“Huir sí es mejor plan”: Rethinking the Subject in Digital Literature
Proposal Type
Individual Talk
Location
Hypertexts & Fictions
Start Date
July 2026
End Date
July 2026
Abstract
As an extension of my research on contemporary appropriative practices that experiment with deviant uses of technology, this paper explores the question of subjectivity in digital literature. My aim is to examine how a set of contemporary works of electronic literature problematize the relationships between writing, technology, and subject formation. Within this framework, I propose a reading of Huir sí es mejor plan (2020), a work created in Twine by Argentine writer Valeria Mussio. To address the question of the subject in an algorithmic culture, it is essential to attend to the spatial modulations (Angeliki 2021) that traverse it: media architectures, dynamics of attention, and regimes of circulation that condition and produce ways of being, perceiving, and acting within a platform culture (Bratton 2015). This spatial dimension is central to Mussio’s work. I therefore examine how digital writing and forms of subjective spacing articulate themselves within a context marked by the increasing standardization of circulation and the modulation of attention. From this perspective, the work does not merely thematize a digital subject; rather, it enables us to read, in its very configuration, an epochal shift in the category of the subject itself (Bürger 2001). Following Michel de Certeau’s notion of “spatial practices,” I read Mussio’s hypertext as the production of a second, poetic geography—a space of language (Bachelard) in which subject formation takes place.
Keywords
Digital Literature – Subjectivity – Platform Culture – Twine
“Huir sí es mejor plan”: Rethinking the Subject in Digital Literature
Hypertexts & Fictions
As an extension of my research on contemporary appropriative practices that experiment with deviant uses of technology, this paper explores the question of subjectivity in digital literature. My aim is to examine how a set of contemporary works of electronic literature problematize the relationships between writing, technology, and subject formation. Within this framework, I propose a reading of Huir sí es mejor plan (2020), a work created in Twine by Argentine writer Valeria Mussio. To address the question of the subject in an algorithmic culture, it is essential to attend to the spatial modulations (Angeliki 2021) that traverse it: media architectures, dynamics of attention, and regimes of circulation that condition and produce ways of being, perceiving, and acting within a platform culture (Bratton 2015). This spatial dimension is central to Mussio’s work. I therefore examine how digital writing and forms of subjective spacing articulate themselves within a context marked by the increasing standardization of circulation and the modulation of attention. From this perspective, the work does not merely thematize a digital subject; rather, it enables us to read, in its very configuration, an epochal shift in the category of the subject itself (Bürger 2001). Following Michel de Certeau’s notion of “spatial practices,” I read Mussio’s hypertext as the production of a second, poetic geography—a space of language (Bachelard) in which subject formation takes place.
Keywords
Digital Literature – Subjectivity – Platform Culture – Twine
Bio
Fernanda Mugica holds a B.A. in Literature and an M.A. in Hispanic Literature (Universidad Nacional de Mar del Plata). She is a Doctoral Fellow at CONICET (in co-tutelle with Université Paris 8) with a research project on the question of the subject in electronic literature. She is also a certified Webmaster (UTN). She has completed various programming courses (Python at UNSAM; Java Web Full Stack Junior) and specializes in creative coding. She holds a postgraduate diploma in Technology, Subjectivity, and Politics (CLACSO). Since 2024, she has been Lecturer in charge of the seminar “Cartographies I: Museums, Archives, Laboratories” in the M.A. Program in Augmented Humanities at the Universidad Nacional de Rosario. She has published the poetry books Museo del kamikaze del corazón (Nutrias Espaciales, 2024), Informe… (Oficina Perambulante, 2022), Un billete de mil australes encontrado en un libro de Carl Sagan (EMR, 2018; Honorable Mention, First National Poetry Prize of Rosario; Liliputienses, 2021; Capiranhas Do Parahybuna, 2022, translated into Portuguese by Anelise Freitas with support from Argentina’s SUR Translation Program), Soñé (Matrerita, 2021), El núcleo duro (Goles Rosas, 2015), and Alberta (Honesta, 2014). In 2020, she received First Prize in the Argentine and Latin American Art Criticism Essay Competition organized by Fundación PROA and the Argentine Association of Art Critics. That same year, she was awarded the Mexican Government Excellence Scholarship for Foreigners and the AUIP Mobility Grant. In 2023, she received the Saint-Exupéry Doctoral Research Fellowship in France, and in 2025, the Digital Change Fellowship at the Ibero-American Institute in Berlin. Her work has appeared in the anthologies Archipiélagos (UNLP, 2018), Van llegando (Mansalva, 2017), and Las olas y el viento (Letra Sudaca, 2015). She is currently a fellow at Presente Continuo (2025–2026) and artist-in-residence in the Calado Art–Science Residency (UTN, Mar del Plata). Website: http://fernandamugica.com