Guest of Honor: Ana María Caballero
“The way I frame my vision and understanding of generative art hinges on the following quote by Casey Reas: I think generative art is a branch of performance — the way that something can always be unique and different every time it’s experienced.
My definition of generative art is that the artist makes the system and the system makes the art. That expands all kinds of media: music, drawing, performance, etc. I’m less interested in computers and more interested in generativity. I really appreciate this definition because narrow definitions serve narrow interests and benefit narrow populations. To expand the definition of generativity is to expand who participates.
I believe it’s very important to acknowledge the wide spectrum of possibility when we speak about generative art, and thus invite new generations to participate and to elaborate upon it, redefining it again and again so that no single definition becomes a limiting force, excluding those who create incredible systems for artmaking.
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This event acts as a powerful connecting rod between generations and practices, affirming the importance of each. I greatly commend the organizers for their vision in developing it.”
Biography
Ana María Caballero is a Colombian-American literary artist whose work 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, a Future Arts Writer Award, a Sevens Foundation Grant and has been a finalist for numerous other literary and arts prizes, including the prestigious Kurt Brown, Vassar Miller and MAXXI Bvlgari Prize in the Digital Sector.
Caballero is the author of Mammal (forthcoming via Steel Tool Books, 2024); Cortadas (forthcoming from S/W Ediciones, 2025); A Petit Mal (Black Spring Press, 2023); Tryst (Alexandria Publishing, 2022); mid-life (Finishing Line Press, 2016); Reverse Commute (Silver Birch Press, 2014); Entre domingo y domingo (Valparaíso Ediciones, 2023 and 2014).
Pulitzer Prize-finalist Campbell McGrath has written about her work: “It is a rare poet for whom the first comparison that comes to my mind is Anne Carson. Yes, that Anne Carson. But [Caballero’s writing] is of such rigorous thinking, rigorous language, and rigorous thinking-about-language, that it merits the highest praise.”
Her Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net-nominated work has been published extensively and exhibited as fine art at museums and leading international venues, such as the Wroclaw Contemporary Museum, Museo de Arte Miguel Urrutia, bitforms, Office Impart, Poetry Society of America, Gazelli Art House, New World Center and Times Square.
She’s been an artist-in-residence at GAZELL_iO, Glitch, Wild and VERTICAL. The first living poet to sell a digital poem via Sotheby’s and via auction in Spain, Caballero has also released digital poems in partnership with TIME, Diario ABC and Playboy. She is a contributing writer for Forbes, reporting on Web3 culture.
Widely recognized as a digital poetry pioneer whose own practice is transforming the way language is exhibited, experienced and transacted, she’s also the cofounder of literary gallery theVERSEverse, short-listed for the Lumen Prize and the Digital Innovation in Art Award.
Caballero graduated with a magna cum laude degree from Harvard University, where she was awarded a grant by Madrid’s Complutense University to finalize her honors thesis work on the role of the café in sparking cultural revolutions. As an MFA candidate in Poetry at Florida International University she was a finalist for the Academy of American Poets Prize.
She lives in Madrid with her husband and two children.
anamariacaballero.com