Stefa Govaart

Jammer Poems

Jammer Poems is an edition of three books of poetry. The poems consist of fragments of found text around cellphone jammers (blogs, court rulings, product information, forums, transcriptions of video instructions) manipulated by formal poetic procedures. Scrambling and reshuffling words in the source text obscures the original intent. The resulting poems read like building blocks of syntactical stability and collapse. They are plotter printed on the outside of plastic document booklets whose insides are clogged with dyed glue. Form and content meet in the idea of blockage. Cellphone jammers exist between the public and the private: illegal in most countries, they are nonetheless attainable online. Disrupting or blocking the services of the mobile phone industry, cellphone jammers expose the omnipotent form of logistics in the contemporary. The circulation of voices, bodies, goods and capital is regulated without end. The lure of obstruction is everywhere. The fine thread of deviation any act of sabotage lays bare––the one missing link causing wholesale collapse––exponentially redoubles the relation of cause to effect: what seemed trivial turns out vital, or deadly. Jammer Poems confronts the technical management of access and information. It traffics in the much desired message gone missing.