Crashes on the Information Highway

Kendra Sullivan reviews Chris Campanioni’s “Windows 85.”

By Kendra SullivanFebruary 10, 2025

• Poetry

• Science & Technology

WINDOWS 85 (2024), CHRIS CAMPANIONI’S first full-length collection of poetry, is flanked by three nearly simultaneous publications. Campanioni’s scholarly monograph Drift Net: The Aesthetics of Literature and Media in Migration (Lever Press, 2025) advances theory to describe artworks and mediascapes that are born in translation. His novel VHS (CLASH Books, 2025) threads together the stories of a family’s exile as recorded on interconnected videocassettes. And north by north/west (an attention to frequency) (West Virginia University Press, 2025) is a work of creative nonfiction that gathers photographs, notebooks, and poem fragments to unpack the idea of migratory poetics.

Windows 85 fleshes out the human experience in a more-than-human world—a world where nature and technology are fully merged as “a thing […] forever / chemicals in our rainwater.” Slippery, associative language leads readers through loopholes, peepholes, camera apertures, and open (and closed) windows. Whereas a person might have difficulty crossing borders, the poems traverse virtual and objective, digital and physical, and synthetic and natural realities. While descriptions of felt sense and embodied experience sew mixed realities into one uniform fabric throughout the collection, individual poems magnify the snags, catches, and discrepancies in the cloth. Such glitches “equip theory / with practice.”

In the spirit of practice theory or social practice, Campanioni offers an abundance of sensory information about how the body feels—about how it feels to be a body—performing everyday actions and rituals within the material and social matrices of the postmodern mediascape in Windows 85. The body is, has always been, a technology for sensing. Poems such as “{in a slippery body}” and “{mannequin}” treat sensation as qualitative data, as in “two data points don’t make a trend // two bodies don’t make a double.” The “sensory flexion” of this “pink juicy” data is buried beneath the “flesh buffed” skin of the internet of things. Such pink data is everywhere on display in Windows 85. The flesh, texture, and dexterity of human cells, tissues, organs, and systems at play in cyberspace offer a counterpoint to surveillance capitalism.

Following in the footsteps of phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty and ecologist David Abram, the collection flags the participatory nature of perception. As Campanioni directs us in “{refer to my legs}”:

notice now how
a baby rabbit

sucks upon
a single

strawberry
still hanging

on the branch
I felt my body

tighten
beneath me

fingers & teeth
as final obstacles

of artificial intelligence 

The text is on the move: bunnies suck strawberries, and the “softened / underbelly” of technology gets fed. It is, after all, human consumption that fuels the web and its energy-guzzling offshore storage infrastructure, where we find, “mainframe & sea / floor cast & flattened.” Disjunctive language and uncanny enjambments rush to incorporate computer sensing and somatic experiences into unlikely syntheses, what Colombian American anthropologist Arturo Escobar calls “hybrid natures.”

Taken as a whole, the works handily resist dichotomization of the human and technology with “shaky hands.” How did it come to pass that human-born technologies—from genomics to artificial intelligence—seem at once autonomic and autonomous? By what mechanisms has technology come to be “naturalized” as an extrahistorical force, shaping human futures without our explicit consent? ​​Campanioni reminds us that the danger in treating technology as such a force is a “betrayal of the real.” Without embracing hybrid natures, we risk losing touch with human politics and agency upon which our reality rests so uneasily. Like the car crash paintings in Andy Warhol’s Death and Disasters series (1962–64), poems like “{near the end of the world}” demand that a reader slow down and take a second glance at the wreckage on the roadside of the status quo. Like shiny wrecks, Campanioni’s poems denaturalize the technocratic norms of postmodernity and, paradoxically, refamiliarize readers with the singularity of their own sensations and perceptions.

Perception, recognition, and second glances are central themes in Windows 85. Whether by algorithm or accident, gazes meet between two or more network actors making their own way through the web. Each glimpse gathers and scatters multiple subjectivities through “a resized window.” These surprisingly poignant encounters reflect nodes or vertices in the network: points where people and media cross paths (or crash!) during mass acts of movement—translation, transmission, distribution, social change, and migration.

The tempo, pace, and diction in Windows 85 are at once agile, precise, flamboyant, and even promiscuous, equal parts postcolonial and neobaroque, à la Cuban literary icon Severo Sarduy, one of Campanioni’s many archival intimacies. Campanioni’s connection with his literary interlocutors, like poet Meena Alexander, reminds me of poet and scholar Ammiel Alcalay’s dictate to “follow the person” when navigating the archive. Alcalay says that deepening familiarization with the person or works being researched instills a heightened sense of responsibly toward the subject of study, living or dead, flesh or data.

Instead of a table of contents, Windows 85 offers “keyboard shortcuts.” Each title is a portal through which “men seeking men / to play flaneur // through my arcades” pass. This is a reference to Walter Benjamin’s unfinished thesis on the emergence of covered shopping arcades in 19th-century Paris. Displaying vast collections of commodities for sale, arcades and plazas are “a ritual not for memory / but to make people forget.” Rather than serving as archives, they provide cover for flaneurs searching the “catacomb // for kinks / in transmission.” Campanioni courts intimacy and responsibility whether in the archive or the arcades.

Campanioni highlights recessive similarities in dominant—but dissonant—discourses, transforming found language patterns into an original mode of exultant devotion to literature as cosmology. Authors from disjunctive movements and schools come together through “rolling chatter.” The language is pastiche, its rhythm and movement somehow resonant with both the situationists, who tried to recapture desire from capitalism and save the everyday from alienated labor, and the diasporic avant-garde, like Aimé Césaire, Kamau Brathwaite, and Aubrey Williams. Campanioni’s fidelity to this kind of citational promiscuity is refreshing. A “mnemonic courier” who is also “not // your carrier / pigeon,” the speaker delivers “a flirty directness countered by cunning enjambment.” In “{trying hard is beneath you},” the speaker goes “below / the text for / our safety,” where “appendices burst // with self / citation,” and “words get off / to action / adventure.

A deceptively glossy read, masking or passing under the “man-skin” of the text is a fecund “earth magic” that offers the depth and promise of a false-bottom box. Campanioni packs the chest with pretexts, unread letters, and archival excess: each compact poem is a fiber-optic cable “laid along the bed / of ocean,” carrying coded references and messages “in total darkness” from their storage location to their network destination—the readership.

For me, Windows 85 calls to mind “The Romance of Certain Old Clothes” (1868), a gothic short story by Henry James, and Céline et Julie vont en bateau (1974), a riotous film by Jacques Rivette. Both feature a trunk full of dress-up clothes as the port of entry into the “house of fiction.” By acting as agents of their own fate, the characters in both works crack the foundation of linear narrative as a deterministic architecture. Like a “character in a novel / & not a breathing body,” denizens of Windows 85 may be described as abiding in the “house of media.” But if the house of fiction is plastic, the house of media is plasticity itself.

What is “the idea & the story / of the idea / in the story” that leads out of the house and into the phenomenological world? It may be that all operating systems have an “enclosure fetish.” They pretend to surround and contain. But through “the flesh textures / general // lack of cohesion,” humans outmaneuver actor-network theory every time. At least in Windows 85. For example, in “{sisyphus & the rock},” the speaker is the rock. Later, he is “grabbing the fence of a tennis court so firmly” he appears “to be chained to its metal links.” He is enmeshed as we are enmeshed. Is a human information or an information manager? A subject or agent of technology?

Campanioni’s exuberant style somehow defies the consumerist logics of late capitalism, which manifest as an economy of spectacle without depth or duration, to gloss Marxist historian Fredric Jameson. But if late capitalism leads consumers to consume even their own futures, Campanioni is more ambivalent about the exchange between the user and the used, the searcher and the search engine, the human and the machine. He writes, “my cookies / disappear the body,” but representations of “the body” swell and accumulate, are “knowable,” as if “a character in a novel / & not a breathing body / discovering what governs a person.” Windows 85 is a spectacle of depth and duration where the “lyric / I” is redeemed: a network user who, to borrow Fred Moten’s phrase, “consents not to be a single being.”

The book’s sensual quest to feed, meet, and squeeze other solid bodies in the cloud smuggles in a larger, existential question: where is our agency and how do we access it? Throughout the collection, everyday digital media terms like “network,” “dropbox,” and “AI” signal the speaker’s (and the readers’) effort to extract sensory sovereignty from within a technocratic state through human-to-human contact, sometimes achieved through self-touch.

Windows in Windows 85 reflect an operating system, a seeing instrument, and an architectural technology. French theorist Jacques Rancière refers to the window (in works of fiction) as a “determined structure” composing a fourfold relationship to space-time. It distinguishes between inside (the here, the now, the real) and outside (the not here, not now, not me, not real). One political/moral value of fiction is that it can inspire recognition of and responsibility toward the not here, the not now, and the not me, including those people who do not exist yet, but will. The question of how to acknowledge the rights and vitality of future beings is a question that also concerns climate justice activists and philosophers of existential risk alike, underscoring the significance of Campanioni’s project. American philosopher Lewis Mumford described the relationship between humans and technology as “technics.” Sparked by the flint, amplified by the simple lever, and present in the most complex networks, the human-machine is an interbeing irreducible on the social, structural, and phenomenological scale. French philosopher Bernard Stiegler expands this idea, determining that technics is a suite of physical and ideological tools through which time is conceived and measured. Since the human is a time-bound being, Stiegler says there would be no “we” without technology. I learn from Campanioni that the poems were written on the go. The prosody is sharp and sparse, reflective of the design characteristics of a phone screen. Their medium is iMessage and Notes. Reshuffled into couplets and tercets during the editing process, most include short lines stacked into thin columns. Manufactured elsewhere but assembled on-site, they feel modular and scalable, like data racks.

Follow the internet to one of its many physical sources and you will find a big, secure building filled with cables, servers, racks, and cooling units connected to power, water, and fiber. In New York City, the colocation center at 375 Pearl Street boasts diverse pathways to guide data through an evolving media landscape that is difficult to map. Years ago, my college friend, social practice artist Oscar Rene Cornejo, told me his mom was an overnight custodian when the windowless building was still known locally as the Verizon Building. There are always real people with various ideological standpoints laboring deep within the digital ecosystem.

The subjectivity of human interpretation splashes open like a pop-up ad in Windows 85: “a sacrament to keep me on your screen.” In “{as natural as the camera},” “what appears to be a hole in the upholstery” is a human head that punctures the pseudo-transparency of screens both analog and digital: windows and Windows OS. Campanioni asks us to “aestheticize / the humiliation of / being human unnaturally.” In doing so, readers recognize “the human use of human faces” in the age of empowered AI. What are those uses? Perceptual learning, critical thinking, imagination, memory, and, of course, poetry.