While we might imagine a contestatory function for the intermedial artwork in Spanish available on YouTube, the following reading ends up largely denying such alterity. Videos by three Mexican artists, Mónica Nepote (b. 1970, Guadalajara, Jalisco), Carla Faesler (b. 1967, Mexico City), and Fátima Orozco (b. 1993, Monterrey, Nuevo León) exemplify the flexibility of the categories of the amateur and the professional in an age of distrust for expertise, without pushing the discussion in new directions – sadly for feminists. In a key YouTube video that I discuss, Nepote turns the notion of the voice into an interface, now that of an analogue body, now that of a digital trick. Similar games with mediated presence appear in Faesler's YouTube videos, which include print pages and paper dolls. Orozco, a Mexican book reviewer on YouTube, or Booktuber for short, performs something of a fetish for print books in her videos. Non-poet Orozco at first seems a dissonant choice beside Nepote and Faesler, although I hope that by the end of the present analysis, my reader will understand the stakes of dismissing Orozco's efforts out of hand.

THE SET UP: INTERMEDIALITY, EXPERTISE, AND PRINT

Jan Baetens and Domingo Sánchez Mesa define the term intermediality as an artwork of heterogenous materials in conflict (292). This definition strikes a familiar deconstructive note, and in recognition of that familiarity, Baetens and Sánchez-Mesa nod at the relevance of Kiene Brillenburg's “back to the book” conference, now transformed into an edited volume (298). The relevance of the print book is also hinted at in Mexican critic Roberto Cruz Arzabal's work on materiality and the interface, the point where mediums meet. An enthusiast of Nepote's and Faesler's poetry, Cruz Arzabal launches his criticism from Alexander Galloway's broad definition of interface as a “space of transition between media and forms of language” (“Writing” 244). An interface is usually invisible and therefore when one appears, “it has stopped operating as such and has begun to function as a medium” (“Writing” 244).

Interest in materiality coincides with Edmundo Paz Soldán and Debra Castillo's observation regarding “literature's overall ‘representational privilege’” (cited in Lavery 13). This question of print publication is hardly esoteric – or even a truly alternative topic, especially if distribution systems for e-book editions of print material are taken into account.