Media archeology: a genealogical approach to Peruvian electronic poetry

Since the 1960s, several Peruvian poets, insular and heirs to an experimental poetic tradition, created works with visual and verbal elements that advanced the presence of poetry in electronic media and platforms. Works such as those by Jorge Eielson, Raquel Jodorowsky, Ricardo Falla, Enrique Verástegui, César Toro Montalvo or Juan Ramirez Ruiz already showed in Peruvian creators an awareness of the existence and assimilation of electronic media to their productions based on references to circuits electronic (1964), computers (1973-1988) and formal and experimental games with the algorithm (1977). Works like these are used in key antecedents to reimagine the Peruvian poetic tradition, but, at the same time, they raise the need for an approach that analyzes and discusses the adoption of the media as part of poetic experimentation to understand, in all its dimensions, at the time of the internet boom and its platformization, the work carried out in later decades by José Aburto with interactive poems using Flash (2000); Oswaldo Chanove through the possibilities of the hyperlink in a web platform (2001); Enrique Beó with hypertext poems in binary language through Wix and Issuu (2010); and Rafael García Godos with MVX0 a video game poem programmed in Unity (2017). Therefore, the objective of this panel is to show how, since the 2000s, Peruvian poets have inhabited digital platforms with works that used different technologies in trend, as practices related to what was previously developed by their peers in the materiality of paper. For this, our research will focus on this problem from a media archeology with two areas that must necessarily dialogue: discursive and digital. In the first case, to trace the insularity of these authors, we start from Michel Foucault's concept of genealogy as the study of a non-linear and heterogeneous history of knowledge, contextualized by power relations. In the second case, to show the jobs that were hosted on the Internet, we will use various rescue platforms such as wayback machine, for old websites; Ruffle, for work done in flash; and videos of the experience in the case of wix. The result of this work will be exposed in a data visualization on what we have called the origins of electronic poetry in Peru. In this way, we consider that a genealogical work must combine the apparatus of symbolic evaluation and the consequent use of platforms to counteract the absence of a critical and theoretical approach to this complex field, but also the obsolescence of technology.