Berlin’s most sympathetic journal, Reality Scratch, published my UML poem “A Bit of Surveillance”. Thanks to editors Melissa Frost and Thomas McDonald and all the other authors for this great issue!
This poem was constructed using UML (Unified Modeling Language), a modeling tool for software systems. To create the diagram and try and capture the current precarious moment in tech affairs, I used PlantText (the expert’s design tool).
As a backbone for the poem, I used two common design patterns in software architecture: the Observer pattern and the Abstract Factory pattern. Both these patterns are used to structure complex code hierarchies. They are merely abstractions, but in this work serve as a metaphor for surveillance practices of the tech industry.
(Click on the image to enlarge)
