E-Papers > Arte Media
FROM CONCRETE POETRY TO NET POETRY
Lucia Santaella
In human history, every time that changes in the medium of writing emerged, the artists and poets were the first ones to explore the potential that the new medium opened for creativity. Giving continuity to this tradition, the contemporary poets are extracting from the digital media the new features of writing conceived of as art. Based in the investigation of the materiality of digital writing, there are at least three ways of exploring creative electronic or cyber-textuality. Although these ways are distinctive, they are inseparable and operate simultaneously in the digital realm. They are: (a) hypertext and its expansion in hypermedia, (b) the visual kinetic text, (c) works in programable hybrid media. The first one, hypertext and hypermedia, is more proeminently related to narrative works, such as, for instance, literary interactive prose and computer games; the second, the visual kinetic text is dominantly related to e-poetry; the third one is located in the fluid frontier of net art and net poetry.
Having this in mind, my presentation aims at arguing that the connection between the innovative poetry of the twentieth century and e-poetry is so intimate that we may state that the poetic principles that were pursued by the innovators coincide with some of the most relevant questions of today’s e-poetry. To exemplify this argument I will present the poetics of the Brazilian poet Augusto de Campos as emblematic of these questions.
However, the digital world presents some features of its own that could not be anticipated by the poetry that was produced in other media. In that sense, e-poets are not simply transposing to the digital media something that could and can be done outside it. Hence, to discriminate what distinguishes inventive poetry in other media and e-poetry is also in the scope of my presentation.
Last but not least, my aim is to discuss that the hybrid e-poetry that is emerging in the net, that is, a kind of poetry that is produced with the potentials and means that only the net may turn possible, is intensifying the dintinctions between the experimental poetry of the twentieth century and e-poetry. A new and very specific form of creative writing is appearing in the net. Although it inherited the radicality of textual experimentation which was the main characteristic of innovative poetry in the last century, its specificities have to be highlighted. That is why I prefer to give to it the name of net-poetry. To exemplify this argument I will present Poetrica, a recent project by the Brazilian artist Giselle Beiguelman, an interactive and collaborative teleintervention that explores mobile technologies in the context of creative writing.
1. E-poetry: writing in process
Two of the most proeminent features of the digital process are the hybridization of technologies and the media convergence. Several technological means and various media that had been previously separated converged in a single complex device. Thanks to the digitalization of information, faxes, prints, scanners, answering machines, recorded sounds, photo and video cameras, phones and celular phones converge in the computer. This convergence allows the digital text to have sound, graphical, pictorial, video, and textual animated contents all at the same time. Allied to hypertext, which is the grammar and syntax of the digital text, this mixture of languages generates a new hybrid language: the hypermedia.
Besides allowing the convergence of diverse media and the mixture of their corresponding sign systems, digitalization also allows the reticular organization of the flux of signs in hypertextual architectures. When conceived in digital media, the signs are embodied in non-linear configurations. The key to make sense of the discontinuity of signs is the hyperlink, which connects the nodes of information in the digital space. When these nodes of information appear not only in verbal form, but also in any of the kinds of visual form, and in sound form, the hypertext is expanded to hypermedia. However, these nodes of information do not connect by themselves. They need the agency of the user to activate them. This agency is interactive. Making his/her own selections in a field of possibilities, the user performes the role of a co-criator of the message.
These are the conditions for the production of e-poetry. To fulfill these conditions, the production is based on a series of devices such as word processors, programs for image manipulation, animation and 3-D tools, HTML generators etc. These devices are able to produce adaptable, flexible, and permutable effects. Writing e-poetry is to choreograph a wide range of possibilities of representation. That is why e-texts are variable, instable, and provisional in the sense that they may produce multiple results in a changing environment. It is a kind of text that is highly sensitive in each tiny part of its surface. This means that each of these parts has an ability to perform a role or even several roles in the a-linear, multi-directional dynamics of the text.
Hence, among the most powerful qualities of digital poems are: intermediality, hybridization, interactivity, permutability, and kinetics.
After this brief presentation of the most proeminent e-poetry features, let’s examine to which extent and in which possible ways some of these features could have been explored in last century’s experimental poetry. In my view, the trajectory of Augusto de Campos’ work can offer us a privileged panorama for this examination.
2. Anticipations of e-poetry in Augusto de Campos’ work
For Augusto, there can be no inventive experimental poetry if the poet does not strive to extract the potential for renovation of the new writing media. This, in fact, has been Augusto’s goal from his youth to these days.
In the 1950’s, he already thought of poetry in terms of intermediality. In his first book of poems, Poetamenos, he used colourful graphemes which produce meaning by means of the multirelational potential of the colours. In 1956, in close connection with painters, he produced poster-poems. Rather dissatisfied with the limitations of typography, in 1964, he began to produce his poems with newspaper clippings. This was the time of his popcrete poems. A year later, he was using filmletters. Then, he entertained the idea of disentangling the structure of the book and even of the page. A brilliant example of this idea is the poem Cidade/City/Cité .
This was the time when he first met the Spanish graphic artist Julio Plaza and together they innitiated an extraordinary work partnership. This started with their first mobilepoem: Abre/Open. The partnership was interrupted by Plaza’s return to Spain. During this time, Augusto produced photopoems.
When Plaza went back to Brasil in 1974, they transformed the first experience of a mobilepoem into an entire book made of released pages. The name Mobilepoems is very appropriate. Each page is a three-dimensional coreography of colors and forms, a coreography that is accomplished as the reader manipulates the page. As he/she opens and closes the page, the colors and forms appear as combined and recombined words. From Mobilepoems, Augusto and Plaza moved to the more ambitious project called Caixa Preta (Black Box). This, in fact, is a black box inside which one finds poetic objects to be manipulated and even constructed by the reader, in a clear prefiguration of e-poetry interactivity.
In the years 1980, Augusto’s and Plaza’s works moved from the graphic medium to other media such as video text, electronic panels and hologhaphy. Although in a rudimentary manner, the kinetics which is proper of e-poetry was anticipated in their work in videotext and electronic panels. At the same time, the holographic poems, such as Plaza’s Arco iris no ar curvo (Rainbow in curved air) anticipated the three dimensionality and mutability of words in an atmosphere of light, colour and shadow which is greatly responsible for the magic of e-poetry.
From the 1980’s on, new techological devices have continuously appeared. In 1993, some of Augusto’s statements indicate how conscious he was of the fact that the emergent media were bound to turn effective some procedures that were the most difficult to be acomplished in bidimensional and static media. For him, technology was the really new fact that appeared at that time to enhance poetic production.
In the beginnings of the 1990s, when he put his hands in a computer, he immediately realized that the poetic practices that he had been developing for decades, such as the emphasis on the materiality of the words, parts of words and their interconnections, their interfaces with non-verbal signs, all of them had everything to do with the computer. The first computer animations that he produced came from the phonic and graphic virtualities of poems he had created in other media. Then, he began to create directly in the computer what he called digital clip poems.
3. What is distinctive of e-poetry
Although the task of establishing the differences between innovative poetry in other media and e-poetry may seem difficult at first sight, as far as I can see, Augusto de Campos’ poetic trajectory functions as a guiding map to overcome this difficulty. Augusto’s inventive experimentation with new media for the making of his poetics detached him from the printed media and gradually took him closer and closer to the potentials of the electronic media. In that sense, Augusto’s trajectory evinces that the differences that exist from one medium to the other are always differences of grade and not of nature, what functions as an antidote against the idea that invention is dependent exclusively on the media and not on the talent of the artist.
Hence, the differences of grade in e-poetry are all derivative from the fact that it is produced in the computer. This inaugurates a new kind of maleable writing that can be infinitely rewritten. To copy specific motives or parts of them, to remove them from one spot to the other, to delete, to manipulate data, to mix systems of signs are basic procedures of computer writing which allow the producer to experiment with hybridization, permutability and kinetics to an extent that no other media could have dreamt of. E-writing is also nomadic. It can be inside the computer and also be copied to other supports such as disquetes, CD-roms, DVDs.
Besides that, digital data have no fixed habitat. They are non-sequential and are organized in a web of nodes whose links are performed by the user who is free to navigate in a non-linear manner. In an environment like this, the reader acquires the potency of an agent. A potency with which no other media can compete.
Last but not least, the computer is a promiscuous machine. Thanks to modems, telephones and other connections it can talk to other computers. Data can be exchanged from one machine to the other. E-writing is instantly transmissible to a multitude of computers at the same time. Among all the others, this seems to be the most crucial difference or potentiality for e-writing, that is, the re-invention of writing by means of the possibilities opened by the net conceived of as a medium for art. It is exactly this potentiality that Giselle Beiguelman has been exploring in her net-poetic works.
4. Net-poetry in the cybrid space
A constant feature in Beiguelman’s works comes from an interrogation about how digital media are bluring the borders between art and communication in a manner even more intensive than video art did some decades ago. The net today is not only a global web of computers linked to each other. The most recent configurations of cyberspace present a multiplicity of small digital windows, smaller than the computer’s, and at the same time more volatile and evanescent: the screen of cell phones, palm tops, electronic terminals in banks, faxes, bips, quiosques in shoppings and airports. The multiplying effect of wireless technology has turned digital culture into an expansive ecosystem of subcultures that are mixed up in micro, macro and megacommunities. Conscious of the new technological and cultural mobile-condition, for Beiguelman, in this time of wireless nomadism, the interface is the message.
Her work Poetrica , in any of its various versions, is an imaginative and lucid exploration of poetic writing in the entropic and nomadic cybrid space, a digital space that has turned possible any media to be linked to any other media from any point in space at the same time.
In one of its versions, Poetrica is constituted of digital poems whose process of composition envolves the use of non-phonetic fonts (dings and system fonts) and algebraic operations. The title of each poem presents the equation that describes its sequences of operations (additions, superpositions, divisions etc.). The result are animated forms of writing that reverberate in our real or imaginary memory as an archeology of images of writings.
Another version of Poetrica, is a teleintervention that happened in São Paulo from Oct. 8 th to November 11 th, 2003. This teleintervention is highly interactive since it is a collaborative work that depends on the participation of the receiver to exist. And it exists according to the parameters that are allowed by the kind of interface that the receiver is using. In this web work, those who had access to the net through cell phones, palms, pocket computers, while they were moving in the chaotic rhythm of São Paulo’s daily life, could submit a message by the web and SMS to three electronic billboards located in downtown São Paulo. Those messages were converted in non-phonetic fonts and then transmitted to the billboards. The subvertion of the billboard advertising function by those ephemeral hierogliphs, in the figurative sense of illegible or uninteligible writing, the collaborative action of wireless agents which generated the work, and its nomadic character create an admirable isomorphism with the chaotic and self-organizing principles of the net itself.
A third version of Poetrica was presented in Berlin, during the exihibition Poes1s, curated by Friedrich Block. In public space Poetrica was displayed at Kurfürstendamm electronic billboard and in the movies in trailler format, announcing the exhibition through the series ad oetries (ads plus poetries).
The complexity of artistic, environmental, authorial and critical issues that are raised by Beiguelman’s works surely claim for a radical rethinking of most of our aesthetic categories and principles. This discussion, however, has to be left to another occasion.