Curly Velasquez: Check out this QR code. 

No, it's not a menu specially designed to confuse my abuelo. It was made by Brazilian artist Giselle Beiguelman. 

Scan it, and it links to a single l8ne about the intersection of words and symbols. 

Beiguelman is just one of a group of "e-poets" in Latin America who combine technology with writing to create a new form of literature for the digital age. 

So, can a QR code be a poem? And how else does technology influence literature?

Hi! I'm Curly Velasquez, and this is Crash Course Latin American Literature. 

[Theme music]

In today's world, maybe it's no surprise that technology shapes our literature and vice versa.

But have you ever considered that that's always been true? Science and technology get interpreted and reinterpreted by literature all the time. 

Let's start a few hundred years ago...

As we know from earlier episodes, you can't talk about Latin America without talking about the colonial enterprise. And really, you can't talk about the colonial enterprise without talking about technology. 

Because without ships that could cross oceans, deadly weapons that could suppress indigenous peoples, and the printing press to distribute reports from conquistadors back to Europe, colonialism would've been a non-starter. 

One can only dream. 

And when colonisers arrived in Latin America, they were pretty smug about their...

Colonial Carl: "advanced technology"

Curly: They saw indigenous peoples as primitive groups who used the resources at their disposal for silly things like rituals and ceremonies. Instead of big boy stuff like guns and cannons. 

In reality, the Indigenous peoples of Latin America were making scientific discoveries and developing complex technologies long before Columbus got there. 

Honduran-born Guatemalan writer Augusto Monterroso pokes fun at this ignorance in his 1995 flash fiction piece, El eclipse. 

In it, a Catholic friar gets lost in the jungle, and when he gets captured by the Maya for a sacrifice, he attempts to outsmart them. He knows there's going to be a total solar eclipse, so he tells them that, if they kill him, he'll make the sun go dark. 

But the Maya are way ahead of him — they've been refining calendars and tracking eclipses for centuries. So not only do they kill the friar, but they place his heart on an altar while ritually reciting all the dates of the eclipses they already know are coming.

Girl, never underestimate the folks with the epic calendars. Probably all Virgos. 

Of course, science and technology kept developing after the colonial era — and, unfortunately, they kept being used for destructive purposes. 

Fast-forward to World War I, and new war technologies, like machine guns, tanks, and chemical weapons, were transforming the world in unprecedented ways. 

Over 16 million people died during that global conflict, and all that death and destruction left some writers reaching for new ways to express themselves. 

For Chilean poet Vicente Huidobro, the only answer was: start over.

He was the one-man band behind Creacionismo — Creationism — a movement influenced by European modernism that played with language in new and experimental ways. 

Instead of describing the natural world as it is, Huidobro sought to create a new imaginary world through things like juxtaposition — or contrasting concepts — and offbeat vocabulary. 

Creacionismo was part of the wider avant-garde trend, a French term referring to radical art that pushes boundaries. 

So let's get a little radical with the Curly Notes, shall we? 

[Curly Notes]

Huidobro's most famous work is the 1931 book-length poem Altazor, described by its publisher as an ode to flight. 

The poem's English translator, Eliot Weinberger, says that its unnamed inspiration is Charles Lindbergh, who famously completed the first solo, non-stop transatlantic flight in 1927.

Altazor's titular protagonist is spaced out — literally. 

He's falling through empty space at light speed with only a parachute on his back. As Altazor falls to his death, he contemplates the nature of poetry, and the language he uses gradually disintegrates into nonsensical sounds.

Literary scholar Bruce Dean Willis breaks it down like this:

The first three cantos, or sections, use ordinary grammar to express Altazor's thoughts. 

Huidebro writes:

"We must revive the languages 
With raucous laughter 
With wagonloads of giggles
With circuit breakers in the sentences
And catalysm in the grammar."

Then, the fourth and fifth cantos start to play with the language. 

Like, Altazor uses nouns as verbs and vice versa. 

He says:

"The waterfall tresses over the night 
While the night beds to rest
With its moon that pillows the sky
I iris the sleepy land."

And when he uses a windmill as a metaphor, the words on the page are arranged to actually look like a windmill. 

By the final two cantos, the poem's meaning becomes unintelligible, with metaphors criss-crossing in ways that don't make apparent sense. 

Altazor says things like Ee ee ee oh, Ahee ah ee: sounds that are, let's say, of the body and not of the mind. 

According to Huidobro's Creacionismo, it's meant to be a purer form of language, where the meanings we normally assign to words no longer exist.

Instead, we've got a new set of rearranged sounds and images to make something — a poem, or even a world — that's totally new. 

As time went on, and science and technology continued to advance, Latin American writers kept on innovating.

Let's move forward to the dawn of the Information Age, with PCs in every colour, new websites filling the net, and Tamagotchis that I could never keep alive. The 1990s! 

A group of writers was ready to break from the status quo and hit "restart" on the Mexican novel. They were the bad bots of the 90s literary world, essentially a crew of Jess Marianos. 

Y'all still watch Gilmore Girls?

Anyway, in 1996, these five Mexican writers published what they called the Manifesto del Crack, the cracks part referencing the sound of something breaking. 

In this case, the box they'd been shoved into as writers from Mexico. 

You see, the crackeros rejected the idea of Mexican-ness as a literary category. Publishers wanted them to "stay in their lane" and write only about national themes.

Which sent a message that their books could never be considered universal, like the novels coming out of Europe and the United States. 

But if those authors didn't have to write only about their identities and home countries, why should Mexican writers have to? 

The most famous Crack novel, Jorge Volpi's En busca de Klingsor — In Search of Klingsor — certainly bucked those expectations. 

For one thing, there's no mention of Mexico — or of Latin America, for that matter. It's set in Germany and the US around World War II. 

And for another, it explores universal themes like human nature, and how science and technology can shape the future — for better or for worse. 

Volpi wanted to be a physical when he was growing up, and spent years researching heady scientific ideas, like Heisenberg's uncertainty principle and Einstein's theory of relativity. 

And he decided to use fiction as a way to translate some of those ideas to s broader audience. 

Each of the books three sections starts off with a law of physics, and some of the chapter titles have double meanings — like "Attraction of Bodies," which could refer to gravitational force... or gravitational force. 

Volpi also fills the novel with characters based on real scientists, merging their daily experiences with scientific research to explore the intersection of science and human nature. 

Like, a main focus of the novel is the race to create the atomic bomb, a 20th-century technology that changed our world forever. 

Scientists on both sides of the war show a certain hubris, a belief in their own power. But they also have very messy personal lives — and romantic relationships.

Finally, the chisme! 

They're extremely flawed humans aiming to accomplish something superhuman. 

In an interview, Volpi said, "The challenge was to simultaneously portray the characters as flesh and bone, showing their weaknesses, strengths and eccentricities while also offering a synthesis of their scientific thought."

In Search of Klingsor showed that Mexican writers — and all Latin American writers — don't have to write only about their own cultural experiences. Their stories can be universal. 

In fact, In Search of Klingsor was translated into 19 languages, proving its worldwide appeal. 

Consider the box exploded. 

So where does that leave us now, in today's world of smartphones, artificial intelligence, and virtual reality? 

Our technologies still have the potential to be used for exploitation and hoarding power, just like those naval ships of the colonial era.

But there's also hope that new developments in science and tech can be used for good — for more inclusivity, more creativity, and increased access to information.

And writers play s big role in that: helping us to break the molds of our thinking, and imagine better versions of the future. 

Because in today's world, poems can be both words and QR codes. 

Next time, we'll explore the relationship between literature and another technology: cinema. See you then. 

Thanks for watching Crash Course Latin American Literature, which was filmed at the Carlos Hernandez studio in Indianapolis, Indiana, and was made with the help of all these smart people. If you want to help keep Crash Course free for everyone forever, you can join our community on Patreon.