Ana María Caballero  
Oración, 2023  
HD video with audio  
TRT: 1 minutes 38 seconds  

In Oración (Prayer), which takes its name from a poem by acclaimed Colombian poet María Mercedes Carranza, Ana María Caballero proposes a new form of literary translation, breaking down the process to probe the subliminal connotations of prayer, the poetics of prompts and the semiotic entanglements of metaphor. 

Caballero’s textual translation is gestural–a personalized recasting of Carranza’s desperation in ways that speak to Caballero’s own relationship with devotion. By concentrating on the poem’s undercurrent of despair, Caballero accentuates poetry’s ability to capture ephemeral, personal moments and preserve them within poetic time and space so they may be felt by others. Caballeroalso transposed phrases from the poem, along with nuanced interpretations of its symbolism, into prompts, creating a vast compendium of images. The semantics, sounds, palettes, architectures, garments, kinesics, iconographies of prayer have been conditioned by institutionalized faith over centuries. Despite this, Caballero found honesty in her dialogue with the machine, curating a visual narrative that evokes the privacy, hope and despair of prayer, at once an experience of intense selfhood and acknowledgement of otherness. As prayer uses language to beseech the unknown for answers, working with text-to-image generation queries our collective unconscious, scouring our digital, shared memories, hoping to find an image that looks and feels like a response. 

Few are the places where the personal and the universal, the sublime and the crepuscular, the known and the unknown, collide as bluntly as in prayer—but, also, as in poetry.  
     
Ana María Caballero is a Colombian-American poet and artist. Her verse explores how biology delimits societal and cultural rites, ripping the veil off romanticized motherhood and questioning notions that package sacrifice as a virtue. She’s the recipient of the Beverly International Prize, Colombia’s José Manuel Arango National Poetry Prize, the Steel Toe Books Poetry Prize and a Sevens Foundation Grant. Her Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net-nominated work has been widely published and exhibited internationally,most recently at Gazelli Art House, L’Avant Galerie Vossen and Galloire in Dubai. As cofounder of digital poetry gallery theVERSEverse, she’s pushing the boundaries of how poetry is exhibited, experienced and valued.  
______________________________

EPOCH presents, XENOSPACE, a ground-breaking and experimental virtual exhibition that features seven artists exploring the collaborative boundaries between AI and machine learning within their creative processes.

The title “XENOSPACE” alludes to an unusual or unfamiliar environment. EPOCH has processed 360 equirectangular panoramas through Stable Diffusion, generating the subsequent AI-assisted environments that serve as the backdrop for the artworks.

XENOSPACE responds to a significant moment in the field, as it reflects on the growing relationship between humans and machines and the impact of AI on creative expression. The exhibition serves as a benchmark, showcasing the expansive collaborative potential of AI and machine learning in contemporary art practices and exhibition building. – chatGPT

Oración #3/15

Wallace Stevens’ poem “Fabliau of Florida” is a special edition from Ana María Caballero and hieroglyphica’s sold-out generative collection POEMS IN THE PUBLIC DOMAIN [PITPD]. This artwork was live-coded during South Florida's IGNITE Art + Tech Festival in January 2023, during which participants submitted comments that were incorporated into the project’s algorithm to create this unique, hand-annotated poem.

PITPD explores authorship. When a poem enters the public domain, it no longer belongs to its author but to its readers. In the intimate moments we read a poem, we link it to our private, pulsating worlds & help ensure others will read it, too. If history’s palms hadn’t held Sappho’s words, our fingers wouldn’t be holding them now.

The verses vanish – just like our memory of their exact words might fade – but distilled, standout moments of personal connection remain. In time, even these wane, providing a scarcely perceptible backdrop as the poem is discovered & interpreted anew. In this way, PITPD represents a new form of poetic anthology – one that celebrates the role of the reader in shaping the life of a poem. More information about the project can be found in our companion article: 

https://www.fxhash.xyz/article/poems-in-the-public-domain-marginalia-as-living-verse

Use touch or spacebar to pause and resume the animation. Refresh or resize the window to generate a new sequence of readers and comments.

NOTE: This piece is a live generative animation. If you are on a platform that does not support HTML tokens and are seeing only the preview GIF, you can view the actual token at the "animation_url" listed in the metadata.  

Poems in the Public Domain: "Fabliau of Florida" (IGNITE 2023 Special Edition) #3/10

Newly Abridged Happiness Manual, Vol I is a conceptual poem that explores the tension between time and mind, between what we tell ourselves and what our thoughts tell us. 

Our emotional states are underpinned by the unspoken words that traverse our minds as thought. To examine these words is to examine the intimate scaffolding that sustains our outward-facing selves. This poem does so with humor, compassion, and straightforward honesty, highlighting both the mundane and contradictory nature of thought. 

Consisting of twenty-four short verses, each of which is displayed independently on a frame for sixty minutes, this piece takes advantage of Async Art’s 24hour canvas to explore the evolution–or lack thereof–of thought along the vast axis of time. Sloganeering statements of self-improvement and assertive grasps for the transcendental interrupt expressions of routine, of place, of physicality. In one breath, we conceive of an ideal tomorrow, in the next we abruptly reach for a peach. How to construct a meaningful sense of self when our senses are constantly under assault?

This artwork functions as a diptych–its collector will receive an airdropped video version in which the same twenty-four frames rotate in under a minute. The slow and fast versions of the poem work together to show how our thoughts cycle and recycle from second to second, hour to hour, moment to moment. 

By rethinking the same thoughts, are we essentially reliving a single day?

Debuted at the Digital Francisco Carolinum in April 2022.

--

Newly Abridged Happiness Manual, Vol I

what comes first 
the word or the image 
in the kitchen the scent of thawed meat 
prefaces the raw sweat of noon 
where I reside it smolders 
despite the promise of shade 
I resolve it's senseless to worry 
the pink muscle of mind 
draws me nowhere closer 
tomorrow 
charts an unreal circle 
why must I choose 
between language or bread 
the moral of the story is to want less 
panoramic thoughts 
like everything that eats time 
if habitual inhabit my day 
though simple and simplistic 
wrench me with separate strings 
a wonderful day 
is conceived 
produced like chilled fruit 
the moral of the story is to want more 
every waking hour

Newly Abridged Happiness Manual, Vol I

YELLOW TOMATOES is a spoken-word poem from Ana María Caballero's book MID-LIFE, which explores the grueling intersection of birth and death that occurs when parents decline, children appear, and marriages settle.

Debuted at the Poème Objkt exhibition, L’Avant Galerie Vossen, Paris, October 2022.

--

YELLOW TOMATOES
1080 x 1080
MP4
2:37


Yellow Tomatoes

TRYST explores the moments and the non-moments, the loves, the losses, and the in-betweens that make up the lives of the people we walk past every day. A set of three lyrical and arresting short stories, TRYST offers a glimpse into the poetic and expansive inner lives of three women, each rooted in a different Brooklyn neighborhood.

This second edition is offered as a collection of 150. Book covers by artist Alexandria Sofija. Cover design by Julia Lasker. 



To read this book and access related features, visit https://alexandrialabs.xyz and connect your wallet.

TRYST

A spoken-word poem by Ana María Caballero visualized via a series of works coded in p5js that convey pregnant time–with its sensations of inevitability, vulnerability, and physical entrapment. Written in Caballero’s signature straightforward style, this text forms part of her prize-winning manuscript MAMMAL. 

Caballero is a recipient of the Beverly International Prize and Colombia’s National José Manuel Arango Prize. Her writing, which has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, a Best of the Net, and been a finalist for the Academy of American Poets Prize, rips the veil off romanticized motherhood and questions notions that package female sacrifice as a virtue.  Recognized as a Web3 poetry pioneer, she’s one of the cofounders of literary gallery theVERSEverse. She has three books forthcoming in 2023, all written in the hours before the world wakes up. 

What she writes in the dark can be read at anamariacaballero.com. 

Debuted at FEMGEN exhibition, Miami Art Week 2022.

MAMMAL ONE

A spoken-word poem written to commemorate the ten-year anniversary of a close friend’s passing. This text celebrates how the seemingly small moments spent with others prove to be the most meaningful.

Verisart Certified: https://verisart.com/works/68759764-b6af-4b3e-9065-c44c07df37f9

Juan

A spoken-word poem written to commemorate the ten year anniversary of a close friend’s passing.This text celebrates how the seemingly small moments spent with others prove to be the most meaningful.

Verisart Certified: https://verisart.com/works/6a1a92d5-0f0d-48e6-b02e-5452fbe37c29

Once

TRYST explores the moments and the non-moments, the loves, the losses, and the in-between that make up the lives of the people of Brooklyn. A set of three lyrical and arresting short stories, TRYST offers a glimpse into the poetic and expansive inner lives of the people we walk past every day.

Offered as a collection of 100, each edition comes with an original cover by artist Alexandria Sofija. 

TRYST: A Triptych of Stories


WAYS TO MISSPELL OBSIDIAN is a collection of spoken-word poems by Ana Maria Caballero that investigates and celebrates the storytelling potential of long-form poetry. Following the passing of a very close friend, Caballero composed JUAN, a eulogy-in-verse. This text serves as both precursor and companion to “Ways to Misspell Obsidian,” a lyric essay written years later in which details of Juan’s passing are braided into the story of the intoxication of Caballero’s young son with nail polish remover. 

Caballero culled from the pages of her essay to create two standalone poems, FATHOMLESS and ONCE. Combined with JUAN, these works form a triptych of shared signification, recursion, imagery, and vocabulary in which rhyme, unexpected line breaks, and spacing are used to sketch the shadows of emotion.

Ways to Misspell Obsidian

Async Art

A love poem by Ana Maria Caballero, whose writing has been awarded the Beverly International Prize for Literature + Colombia's José Miguel Arango National Poetry Prize. She's also been a finalist for the Academy of American Poets Prize.

Her NFTs are available via KnownOrigin, Fort Gallery NFT, MONOGRAMA NFT Gallery, Async, Etherpoems, HEN and are on display at Dreamverse 2021. 

anamariaccaballero.com

poem = work of art

**

Tragedy at Sushi Siam

Today I read about poetic time
and poetic space, 
about how allegories are imagined
but metrics not. 

I read about real efforts 
to compose—
allusion, hyperbole, sibilance
as help. 

I read all this believing in it, 

not knowing tonight 
you would be 
where I was,

and I would need to come home
to consider you
in recent time, 

in recent space.
 



Tragedy at Sushi Siam

"Housebroken" is a poem by award-winning poet and essayist Ana Maria Caballero. 

The poem forms part of "Mammal," a collection that explores how biology delimits cultural rites.  Caballero's work rips the veil off of romanticized motherhood and challenges the notion that female sacrifice is somehow a virtue. Her signature, straightforward verse gives voice to what's left unsaid in that all-important space of home. 

anamariacaballero.com

Housebroken

Foundation

“bud” is the second micro poem from Petal Book, a three-part lieder cycle inspired by Louise Glück’s The Wild Iris. 

Taking Glück’s oracular, anthropomorphic voice as a point of entry, Ana María Caballero explores our relationship with mortality, with words, and with each other, in this series of pithy, cutting poems written in the language of flowers. 

“stem,” the first poem, was released and offered to Refraction Festival's REFRACT PASS holders.  "bud" debuted during Proof of People in New York on April 12/13, 2023. “bouquet,” the third poem, will be offered to collectors via a future Refraction event. 

Holders of all three poems will receive a fourth work as a gift. 

*

stem
 
because you cut 
me
 
now
you have 
 
to water 
me 

*

bud
 
like every spoken word
 
I, too, 
wager everything
on the ignition of dirt
and then—
 
spring

 *
 
bouquet
 
my limbs bound
as offering 
by string, or

your hand
 
flesh-colored blossoms
upon the marbled slab
of time

*

Petal Book 3/30

Petal Book 2/30

Petal Book

3PM is a still from Newly Abridged Happiness Manual, Vol II,  a conceptual poem which continues award-winning poet Ana María Caballero's explorations of the evolution of thought along the vast axis of time. 

Our emotional states are underpinned by the unspoken words that traverse our minds. To examine these words is to examine the intimate scaffolding that sustains our outward-facing selves. 

This 24-part poem does so with humor, compassion, and straightforward honesty, highlighting the mundane, transcendental and contradictory nature of thought.

This is an Expansion Item for Forever Supper, the biggest cryptoart collaboration. Claim your free Core and customise it with the Expansions you collect here: https://async.market/dynamic-blueprints/63fe742c74e62000a8cf7bb8/async-forever-supper

3 PM-Newly Abridged Happiness Manual, Vol II

Newly Abridged Happiness Manual, Vol II is a conceptual poem by award-winning poet Ana María Caballero that explores the tension between time and mind, between what we tell ourselves and what our thoughts tell us.

Our emotional states are underpinned by the unspoken words that traverse our minds as thought. To examine these words is to examine the intimate scaffolding that sustains our outward-facing selves. This poem does so with humor, compassion, and straightforward honesty, highlighting both the mundane and contradictory nature of thought.

Consisting of twenty-four short verses, this work explores the evolution–or lack thereof–of thought along the vast axis of time. Sloganeering statements of self-improvement and assertive grasps for the transcendental interrupt expressions of routine, of place, of physicality. 

By rethinking the same thoughts, are we essentially reliving a single day?

The collector of each of the twenty-four verses will receive a version of this poem built on Async's 24hr canvas, in which each verse is displayed for sixty minutes, cycling ad infinitum.

This is an Expansion Pack for Forever Supper, the biggest cryptoart collaboration. Claim your free Core and customise it with the Expansions you collect here: https://async.market/dynamic-blueprints/63fe742c74e62000a8cf7bb8/async-forever-supper

7 PM is a still from Newly Abridged Happiness Manual, Vol II,  a conceptual poem which continues award-winning poet Ana María Caballero's explorations of the evolution of thought along the vast axis of time. 

Our emotional states are underpinned by the unspoken words that traverse our minds. To examine these words is to examine the intimate scaffolding that sustains our outward-facing selves. 

This 24-part poem does so with humor, compassion, and straightforward honesty, highlighting the mundane, transcendental and contradictory nature of thought.

This is an Expansion Item for Forever Supper, the biggest cryptoart collaboration. Claim your free Core and customise it with the Expansions you collect here: https://async.market/dynamic-blueprints/63fe742c74e62000a8cf7bb8/async-forever-supper

7 PM-Newly Abridged Happiness Manual, Vol II

Newly Abridged Happiness Manual, Vol II

JE VOUDRAIS QUE LE MÉTAVERSE explores language's ambiguity through the lens of one sentence with infinite nuanced meanings.

This work is a special edition of hieroglyphica + Ana María Caballero’s fxhash collection I WISH FOR THE METAVERSE. Collectors receive a generative version.

JE VOUDRAIS QUE LE MÉTAVERSE… 

Indigo X hieroglyphica x Ana María Caballero

(2021, Edition of 1)

A spoken word, media-rich poem by award-winning poet Ana Maria Caballero.

Caballero's writing has won the Beverly International Prize for Literature, Colombia's José Miguel Arango National Poetry Prize + been a finalist for the Academy of American Poets Prize.

Her digital art was exhibited at Dreamverse and was awarded a Sevens Foundation grant. Her NFTs are available via Fort Gallery NFT, MONOGRAMA NFT Gallery, Async.Art, Foundation, Etherpoems, HEN. 

This poem is part of Caballero's manuscript "Mammal," designated a Manuscript of Exceptional Merit by Tupelo Press.

anamariacaballero.com

Part of the inaugural collection of theVERSEverse.com. Designs commissioned from John Contreras.

Rule Book 

A sultry poem as love letter. 
Written by award-winning poet + artist Ana Maria Caballero. 
anamariacaballero.com

Overdue Love Letter

Hic et Nunc

Wallace Stevens’ poem “Fabliau of Florida” is a special edition from Ana María Caballero and hieroglyphica’s sold-out generative collection POEMS IN THE PUBLIC DOMAIN [PITPD]. This artwork was live-coded during South Florida's IGNITE Art + Tech Festival in January 2023, during which participants submitted comments that were incorporated into the project’s algorithm to create this unique, hand-annotated poem.

***  
NOTE: This piece is a live generative animation. If you are on a platform that does not support HTML tokens and are seeing only the preview GIF, you can view the actual token at the "animation_url" listed in the metadata.  
***

PITPD explores authorship. When a poem enters the public domain, it no longer belongs to its author but to its readers. In the intimate moments we read a poem, we link it to our private, pulsating worlds & help ensure others will read it, too. If history’s palms hadn’t held Sappho’s words, our fingers wouldn’t be holding them now.

The verses vanish – just like our memory of their exact words might fade – but distilled, standout moments of personal connection remain. In time, even these wane, providing a scarcely perceptible backdrop as the poem is discovered & interpreted anew. In this way, PITPD represents a new form of poetic anthology – one that celebrates the role of the reader in shaping the life of a poem. More information about the project can be found in our companion article: https://www.fxhash.xyz/article/poems-in-the-public-domain-marginalia-as-living-verse

Use touch or spacebar to pause and resume the animation. Refresh the browser window to generate a new sequence of readers and comments.

Poems in the Public Domain: "Fabliau of Florida" (IGNITE 2023 Special Edition)

Poems in the Public Domain: "Fabliau of Florida" (IGNITE 2023 Special Edition) #2/10

hieroglyphica x Ana María Caballero

young adult section


the book I want to write is about a child
about to stop being a child

because this is how I feel everyday,
except there is nothing heroic 
about it. 

and the story I want to write is heroic. 

this is why the work
must be fiction. 


young adult section
...

Typed

From theVERSEverse's GenText series, CITY LIFE, is a collaboration between poet Ana Maria Caballero + artist Ivona Tau, with generative text from a poem co-created with AI writing tool Sudowrite.

Caballero sketched a rough draft of the twelve stanzas of CITY LIFE during the funeral of a close friend's father. She sent Tau these notes, which Tau took as inspiration to create the poignant, urban visuals for the piece.  Using AI as poetic conspirator, Caballero crafted the final version of the poem. 

+

Caballero's writing has won the Beverly International Prize, Colombia's José Miguel Arango National Poetry Prize, been nominated for a Pushcart Prize + been a finalist for the Academy of American Poets Prize. Her digital poems were featured by MOCDA, displayed at Dreamverse + received a Sevens Foundation x Playboy grant. Her work questions romanticized motherhood + notions that present female sacrifice as a virtue. Her signature, straightforward verse gives voice to what's left unsaid in the home. anamariacaballero.com

Tau is an artist + researcher from Lithuania who works with AI as a medium in visual arts. Her goal is to find + evoke emotions in artificially intelligent tools, this way making them more human. By collaborating with machines, she also explores her inner emotional states.  Tau holds a Master's degree in Mathematics at Warsaw University. Currently, she pursues a Ph.D. in Computer Science at the Polish-Japanese Academy of Information Technology. She received highest honors at the Digital Ars 2020 contest for her two projects: “These humans did not feel” + “Unseen Warsaw”.  She is one of the top-50 creators on Tezos + her work was sold at Sotheby's in New York. ivonatau.com 

+

theVERSEverse.com is poetry's home in the metaverse, a literary gallery where text is art, poetry is technology + language is limitless, founded by Ana Maria Caballero, Kalen Iwamoto + Sasha Stiles. theVERSEverse offers specially curated 1/1 visual poems by critically acclaimed poets + its GenText, which explores the craft + creativity of GPT3-powered generative text.  Each stanza, or GenText block, from the poem is paired with visuals offered as a limited edition series. 

+

CITY LIFE

In the city with blunt edges, 
life comes forth—
against the crafted rock of sidewalks
our feet forget black dirt. 

Water, light, concrete, and time—
elements that we compress and compact.
Cranes of metal cut the sky,  
then, a solitary pigeon flies by.

I am here to sing, I state,
but the day swings back, and I fall hard.
I grieve amongst the infrastructure—
columns and footers underpin my call. 

You were here, once,
in this built metropolis, with us.
You loved to swim,
your body bronzed by my sun.

Do I cry for you?
Or do I cry for every father—
for mine?

For all my high-heeled asphalt walking
I remain a daughter:
a fruit who at its core
is summed up as seed. 

In the funeral mass, I hold
the thin wafer—memory of a father—
on my tongue before I swallow.

Bread breaks within me,
becomes me,
but I remain hungry. 

After the ceremony,
bodies form a single row—
we wait for a moment
to embrace the bereaved.

A faint breeze blows,
stirs frail leaves,
while beneath the red-tiled ground
soft dirt sustains my feet. 

World of tree,
world of cut stone.
Place of passing through,
land of soundless bone. 

I take one step forward
within the breath-held line. 
It is always almost my turn
to mourn. 

~

in loving memory of C.C.

CIT LIFE 6

From theVERSEverse's GenText series, CITY LIFE, is a collaboration between poet Ana Maria Caballero + artist Ivona Tau, with generative text from a poem co-created with AI writing tool Sudowrite.

Caballero sketched a rough draft of the twelve stanzas of CITY LIFE during the funeral of a close friend's father. She sent Tau these notes, which Tau took as inspiration to create the poignant, urban visuals for the piece.  Using AI as poetic conspirator, Caballero crafted the final version of the poem. 

+

Caballero's writing has won the Beverly International Prize, Colombia's José Miguel Arango National Poetry Prize, been nominated for a Pushcart Prize + been a finalist for the Academy of American Poets Prize. Her digital poems were featured by MOCDA, displayed at Dreamverse + received a Sevens Foundation x Playboy grant. Her work questions romanticized motherhood + notions that present female sacrifice as a virtue. Her signature, straightforward verse gives voice to what's left unsaid in the home. anamariacaballero.com

Tau is an artist + researcher from Lithuania who works with AI as a medium in visual arts. Her goal is to find + evoke emotions in artificially intelligent tools, this way making them more human. By collaborating with machines, she also explores her inner emotional states.  Tau holds a Master's degree in Mathematics at Warsaw University. Currently, she pursues a Ph.D. in Computer Science at the Polish-Japanese Academy of Information Technology. She received highest honors at the Digital Ars 2020 contest for her two projects: “These humans did not feel” + “Unseen Warsaw”.  She is one of the top-50 creators on Tezos + her work was sold at Sotheby's in New York. ivonatau.com 

+

theVERSEverse.com is poetry's home in the metaverse, a literary gallery where text is art, poetry is technology + language is limitless, founded by Ana Maria Caballero, Kalen Iwamoto + Sasha Stiles. theVERSEverse offers specially curated 1/1 visual poems by critically acclaimed poets + its GenText, which explores the craft + creativity of GPT3-powered generative text.  Each stanza, or GenText block, from the poem is paired with visuals offered as a limited edition series. 

+

CITY LIFE

In the city with blunt edges, 
life comes forth—
against the crafted rock of sidewalks
our feet forget black dirt. 

Water, light, concrete, and time—
elements that we compress and compact.
Cranes of metal cut the sky,  
then, a solitary pigeon flies by.

I am here to sing, I state,
but the day swings back, and I fall hard.
I grieve amongst the infrastructure—
columns and footers underpin my call. 

You were here, once,
in this built metropolis, with us.
You loved to swim,
your body bronzed by my sun.

Do I cry for you?
Or do I cry for every father—
for mine?

For all my high-heeled asphalt walking
I remain a daughter:
a fruit who at its core
is summed up as seed. 

In the funeral mass, I hold
the thin wafer—memory of a father—
on my tongue before I swallow.

Bread breaks within me,
becomes me,
but I remain hungry. 

After the ceremony,
bodies form a single row—
we wait for a moment
to embrace the bereaved.

A faint breeze blows,
stirs frail leaves,
while beneath the red-tiled ground
soft dirt sustains my feet. 

World of tree,
world of cut stone.
Place of passing through,
land of soundless bone. 

I take one step forward
within the breath-held line. 
It is always almost my turn
to mourn. 

~

in loving memory of C.C.



CITY LIFE 9

Versum

HISTORY DRAWN AS A LINEAR THING is a spoken-word poem that delves into intimate cycles of destructive familial behavior. Written in Caballero's signature, straightforward style, it juxtaposes inner and outer dialogue to reveal the complex negotiations at play in seemingly basic interactions. Memory and anticipation weigh heavily on the present, adding layers of emotion to everyday conversations with those to whom we are closest. 


Ana Maria Caballero is the recipient of the Beverly International Literature Prize and Colombia's José Manuel Arango National Poetry Prize. She believes poems are works of art. anamariacaballero.com


Edition of 1
MP4
1:11
1080 x 1080

History Drawn as a Linear Thing

Work by award-winning poet Ana Maria Caballero

A spoken-word poem by Ana María Caballero . Written in her signature straightforward style, this text forms part of her prize-winning book MAMMAL.  

Caballero is a recipient of the Steel Toe Books 2022 Poetry Prize, the Beverly International Prize , and Colombia’s National José Manuel Arango Prize. Her writing, which has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, a Best of the Net, and been a finalist for the Academy of American Poets Prize, rips the veil off  romanticized motherhood and questions notions that package female sacrifice as a virtue. Much of what she writes can be read at anamariacaballero.com.  

--

FIRSTBORN
1080 x 1080 
MP4 
0:50

Firstborn

Poems by Ana Maria Caballero

GENERATION GENERATION is poet Ana Maria Caballero's first generative poem creating p5js.  Using four words and retro-tech visuals, this purposefully direct artwork exults a creative moment in which technology can become a driver for poetic innovation.  

At its heart is a desire to experiment with code-based language and investigate ways in which poetry can engage with the generative arts. All language is code, all poetry is generative, all poems are vessels of emotional information. In what ways can computation, information and generation collide in a poem? 

GENERATION GENERATION celebrates both the creative potential of web3 and the innovation that the Tezos community invites.

Minted to commemorate the #tezosartweek event of June 2022

--

Ana Maria Caballero is the recipient of the Beverly International Prize and Colombia's José Miguel Arango National Poetry Prize. She’s been nominated for a Pushcart and been a finalist for the Academy of American Poets Prize and the Kurt Brown Prize, among others. 

Her work explores how biology delimits our societal + cultural rites, ripping the veil off romanticized motherhood + questioning notions that package female sacrifice as a virtue. Her poems' speakers find their voice by navigating the intellectual + the everyday, daring to name what's left unsaid in that all-important space of home. 


GENERATION GENERATION

let word = 0

Artifacts mean many things.  

They are the products of humanity and of machine learning. They are also errors of perception and representation. At the end, they are traces of what has been and what might be — evidence of our majesty and fallibility.  

These _artifacts_ are an attempt to imagine a new token economy where both image and coinage can challenge tired histories. By harnessing the emergent potential of generative AI, they unearth the unexpected while hinting at human-machine cultures not yet discovered.  

Through a process of devoted iteration, we have inserted alternative histories into the complex of ancient and medieval money, thereby posing the question: what might images of pregnancy, of family, and of domesticity mean when minted onto currency?  

Our tokens tell simple stories of private lives but the identities of their subjects remain unknown. _artifacts_ exist in a space of contested histories, displacing value from established, patriarchal power and situating it in our homes. In doing so, they ask the collector to join in the creation of new meanings.  

artifacts APs  
Ana Maria Caballero & Alex Estorick  
Long-Form Generative AI  
Edition of 25  
EmProps OpenStudio  
1920x1920 PNG  
Sep 25, 2023

artifacts APs: Token #3

artifacts APs: Token #20

artifacts APs

Being Borges proposes a new form of literary translation, begging the question: What’s at stake when language becomes literal via the visual?

In this ongoing series, Ana María Caballero takes Jorge Luis Borges and Margarita Guerrero’s The Book of Imaginary Beings (a vast compendium of humanity’s imagined creatures) and its 1970 English translation by Norman Thomas di Giovanni as points of departure from which to explore how AI interprets Spanish versus English text, unmasking biases ingrained in large data sets. This collection also delves into the impossibility of translation–AI cannot “read” Spanish and English in the same way because they are different sign systems, with nuances and meanings that exist beyond their constructed signifiers, their words.

Caballero’s process was three-fold. She first used Borges and Guerrero’s Spanish descriptions of imaginary beings as prompts to create a large corpus of images from which two were selected. The process was repeated using di Giovanni’s English translations.

Thirdly, Caballero wrote a new poem, an inspired, compressed recasting of the original Spanish text, and used this poem to create an additional compendium of images. Her poems delve into the poetics of prompts, incorporating text-to-image generation semantics in their construction.

![image info](https://verse.works/image/fullscreen/static%2F854f295b-fc8e-4a58-8423-19013552ade1.png@webp)

The Elephant that Foretold the Birth of the Buddha: Collage #1

Being Borges proposes a new form of literary translation, begging the question: What’s at stake when language becomes literal via the visual?

In this ongoing series, Ana María Caballero takes Jorge Luis Borges and Margarita Guerrero’s The Book of Imaginary Beings (a vast compendium of humanity’s imagined creatures) and its 1970 English translation by Norman Thomas di Giovanni as points of departure from which to explore how AI interprets Spanish versus English text, unmasking biases ingrained in large data sets. This collection also delves into the impossibility of translation–AI cannot “read” Spanish and English in the same way because they are different sign systems, with nuances and meanings that exist beyond their constructed signifiers, their words.

Caballero’s process was three-fold. She first used Borges and Guerrero’s Spanish descriptions of imaginary beings as prompts to create a large corpus of images from which two were selected. The process was repeated using di Giovanni’s English translations.

Thirdly, Caballero wrote a new poem, an inspired, compressed recasting of the original Spanish text, and used this poem to create an additional compendium of images. Her poems delve into the poetics of prompts, incorporating text-to-image generation semantics in their construction.

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A Bao A Qu: Image Generated by Caballero's Poem #1

Being Borges

Things We Are Saving to Write is a collaborative poem written by Ana María Caballero using contributions received from visitors to bitforms gallery during its Code Chronicles exhibition (NY, March 3–Apr 15, 2023), curated by Aleksandra Artamonovskaja.

Caballero created a poem for Code Chronicles called Things I Am Saving to Write, inspired by Ernest Hemingway’s story “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” in which the main character is unexpectedly and irrevocably faced with his imminent mortality. During the length of the exhibition, visitors were invited to submit things they were saving to write and to visualize them via a Stable Diffusion text-to-image generation station.  

Caballero culled from over 100 visitor submissions to compose a new poem, a chronicle of Code Chronicles, using visitors' visualizations as well as interpreting their words to create new ones.

As a poet, Caballero uses words to generate images within people’s minds. By using the imagery of her verse as the foundation of AI prompting and then crafting a visual narrative from these images, Caballero brings our collective unconscious into direct dialogue with language’s unspoken connotations, calling forth the entanglements of meaning-making. 

“Prompting” is deeply tied to poetry–writing workshops offer students prompts to inspire poems–but, here, language generates visuals in form of reverse ekphrasis. Via her image curation, Caballero evinces the wide array of emotions that stem from text, as well as the tension between the private and the public, between the mythical and the historic, between the figurative and the verbatim that hide within the layers of verse. 

‍Caballero’s exploration of the poetics of prompts distills the materiality of language, inviting us to contemplate our visceral reactions to words and the vastness of our imagination. 

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Code Chronicles | bitforms gallery | New York, New York | March 3–Apr 15, 2023

Things We Are Saving to Write

Ana María Caballero

Every time Ana María Caballero dedicates one of her books to its future reader, she honors their role in bringing literature to life. Signature Labels transforms this reverence into analog generative art. 

The first page of each of her six books has been converted into a wine label, which Caballero hand-signed in a unique way, leaving space for the collector to insert their name, personalizing the dedication. This collaborative element adds a layer of generativity to the final label or artwork. It also allows for the possibility that the bottle will be gifted to another person, whose name the collector may incorporate into the label, acknowledging the long tradition of offering wine as a gift. 

Signature Labels reveals how the act of signing ennobles an object, bestowing a book or an artwork with a powerful intention that spills beyond its physical bounds. This series also futhers Caballero’s explorations of analog generativity, where hand-written annotations serve to celebrate the ways readers and writers construct each other and paper’s eloquence as a message in and of itself.

Signature Labels - Open Dedication Four

Signature Labels - AMC Edition Eight

Signature Labels

In this multi-faceted rendition of self, Caballero expands her Literal Litoral series of choreographic poems to place her body where it began—the womb. Echo Graph is an exercise in inversion: the poet is defined through her creation, the mother replaces her fetus, the patient subverts her doctor’s verdict. 

Though physical failure here is defined by others, namely, a medical face, the vocal delivery and choreographic score question its validity. In Echo Graph, the body transmits the layers of subversion hidden in the work’s written text to create a rich strata of complementary and contradictory meanings, as often happens in everyday exchanges. 

Recorded via motion-capture technology, this new work continues Caballero’s explorations of how physical movement can translate the spoken-word, using body language to unleash the vital, guttural essence of communication. 

From Caballero’s award-winning book MAMMAL.

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Credits:
Produced in close collaboration with Mad Labs Studios
Yoel Meneses - Motion Capture and CG supervisor
Chase Mussey - Visual Effects 
Rafael Teixeira - Sound Design
Bebe - Producer 
Tiger Shokripour - Technical Assistant

Echo Graph

In Oración (Prayer), which takes its name from a poem by acclaimed Colombian poet María Mercedes Carranza, Ana María Caballero proposes a new form of literary translation, breaking down the process to probe the subliminal connotations of prayer, the poetics of prompts and the semiotic entanglements of metaphor.

Caballero’s textual translation is gestural–a personalized recasting of Carranza’s desperation in ways that speak to Caballero’s own relationship with devotion. By concentrating on the poem’s undercurrent of despair, Caballero accentuates poetry’s ability to capture ephemeral, personal moments and preserve them within poetic time and space so they may be felt by others.  

Few are the places where the personal and the universal, the sublime and the crepuscular, the known and the unknown, collide as bluntly as in prayer—but, also, as in poetry.

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This work is part of Epoch Gallery's groundbreaking XENOSPACE exhibition. Three editions remain at .17 ETH.


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