Digital Poetry & Electronic Literature

A Kitchen of Own's One
The Photographers‘ Gallery, London 2020,
with Sabrina Starnaman and Dale MacDonald

A Kitchen of One's Own was commissioned for Data / Set / Match, a programme that seeks new ways to present, visualise and interrogate contemporary image datasets. Alongside the Media Wall, all parts of the work including its bibliography (The Kitchen Bib), complete video set, and code (.sh, .js, .html, .css, .py) has been published with a Creative Commons (cc-by-nc) license on Github.

The dataset of videos are based on the training from Epic Kitchens intelligence, transformed in size and duration, and re-exported. Due to the timing of this work, Epic Hand Washing in the Time of Lost Narratives is an additional commission that restaged the project for online viewers.

I Got Up 2020, Pandemic Edition
Archived in the Electronic Literature Knowledge Base
I Got Up 2020, Pandemic Edition started as an Instagram series inspired by On Kawara’s 1968-79 daily postcard ritual. This series of digital posts is a visible record of getting up while confined to the house and simultaneously enacting the roles of mother, artist, housekeeper, and teacher. These daily vignettes interpret “getting up” as unusually labor intensive—creative on the best days and merely possible on the worst. As a result of the quarantine, and the collapse of professional and domestic spaces, this series of getting up was a creative family adventure.

I Got Up 2020, Pandemic Edition was published as an artist essay in Filter Insta-Zine (@sarathena192 and @camilligal, co-editors), and exhibited at the Electronic Literature Organization’s COVID E-Lit Exhibition, Platform (Post?) Pandemic conference, May 2021, curated by Anna Nacher, Scott Rettberg, and Søren Pold. A video documenting the work was screened and at the College Art Association's Artist-Parent Pandemic Video and New Genres Film Screening (February 2021, refereed by Myrel Chemick and Niku Kashef). The piece was also featured in the documentary COVID E-Lit: Digital Art During the Pandemic (dirs. Nacher, Pold, Rettberg, and Steele), where burrough was interviewed about the work.
All of the Spaces Collapsing: An Interview with xtine burrough was published in the Electronic Book Review on June 5, 2022.

Paying It Forward (M.I.A. Edition - Paper Planes)
2023
Video distributing commissioned poems first published on the Venmo pay app, then shared on Instagram

Paying It Forward intervenes in the Venmo public pay platform with poetry that comments on or critiques the dehumanizing effects of capitalism. In fall 2022, I commissioned artists, poets, and students to write a poem in less than 166 characters. I sent the poems back to their authors with a publicly shared Venmo payment of one cent (US). Creating a trail of art and poetry, I made a screen capture of the transaction, then posted the final media art object on Instagram, using filters, audio clips, and effects. In 2023 I edited a video for the song Paper Planes by MIA on Instagram in twenty-second intervals: the longest duration for music clips on the platform. I edited the entire music video on the platform, reassembling the song from its sequential 20-second clips.

This work was created during my time in the Art & Code Track of NEW INC and installed at Dunkhunstalle, NYC, June 2023.

One Word Poems
Middle School Edition, 2022, Galveston Beach, Self-imposed Mother’s Artist Residency

Inspired by the Artist/Mother Podcast’s call to continue creative practice during the daily activities of parenting, I transformed summer break into a “Mother's Artist Residency” in Galveston, Texas. During the roadtrip my twin boys and I laughed together at a podcast about middle school.

This collection of one word poems is inspired by the lexicon of their world and my early teen memories.

This work was exhibited on Vintage SONY Trinitron Televisions (10 second digital videos) during my solo exhibition at 7 MOONS MEDIA STUDIOS in Richardson, Texas, March - August, 2026.

Women's Work is Screen Saved
2022,Screensaver made with sentiments shared by female-identifying caretakers on Mechanical Turk

Inspired by the Artist/Mother Podcast’s call to continue forms of creative practice during the daily activities of parenting, I transformed the month of June into a “Mother’s Artist Residency.” Most of this took place on the beach in Galveston, Texas. During the long drive south my twin boys and I talked about the social dimensions of fourth grade, and the likely dramas of middle school. We listened to a This American Life episode about Middle School that had us laughing together and spurred our conversation. This collection of one word poems is inspired by the lexicon of their world and by close proximity, mine, too. Each One Word Poem follows a strict set of self-imposed rules: I only used my iPhone (v. 13) and the free version of Vixer. The videos are ten-seconds with one word overlayed, set in 24 point Amir (one of two free typefaces in the app) with variable tracking. The word-image relationships are poetic. Sometimes the images are conduits for a feeling I associate with the word (like, rituals). Sometimes they’re in opposition (rules, expectations). Sometimes they are literal (forgiveness, routines). Sometimes a quality of the word resonates with the way the word interacts with the slightly moving image (promises, betrayals).

This work was exhibited on Vintage SONY Trinitron Televisions (10 second digital videos) during my solo exhibition at 7 MOONS MEDIA STUDIOS in Richardson, Texas, March - August, 2026.