Hi, I'm Alex. Welcome!
I am a text artist, programmer, and PhD student at UC Santa Cruz.
I play with language
to find new ways of seeing, ways of expressing, and to understand the current moment.
I am publishing poetry and making a slew of odd things - physical and digital (and usually textual).
My past lives include: Me as an art and media reporter. Me as part of a strange Columbia dual-master's degree.
Me as a computational linguistics student. Me as a confused engineer. Me as a confused writer. Me as a less confused maker of undefined things.
Me as an English major. Me as a CS major. Me as a backpacker. Me as a surfer. Me as a Montanan. Me as a New Yorker. Me as an Irish citizen (thank you grandma). Me as a Santa Cruzan. Me as a wanderer. Me as an ADHDer. Me as an <OTHER>.
I am interested in sculptural text, digital poetics, pataphysics, orality, games aimed at joy rather than fun, words-in-the-world, the intersection of critical design and practice based research,
critical literacy, digital literature, the avant garde, Borges, Cortázar, Leyner, critical readings of constraint, contemporary reading+writing, AI literacy, more than human design, design+social justice, baking bread, surrealism, pickling, publishing...
alexcalderw at gmail @xenoscope.bsky.social google scholar instagram