Tina Escaja stands at the forefront of feminist digital poetics, a pioneer whose work merges experimental literature with emergent technologies. Born in Spain and based in the United States, Escaja has long explored the materiality of language through both analog and digital media, establishing herself as a groundbreaking voice in Spanish-language electronic literature. Her multifaceted projects range from hypertext poems to poetic robots (Robopoem@s), and immersive VR installations like Mar y virus, all of which challenge conventional boundaries between art, technology, and the body. Escaja’s work not only reflects a deep engagement with poetic form but also a persistent critique of patriarchal, heteronormative, and monolingual systems of power.
A scholar, performer, and activist as much as a poet, Escaja is also the founder of the Destructivist/a movement—an avant-garde literary intervention she launched at the grave of Chilean poet Vicente Huidobro. This movement reframes experimental traditions by fusing feminist resistance with digital aesthetics, embracing error, glitch, and fragmentation as radical strategies. Her projects, such as Código de barras, Realidad Mitigada, and Emblem/as, invite interaction and co-creation, often incorporating QR codes, barcodes, or bilingual code-switching to collapse distinctions between reader, user, and machine. Whether designing robots that recite poetry when they collide with obstacles or inviting audiences to physically destroy and recreate her books, Escaja makes collaboration and disruption central to her poetics.
In this wide-ranging conversation, Escaja reflects on her trajectory from early experiments with a blinking command-line cursor in the 1980s to contemporary works that engage AI, pandemic memory, and the poetic potential of augmented reality. She discusses the theoretical underpinnings of her digital creations, her political use of bilingualism, and how technologies—from QR codes to virtual reality—serve not merely as tools, but as poetic languages in their own right. At a time when questions of authorship, embodiment, and machine intelligence are more urgent than ever, Escaja’s work offers a lyrical, radical blueprint for where literature—and our relationship to it—might be heading.
You’re considered a pioneer in Spanish-language electronic literature. What drew you to merge technology with poetry, and how has digital media changed the way you approach creative expression?
I have always been fascinated by experimental literature—by the weight of the word in the poem and the very materiality of language. I first discovered technology’s potential as a vehicle for digital materialities—digit in its multiple senses of touch, number, and code—during a basic computing course I took in the late 1980s. The black screen (back then, there was no other option) with its pulsing white cursor, like an interdimensional signal, struck me as the most unsettling, absorbing, and formidable medium for establishing new poetic parameters of communication.
Technology, for me, is also deeply tied to process. As the work develops, opportunities for creation and interaction grow and branch out. That interaction with the reader–navigator is at the core of my poetic practice, and the electronic medium facilitates this in a complex, tentacular way, reflecting our global interconnectedness.
Can you tell us about the “Destructivist/a movement” you initiated at Vicente Huidobro’s grave in 2014? What does destructivism mean in the context of contemporary literature and digital art?
The Destructivist/a movement arose on the grave of Vicente Huidobro, the avant-garde poet and founder of creacionismo. It serves as both a tribute and a form of resistance—an inversion of creacionismo’s core principle—aimed at challenging the male-dominated, heterocentric poetic canon while honoring the experimental vanguards of the 20th century.
I launched it on October 12, 2014—a date associated with Hispanic Heritage Day, but also with Mapuche Resistance Day in Chile. During performances and happenings, I invite audiences to tear apart the second edition of my poetry book Caída Libre (Free Fall), which I believe diluted the feminist and dissenting edge of the first edition. The “destruction” is then followed by acts of re-creation, as participants make new objects from the fragments.
This becomes a collective, cathartic ritual, while also signaling new parameters that “remediate” (in the sense of “new media” and “healing”) the binary, hierarchical practices associated with the book as a medium. During these interventions, I perform a Destructivist/a action while a Manifesto is read that challenges concepts tied to both the analog and digital dominant paradigms of poetic construction. It is therefore a form of resistance with variants that include glitch, error, and erosion as aesthetic strategies. In digital art, this means embracing the fragment, the corrupted file, the interface that doesn’t load. Destructivism/o is a feminist, posthuman rupture—a poethical scream.
Your work spans from traditional poetry collections like Caída Libre to interactive digital pieces. How do you decide which medium best serves a particular creative vision?
A defining aspect of my creative identity is the transgression of boundaries—literary, historical, geographical, religious—and the binaries they uphold: man/woman, creator/creature, organism/machine, paper/digital.
Often, my work extends beyond the page into multimodal artistic–poetic forms or fuses with technology, resulting in a variety of projects. My poetry collection Código de barras (Barcodes), for example, expands into museum and gallery installations where visitors scan barcodes to reveal poetic and political content. Robopoem@s take physical form as five quadrupeds and one larger hexapod embodying a poem I wrote from the perspective of a robot. When these Robopoem@s encounter an obstacle, such as themselves, micro MP3 players recite the poem. In this case, the medium was not only relevant but essential—the moving robots themselves carried the existential message of the poem.
From conception, my projects adapt to the demands of the vision—whether through code, poetic robots, cosmic/menstrual moons, or reflections on the trauma of the COVID-19 pandemic. Interaction and collaboration are central principles, even when the work retains a paper/analog-based aesthetic. I have always wanted to entwine digital creation with analog/non-digital materialities, which I see as ontologically inevitable. In this sense, my work resonates with the multidimensionality in which we live, particularly in the postdigital moment we inhabit. My book Realidad Mitigada (Mitigated Reality) exemplifies this intersection, combining print with digital interactivity through a custom app.
Poetry, humanity, and technology converge in Robopoem@s. You created it in 2016, long before the advent of commercial LLMs. How do you see the work in today’s AI context?
I’m intrigued by the association of Robopoem@s with today’s AI models. The project emerged from an inherent existential tension between humanity and technology—robotics in particular—told from the point of view of a robot reflecting on its fragile identity. This introspection makes it unique, yet mirrors our own existential dilemmas.
Both entities—human and robot—overlap and challenge the boundaries between creator and creature, technology and humanity. Who imagines whom? What defines us as creators or creations?
This distinction becomes increasingly blurred now with an AI built on human knowledge—or eventually robotic knowledge that regurgitates human ideas intersected with itself—breaking down the boundaries of human–robotic consciousness. That existential fragility, present in the original Robopoem@s poem, thus extends to AI’s recent dynamics, while also questioning our own “programming” and assumed “intelligence,” both of which are based on multiple predetermined expectations and constructs (religion, nation, state). Significantly, both Robopoem@s and AI are rooted in language—in the word—as the vehicle of creation, reclaiming the demiurgic capacity of the sign, as in Genesis: “Let there be light, and there was light.” These very principles are questioned and reframed in the final verses of Robopoem@s: A mi semejanza / Tu imagen (“According to likeness / my Image”).
Barcodes and QR codes figure prominently in your work. Why?
Since my early projects—barcodes in Código de barras, BeeTagg codes in Caída libre, and QR codes in Mar y virus—I have been drawn to these visual–digital languages. They are both aesthetic forms and functional interfaces, enabling direct, participatory communication with the user.
For me, they are portals—ways of experiencing and redirecting reality, poetry, and art. In Código de barras, they also carried a political charge, critiquing the Iraq war, imperialist systems, and other “bars” such as surveillance and consumerism.
With Mar y virus / Virus and the Sea, QR codes enabled a communicative relationship among people affected during the COVID-19 pandemic, serving as interfaces inviting participants to share testimonials—thus forging a crucial and painfully necessary alliance between technology and humanity during lockdown years. As such, they encourage interaction and complicity, allow for layered storytelling, and bridge analog and digital space—sometimes concealing hidden archives, sometimes opening unexpected doors.
Your Mar y virus / Virus and the Sea project uses Virtual Reality and QR codes to collect COVID testimonies. How did the pandemic inspire it?
The pandemic and lockdown triggered an existential reckoning that rippled across cultural and artistic practices. Mar y virus / Virus and the Sea was my poetic–technological response, using tools that became lifelines during a time of isolation.
The project involved an art installation within a collective exhibition titled “Messages from the Anthropocene,” but the gallery’s opening coincided with the government’s announcement of the formal lockdown in Burlington, Vermont. So, I continued expanding my segment during the many months when the gallery was inaccessible to the public. One way I expressed my vision was by placing QR codes in local spots and eventually posting them in cities worldwide. These QR codes invited people to “Share your COVID story” / “Cuenta tu historia COVID.” This QR code, therefore, served—both literally and metaphorically—as an interface during the pandemic, allowing the exchange of testimonies and the building of collective and emotional connections. The website collecting these testimonies also features other pandemic-related cultural works, such as hacked/generative “oleatory” poetry; a Poem@ CAPTCHA; videopoems; installations; and more.
The Virtual Reality component allows users to navigate (using a VR headset) through the QR code itself, which is rendered in 3D as a massive labyrinth containing information about the virus, diagrams, photographs, images linked to ancestral plagues, videopoems, and more. This immersive search for the “center” also serves as a meditation on human vulnerability and its effect on our shared environment.
The QR code thus serves as the ultimate gateway to experiencing reality—both personally and collectively—paradoxically accessed through its virtual or electronic form.
Working between English and Spanish, with projects that often include bilingual elements, how does language choice affect the technological possibilities of your work?
Paraphrasing—while questioning—the dictum “In the beginning was the Word,” I see the Poem as the origin of all my projects. My primary language is Spanish, though English inevitably enters my work—not only as my adopted tongue but as the dominant language of technology.
In Robopoem@s, English and Spanish intersect: “Te llego / y Soy. Your flesh, / mi carencia. Tu carne, / my shift / a que aspiro.” My first hypertext work, VeloCity, wove English into Spanish, but also included words in German and French alongside neologisms (Velociudad, velópata, velógamo), evoking the global circuitry of the internet while paying homage to the avant-garde. My Poesía LED project also incorporates English: “Read aloud / Grita / Luz Light / Emitting / Diodos / Transmitting / Poesía LED.”
My journey as a poet is primarily expressed in Spanish, with occasional translations into English as a necessary way to communicate and connect from the U.S. and around the world. I have sometimes critiqued the linguistic and theoretical imperialism of dominant English, acknowledging its limitations but also taking advantage of the open communication it enables through technology. Perhaps the last piece of my triptych Emblem/as—which questions the principles of nationhood from a nomadic poetic/ethical identity and is titled “United Estados”—is my most direct commentary on the intersection of identity and language concerning English. The triptych features Flash-created interfaces (now converted to HTML5), where content and form merge in the poetic–technological goal of interaction, as meanings emerge when the mouse “breaks” the flags or “emblems” that compose it.
I work bilingually—and often polylingually—as a political choice, resisting monolingual code structures. Sometimes, meaning ruptures beautifully in translation, and sometimes it collapses. That instability is part of the work. It’s also reflected in project titles like Robopoem@s, Destructivism/o, Emblem/as, and in my alter(ed) ego, Alm@ Pérez.
Where do you see digital literature going in the future?
I believe the future is the present—something inherent to the practice of electronic literature itself: as new creative forms emerge, new dynamics will continue to develop to “expand” the very idea of digital or electronic literature (“expand” being a term I’ve used in various multimodal projects). In that evolving past, the future points toward other forms of expression beyond traditional language, or similar to ancestral variants: now and in the future, it will include emoji, VR, neuro-activated AR, bioimplants, 3D worlds—emerging alongside the commodification and personalization of experience, or its dispersal into multiple interactive selves.
The most compelling development is AI as co-creator, with models that present themselves not as “tools,” but as agents and collaborators. I’ve connected these new AI-based digital products to the “xenobot” as an allegorical result: a new hybrid interspecies entity, a biological–cybernetic creation that self-evolves. Maybe the term “electronic literature” should be redefined to include, in some way, this process of continuity, collaboration, and growth. But the digital also encompasses “digit”—a sensory matter, touch, materiality—and perhaps a more inclusive postdigital multiplicity is already implied in where we find or will find, ourselves.