On bodies, surveys, virus and rooms. Enter Corporate Poetry

This essay analyzes Alex Saum’s Corporate Poetry project, focusing on its three main rooms (#1, #2 and #3) as well as backrooms #2 and #3, created with the collected data from Room #2. Through a series of interactive “rooms,” these works repurpose the language of a variety of online forms and platforms (Google Forms, Survey Monkey and Zoom) in order to domesticate the neoliberal intent of these data gathering technologies. These poems intervene the kind of corporate language expected in these forms by bringing attention to that other corpora that is our bodies. This way, the poetic surveys regain a surprising type of corporality that engages our embodied reality while making visible the digital infrastructure that is unintentionally brought into our homes whenever we participate in an online survey or take a video conferencing call. In a time where measures to contain the global pandemic are forcing citizens to shelter in their homes, these works illuminate a new dimension of our everyday confinement. Going even further, these works show how the destruction of natural resources and human life (i.e. the 2020 pandemic) is directly related to the evolution of digital technologies that project a perverse sense of immaterial existence. By rethinking the materiality of digital languages these poetry rooms aim to further disjoint that relation.