The material poems of Tina Escaja in Robopoem@s (2016) are an exploration of the robot poet who escapes automatic generation and builds a cyborg body, half poem, half poet. Through five articulated and mobile quadrupeds, the artist explores technological materiality from the manufacture of electronic creatures that constitute a robotic material but also a poetic material. The poetic-electronic material takes shape and materializes in three dimensions under a mixture of Arduino, cables and wood, which evidences the dialogue between the technical and the organic. The game between binaries is exposed in this work that reflects on the lines that separate the creator from the creature, humanity from technology and electronics from poetry (Escaja, 2019, p. 14). The electronic ins and outs of the construction and operation of these Robopoem @ as take center stage and make up the very body of these living poems, which react to obstacles, interact with each other and recite the poetry that they embody in themselves.

This work by Tina Escaja chooses the organic form of an arachnid to exist and becomes aware of itself through the text that occupies the artifacts:

I advance,/ I retreat./ My body is a mere/ formation of figures,/ reaction and caliber, / mathematical module/ in the analogous universe in which I live./ You duplicate us./ But I stop being you/ to Be/ and reach/ the starting point,/ the operable key of digital control.” (Robopoem @ as II-III, 2016)

A text that reflects on the digital materiality of its nature as a robot and that also occupies the birch wood legs on which it is engraved. Thus, the text, the language, the poetry, lives in the extremities of the creatures, the mobile part of the electronic device, and invades and penetrates reality with poetry as a form of intervention, as an action. These animated objects also reflect on poetry as a textual and metaphorical machine, therefore also symbolic, social and ethical.