By calling the letter “h” a centaur, Ana María Uribe (Argentina, 1944–2004) evokes the shape of that animal, while the sizes of the letters mimic depth, and their movement across our computer screen in various iterations suggests the majestic travels of a herd across a barren landscape. In another of her series of “Anipoemas,” one called “Gymnasium,” the “P” stretches itself into an “R” or “I” leaps into a “T” or an “X”; circus jugglers are mimicked by two lower case “i”s exchanging their dots. Spring and winter are evoked by lower case “q” and “p” climbing into each other, then losing their bumps. Belén Gache's (Argentina-Spain, 1960) “Veintidos mariposas rosas” (“Twenty-Two Pink Butterflies” which, indeed, includes twenty-two pink and one blue butterfly) invites the reader to click on butterflies, which flap their way off the page, taking the letter associated with their position with them, and leaving us with a new poem, legible or not. Karen Villeda's (Mexico, 1985) “Poetuitéame” (Poetweetme) gathers reader tweets by way of selected hashtags and converts them into something like cluster poems. Basia Irland (United States, 1946) has a series of mysterious “hydrolibros” created out of rescued ruined paper volumes, or carved out of wood, and another series of “ice books,” seeded and released into waterways, evanescent sculptures that may mimic text, but do not contain any words: “a lyrical and ecological poetry,” says Lynne Cline on Irland's webpage (https://www.basiairland.com/projects/hydrolibros/index.html).

All of these multimedia pieces call themselves poetry, but it is certainly not poetry as we understand it following the most traditional and minimal of definitions: a rhythmical composition, written or spoken, expressed in imaginative words. What they have in common is a focus on some kind of animation and/or interaction, a commitment to some version of rhythm, and a location on the Internet. In this chapter, I want to look at writers/performers/poets like these, by way of a few examples of Latin American intermedial1 artistic practice that is generally still called “poetry,” but which puts pressure on even the most expanded definitions of the genre.

In this chapter the general questions, genres, and authors addressed in the volume are presented.

Two years ago, when I first became interested in the phenomenon of Internet video in the Spanish-speaking world, I was able to locate over a thousand sites including articles and video projection and download sites – a large, but still manageable number. In August 2005, there were 265,000; a quick check in October turned up 700,000 (of which 18,000 were download sites). Even taking into account the vast amounts of duplication on mirror sites, I would be reluctant even to guess at the range of discrete locations that will appear by the time this chapter sees print. The well-known US-based site Atomfilms/Shockwave at that time reported an archive of over 15,000 films and a visitor base of over 20 million per month. Ifilm, in its ‘success stories’ link, bragged about its growing importance to industry heavyweights as evidenced by the on- and offline deals with filmmakers that the site had generated. Buscacine was offering hyperlinked pages on filmmakers, cortometrajes, and even updates on unreleased cortos still in production stages. The Argentine site SoloCortos expressed its mission in an email bulletin dated 30 September 2005 as ‘to generate attention about the new creative Latin American audiovisual currents, which, thanks to the digital era, have offered greater and richer possibilities for expression to more artists, without discrimination by country, resources, and sex’.

Two years ago, when I first became interested in the phenomenon of Internet video in the Spanish-speaking world, I was able to locate over a thousand sites including articles and video projection and download sites – a large, but still manageable number. In August 2005, there were 265,000; a quick check in October turned up 700,000 (of which 18,000 were download sites). Even taking into account the vast amounts of duplication on mirror sites, I would be reluctant even to guess at the range of discrete locations that will appear by the time this chapter sees print. The well-known US-based site Atomfilms /Shockwave at that time reported an archive of over 15,000 films and a visitor base of over 20 million per month. Ifilm, in its ‘success stories’ link, bragged about its growing importance to industry heavyweights as evidenced by the on- and offline deals with filmmakers that the site had generated. Buscacine was offering hyperlinked pages on filmmakers, cortometrajes, and even updates on unreleased cortos still in production stages. The Argentine site SoloCortos expressed its mission in an email bulletin dated 30 September 2005 as ‘to generate attention about the new creative Latin American audiovisual currents, which, thanks to the digital era, have offered greater and richer possibilities for expression to more artists, without discrimination by country, resources, and sex’. Similarly, Cortomanía announced that it was created by a group of people who were passionate about independent film, and, they added, ‘we know how difficult it is to distribute a corto and how frustrating it is for the creator not to be able to show his/her work; for that reason, this team took the initiative of creating this site’.

‘Mejor da click’ [Clicking is better], the title of an already-dated Mexican article, defines the response of many in the Spanish-speaking world when asked about national film production. Clearly, Internet video is a technology and an artistic form that has now been mainstreamed in many circles; yet it has been relatively unstudied in literary or culture studies circles despite representing a phenomenon that, in its many different and sometimes problematic forms, engages larger debates not only about the changing shape of technology, but also about comparative access, identity, and national cinema projects.