virtual reality technology. This is weeks before Hurricane Maria would drastically change the island. Learning the language of decoding space and how poetry acts in that process has been difficult but enriching. This project has been an example as to why I write and how I make sense of my existence. To have creative and critical work be in deep intimate relationship with one another in this project has, too, proved to me how important it is to make sense of my colonial identity. It is an identity that begs for critical scholarship and gentle story.
(Tato Laviera reciting his poem AmerRícan.)
The project is inspired by the poetry of Tato Laviera and Nayyirah Waheed, critical scholarship of embodiment and digital identity, and my own personal experience in navigating my Puerto Rican identity. Tato Laviera was a Nuyorican poet born in Puerto Rico, moving to New York City in 1960. His poetry focuses on transcultural identity with an emphasis on immigration and the Spanish language. Drawing from his 2014 complete collection Bendición, Tato Laviera explores the physical spaces that Puerto Rican people inhabit and the migration of bodies between cultures.
(Cover of salt. with fingerprint stains on it.)
Nayyirah Waheed is also an acclaimed poet who explores identity and race in her work. This project is inspired by her 2013 poetry book salt.. In the case of Waheed, I am deeply inspired by the form of her book. The book has a white cover that radiates ghostliness. Every poem feels as if it floats on each page, giving every one of the poems a skeletal, detached body. The “floating” of the poems on the pages, in a white book with the single word “salt” on the cover, gives salt. a minimal appearance that triggers in the reader a feeling of emptiness. The cover of Waheed’s book showcases the way memory of feelings, thought, and even people are tracked without necessarily knowing what precisely was that memory. A fingerprint stain on the white of the book shows that someone must have held it. To tell who could have held it, what stories they hold in their self, and what caused the fingerprint cannot be deduced from the print alone. The knowledge that someone must’ve held the book before is the only thing that marks the white cover of salt.. This is how ghosts work: you know something or someone must have existed because it is marked in environment and feeling, but can only exist suspended in a moment without context.
(Screenshot of 3D Tic-Tac-Toe for the Atari 2600.)
atlas was a puerto rican is also inspired by Atari Games and the Atari console. Founded in 1972, Atari Inc. is home to familiar games like Tetris and Pong. Their 8-bit, pixelated, virtual designs were a cultural turning point in how we navigate media in our society, forever revolutionizing the way we view and interact as people with a television screen. I focus on the form of 3-D Tic-Tac-Toe, released in 1978 for the Atari 2600. Consisting of four floating and gridded parallelograms over one another, the goal is to have your Xs or Os, like a regular tic-tac-toe game, in a row or diagonal of four to win the game. The catch, though, is that a player can also create columns of Xs and Os between the parallelograms to win, as the parallelograms give the illusion that they are squares floating above one another on the screen. Using the interface of 3-D Tic-Tac-Toe from Atari, we can see these parallelograms as a metaphor for layered planes of existence. It is in the in-between–the space created between two or more of these planes of existence–that Puerto Ricans navigate the multiple spaces they inhabit, traveling between those spaces to access different experiences of embodiment. I refer to this in-between as a type of liminal space. In atlas was a puerto rican, I use 3D Tic-Tac-Toe as a way to visualize this experience of traveling between those spaces. Like 3-D Tic-Tac-Toe, there is information that seeps between those grids to inform the user as they continue to play the game. The grid is interactive. By clicking a tile, a piece of information in the project is rewarded to the user. Instead of four-in-a-row like the original game’s mechanism, here the user has agency as to where to start and where to click. What the user does not know is how every click and interaction “breaks” the interface. The user’s continuous clicks for more information eventually breaks down the interface into a glitch: a jumbled collection of information where the user does not know where to end or begin. A “glitch” is a malfunction in the execution of a computer program. However, the glitch is deliberate in this project to show that it is the “malfunctions” that are truly defining. This is an allegory to how I navigate my Puerto Rican identity: as I learn more and more about myself and my history, it reveals more and more glitches in my existence that still are so wholly me.
Lastly, Laura Briggs’ work in Reproducing Empire, particularly “Ghosts, Cyborgs, and Why Puerto Rico Is the Most Important Place in the World” is helpful to think about the relationship between technology and identity. Briggs interrogates manufactured histories that shape Puerto Rican experiences. She also uses Donna Haraway’s “A Manifesto for Cyborgs,” which not only pushes on how we view experimentation of the Puerto Rican body and technology but also engages the reader to think critically on how the definition of “colonized” has changed in this day and age. “A Manifesto for Cyborgs” was written in 1984 and describes the idea of the “cyborg” as a “cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction” (Haraway, 1). By analyzing structural and physical violence along with Haraway’s conception of the machine body, Briggs questions the current narrative of Puerto Rican identity and what it means to have a manufactured body."/><meta name="twitter:image" content="https://66.media.tumblr.com/avatar_f6bcc875d019_128.pnj"/>
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<p style="color: #222222; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 18px;"><em>atlas was a puerto rican</em> is a critical text that describes some of the relationships of digital embodiment with colonial identity. It also includes poetry that I have written about how I have navigated my Puerto Rican identity. I began my process by taking many digital humanities courses in the last two years. I had noticed that my interests leaned towards thinking about embodiment in relationship with technology and thinking about the body as archive. I have explored this through both critical scholarship and my own poetry throughout the years. In 2016 I was awarded the MacArthur-Leithauser Travel Award and used it to travel to Puerto Rico. Most of my family was born Puerto Rico, but it was my first time ever traveling to the island. There I filmed visually immersive and panoramic 360° video, which is a kind of photographic virtual reality technology. This is weeks before Hurricane Maria would drastically change the island. Learning the language of decoding space and how poetry acts in that process has been difficult but enriching. This project has been an example as to why I write and how I make sense of my existence. To have creative and critical work be in deep intimate relationship with one another in this project has, too, proved to me how important it is to make sense of my colonial identity. It is an identity that begs for critical scholarship and gentle story.</p><p><iframe frameborder="0" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/vhUA7clXmT8" width="560"></iframe></p><p><em>(Tato Laviera reciting his poem </em>AmerRícan.<em>)</em></p><p style="color: #222222; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 18px;">The project is inspired by the poetry of Tato Laviera and Nayyirah Waheed, critical scholarship of embodiment and digital identity, and my own personal experience in navigating my Puerto Rican identity. Tato Laviera was a Nuyorican poet born in Puerto Rico, moving to New York City in 1960. His poetry focuses on transcultural identity with an emphasis on immigration and the Spanish language. Drawing from his 2014 complete collection <em>Bendición</em>, Tato Laviera explores the physical spaces that Puerto Rican people inhabit and the migration of bodies between cultures.</p><p style="color: #222222; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 18px;"><img src="https://66.media.tumblr.com/b52bc84afd4a7602cc5be993bfa9de82/tumblr_inline_p6ivabkWJk1rr8mem_500.jpg"></p><p><em>(Cover of </em>salt. <em>with fingerprint stains on it.)</em></p><p style="color: #222222; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 18px;">Nayyirah Waheed is also an acclaimed poet who explores identity and race in her work. This project is inspired by her 2013 poetry book <em>salt.</em>. In the case of Waheed, I am deeply inspired by the form of her book. The book has a white cover that radiates ghostliness. Every poem feels as if it floats on each page, giving every one of the poems a skeletal, detached body. The “floating” of the poems on the pages, in a white book with the single word “salt” on the cover, gives <em>salt.</em> a minimal appearance that triggers in the reader a feeling of emptiness. The cover of Waheed’s book showcases the way memory of feelings, thought, and even people are tracked without necessarily knowing what precisely was that memory. A fingerprint stain on the white of the book shows that someone must have held it. To tell who could have held it, what stories they hold in their self, and what caused the fingerprint cannot be deduced from the print alone. The knowledge that someone must’ve held the book before is the only thing that marks the white cover of <em>salt.</em>. This is how ghosts work: you know something or someone must have existed because it is marked in environment and feeling, but can only exist suspended in a moment without context.</p><p style="color: #222222; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 18px;"><img src="https://66.media.tumblr.com/986303460ee3f878867064372d20d0ef/tumblr_inline_p6ivb0dpFo1rr8mem_500.jpg" style="color: #444444; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', HelveticaNeue, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px;"></p><p><em>(Screenshot of </em>3D Tic-Tac-Toe <em>for the </em>Atari 2600.<em>)</em></p><p style="color: #222222; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 18px;"><em>atlas was a puerto rican</em> is also inspired by Atari Games and the Atari console. Founded in 1972, Atari Inc. is home to familiar games like <em>Tetris</em> and <em>Pong</em>. Their 8-bit, pixelated, virtual designs were a cultural turning point in how we navigate media in our society, forever revolutionizing the way we view and interact as people with a television screen. I focus on the form of <em>3-D Tic-Tac-Toe</em>, released in 1978 for the Atari 2600. Consisting of four floating and gridded parallelograms over one another, the goal is to have your Xs or Os, like a regular tic-tac-toe game, in a row or diagonal of four to win the game. The catch, though, is that a player can also create columns of Xs and Os between the parallelograms to win, as the parallelograms give the illusion that they are squares floating above one another on the screen. Using the interface of<em> 3-D Tic-Tac-Toe</em> from Atari, we can see these parallelograms as a metaphor for layered planes of existence. It is in the in-between–the space created between two or more of these planes of existence–that Puerto Ricans navigate the multiple spaces they inhabit, traveling between those spaces to access different experiences of embodiment. I refer to this in-between as a type of liminal space. In atlas was a puerto rican, I use <em>3D Tic-Tac-Toe</em> as a way to visualize this experience of traveling between those spaces. Like <em>3-D Tic-Tac-Toe</em>, there is information that seeps between those grids to inform the user as they continue to play the game. The grid is interactive. By clicking a tile, a piece of information in the project is rewarded to the user. Instead of four-in-a-row like the original game’s mechanism, here the user has agency as to where to start and where to click. What the user does not know is how every click and interaction “breaks” the interface. The user’s continuous clicks for more information eventually breaks down the interface into a glitch: a jumbled collection of information where the user does not know where to end or begin. A “glitch” is a malfunction in the execution of a computer program. However, the glitch is deliberate in this project to show that it is the “malfunctions” that are truly defining. This is an allegory to how I navigate my Puerto Rican identity: as I learn more and more about myself and my history, it reveals more and more glitches in my existence that still are so wholly me.</p><p style="color: #222222; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 18px;">Lastly, Laura Briggs’ work in <em>Reproducing Empire</em>, particularly “Ghosts, Cyborgs, and Why Puerto Rico Is the Most Important Place in the World” is helpful to think about the relationship between technology and identity. Briggs interrogates manufactured histories that shape Puerto Rican experiences. She also uses Donna Haraway’s “A Manifesto for Cyborgs,” which not only pushes on how we view experimentation of the Puerto Rican body and technology but also engages the reader to think critically on how the definition of “colonized” has changed in this day and age. “A Manifesto for Cyborgs” was written in 1984 and describes the idea of the “cyborg” as a “cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction” (Haraway, 1). By analyzing structural and physical violence along with Haraway’s conception of the machine body, Briggs questions the current narrative of Puerto Rican identity and what it means to have a manufactured body.</p>
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