POÉTRICA > SOBRE O PROJETO
Giselle Beiguelman, out 2003

Poétrica é uma investigação sobre leitura e recepção em situações cíbridas (pautadas pela interconexão de redes on e off line), entrópicas e de trânsito contínuo.

Envolve uma série de poemas visuais compostos por mim com fontes não-fonéticas e uma teleintervenção urbana mediada por criações feitas pelo público com esse mesmo repertório tipográfico.

É um work in progress. Começa agora, em outubro, e termina em fevereiro. O lançamento acontece em São Paulo, na Galeria Vermelho. O encerramento, no Kulturforum, em Berlim.

As imagens são produzidas em qualquer lugar , via SMS (mensagem de texto pelo celular), Internet fixa e móvel e disponibilizadas em painéis eletrônicos situados na mancha urbana da Galeria Vermelho, nas avenidas Paulista, Consolação e Rebouças.

Essas imagens são, também, retransmitidas on line por webcams e replicadas em diferentes dispositivos (celulares, Palms, computadores) e, em alguns casos, reproduzidas em ploters e outros sistemas de impressão digital.

Resultam, sempre, em significados visuais independentes de sua textualidade e desvinculados do seu lugar de produção e veiculação.

Poétrica inverte, assim, os pressupostos concretistas e da land art do qual se nutre, desfazendo, por um lado, os laços verbais e visuais na relação entre linguagens e códigos, e, por outro se afirmando como arte de congestionamento e de trânsito que só se efetiva como projeto net specific.

Tudo que se cria, no entanto, é visto e lido de forma completamente distinta, de acordo com seu contexto recepção e isso não é conseqüência do tamanho da tela, ou do tipo de superfície a que as imagens e textos momentaneamente aderem.

É resultante de um fenômeno estético particular dessa escritura nômade que, por ser clonável e deslinkada do suporte, desmaterializa a mídia para fazer a interface se realizar como mensagem.

Poétrica tem entre suas fontes de insipiração:
- O tipógrafo Rafael Lain, autor de várias fontes aqui usadas.
- "Introduction to the Letter T", poema de Barrett Watten.
- Desbragada, de Edgar Braga (org. Régis Bonvicino, 1984).
- Ideograma, de Haroldo de Campos, e a obra completa de seu irmão, Augusto.
- A teleintervenção deve mais a Orson Welles e Jenny Holzer.
- Borges, como sempre, está em tudo.

. . . . . . . . . .

LIQUID_POETRY.br
Giselle Beiguelman

Based on the poetic work of some leading visual and concrete poets and e-poets this essay discusses their crossovers, links and distances. It aims not to define their boundaries, but to avoid simple ontological considerations that fade all the cultural differences by reducing poetry to its media (magnetic, printed or digital). The Brazilian Visual Poetry, an exhibition presented at the Mexic-Arte Museum (Austin, Texas, 2002), curated by Regina Vater, and the book Concrete Poetry – A World View, by Mary Ellen Solt are good examples of how those fields are different and similar. [1]

Because of this, a conceptualization of their practices seems to be urgent. Otherwise, the tendency is to follow a reductionist point of view that stresses the predominance of the support over content. Crossovers The associations between Brazilian concrete poetry and e-poetry are frequent and critics [2] stress their importance for poets devoted to digital media. It is time to try to answer why in order to question what did we learn from it and if we are doing something different or just updating what was already done in other media. The particularities of the Brazilian position in the concrete production, specially in the 50’s, as well its international insertion can be understood in the historical context of the post-war. Haroldo de Campos, one of the pioneers in the field states:

“Concrete poetry wasn’t born by spontaneous generation or mere idiosyncrasy. It wasn’t something so isolated. On the contrary, it was an international movement, translinguistic that had resonance among poets of many countries, from East to West. The novelty was that the Brazilians were, since the first hour, involved in that experience, as founders of the movement.

This movement born from a historical necessity- the retaking, in the 50’s, of the first vanguards. (…). After the Second World War there was in all artistic fields a movement towards the recuperation of those purposes that Nazism and Stalinism had marginalized as “degenerated art” and “decadent art”. [3]

If this explains the Brazilian proeminence in the “concrete arena”, it does not make clear why the movement is still considered a reference for that production. Nevertheless, another consideration made by the same author, Haroldo de Campos, is a good point of departure for this discussion.

“In poetry it was imperative to recuperate the revolution started by Mallarmé (“Un Coup des Dés”) and amplified by Pound, Joyce, Stein, Cummings, Apollinaire and other vanguard movements of the first decades. It concerned to continue the knocking down the verbal structures of the contractual discourse, insufficient to embrace the universe of imagination and sensibility.” [4]

As a matter of fact, this is what e-poetry could have as its mission statement: knocking down the verbal structures of the contractual discourse and melting different poetics in an hybrid tradition.

Beside those objectives e-poetry shares important characteristics with visual and concrete practices and aesthetics. Both deal with the resistance to the verse, appeal to multiple senses and media and search for an expansion of the poetic object, working beyond _and sometimes without_ words.

In short, concrete poetry can be definded as a poetic practice that organize the text according to its relational graphic and phonic values and suppresses syntactical links between its composite elements, stressing its paramorphisms (as Pignatari described, or paranomasias, by the way of Jakobson).[5]

From a lyric point of view, those technical attributes formatted in the 50’s are important because they are in the core of e-poetry strategies. As far as they made poetry to coincide with the materiality of language, breaking the linear structure of the traditional printed format, they allowed multiple readings and viewpoints through the exploration of graphic resources.[6]

This non-linear approach, which includes the need of imagination to organize meaning and content was crucial for the introduction of the space into the temporality of language, an issue intrinsic to any cyber poetic work.

Moreover, both poetics systems depend on the reader participation in the meaning building process and on fusion of media methodologies. So, for these reasons, they demand and produce new paradigms of reading and new reading horizons.

It is true, as pointed by Pignatari, paraphrasing Borges, that “any innovating poetic movement creates its own precursors”[7] and, in this sense we can say that one of the most important trends of concretism for e-poetry was the absorption, in the 60’s, of non-verbal elements in the poetic composition.

It opened space for new genres of visual poetry like the boxes and posters produced in the 70’s by Edgard Braga[8], who not only expanded literary supports but worked, like no other Brazilian poet, poetry beyond phonetics playing with the “rise of language” in order to subvert its borders.[9]

Most of the international anthologies that mention Edgard Braga show poems that highlight how he explored the movement of words, the balance between form and content, transforming semantics in content in ways that resemble the work of Eugene Gomringer.[10]

In spite of this, it is in his caligraphic works, made of different materials and supports like stones, walls and carvon , that Braga’poetry points to a subversion of limits of what is visual art and what is poetry that place him as a paradigmatic creator for those working today with new dimensions of language and its intersections with non-verbal arts.

Intersections that mean implosion, visual guerrilla and electronic intervention in the work of Waldemar Cordeiro, who in the 70’s coined the concept of arteônica (art + electronic) and made the first experiences with computer and arts in 1968.

His work is important not because faded the borders between communication, visual art, science, technology and information, but because updated notions of appropriations and recycling processes in the creative practices mediated by electronic media.

LINKS

It is curious to note how creative contemporary Brazilian multimedia poets like Arnaldo Antunes and Lenora de Barros were able to reinvent concrete procedures in their works but did not demonstrate any interest in applying this background in digital environments.

The question here is not if they use or not computers and softwares in order to produce their works. Of course they use and in fact they did some experiences but nothing that has the same poetic strength and degree of invention they reveal in their graphic and printed works.

For many years, the important explorations made by Julio Plaza in electronic panels and with videotext in the 80’s[11] seemed to be isolated exercises pointing to something new that not happened till the 90’s with the work of Eduardo Kac, André Vallias and Philadelpho Menezes.

Plaza’s work can be considered the landmark of a new poetic tradition that could incorporate electronic media in the composition reinventing new uses for its atributes and reconfiguring its functionalities. In this sense, we could say that Plaza antecipated in his work one of the crucial demands of poetry conceived for on line spaces.

Kac researches on holography as well as in videotext expanded the possibilities of the use of electronic media for poetic creation stressing its continuities with some of the more important contributions of concrete poetry to literary renovation: the mix of the media into the message.

Nevertheless it was only in the work of André Vallias and Philadelpho Menezes that a systematic investigation on what could be an e-poetics begun. If in Menezes’ worked the exploration of new sensibilities and the

DISTANCES

Following Mallarmé anthologic Un coup de dés…, all those artists, among many others_ mixed the media into the message. And this_ the mix of the media into the message_ is probably the strongest link between e-poetry and those other genres.

Nevertheless, it is this point that differentiates them and allows us to talk about e-poetry as a different system of cultural practices and aesthetics, and not just a product of the substitution of supports.

It is well known the story of Un coup de dés… publication and how important was for Mallarmé the way the poem must appear on the printed page[12]. In this sense, is enough to say that if Mallarmé could revolutionize poetry, trusting in the materiality of the page[13], e-poets are teaching us, as well as learning, to deal with the transitory and fluid liquid field of digital media.

What is seen, perceived and experimented is a result of monitor pattern and quality, of connection speed, browser versions and models, plug-ins and boards, among many other computer and networked conditions.

E-poetry in this context expands and redirects not the reading support, but rather the reading interface itself. Interfaces that are more and more disconnected from the limits that attach representations to supports and that reduce language to mediation.[14]

From now on, the interface is the message and poetry is made of a liquid textuality that challenges poets and critics to circumscribe literary neighborhoods and territories, not to define their limits, but to understand the hybridism and poetics of our times.

Notes

1 For the electronic catalog of The Brazilian Visual Poetry, see: http://www.imediata.com/BVP/. Concrete Poetry – A World View (Indiana Press, 1968), by Mary Ellen Solt is available on line at WBUWEB - http://www.ubu.com/papers/solt/index.html

2 See, for instance GLAZIER, Loss Pequeño. Digital Poetics, University of Alabama Press, 2002.

3 “A Certeza da Influência” an interview with Décio Pignatari, Haroldo de Campos e Augusto de Campos. Folha de S. Paulo, December 18th, 1996

4 Idem, Ibidem

5 Id., Ibid. and GREENE, Roland. “From Dante to the Post-Concrete – An Interview with Augusto de Campos”. The Harvard Library Bulletin, Summer 1992, Vol. 3, No. 2, reproduced at http://www.ubu.com/papers/decampos.html

6 Idem, Ibidem.

7 Folha de S. Paulo, December 18th, 1996

8 Phisician, born in the Northeast of Brazil, Edgard Braga is not well known and there are only a few articles about his impressive work, most of them written by other proeminent contemporary poets, like Haroldo de Campos and Régis Bonvicino who was the editor of Desbragada, an anthology of Braga’s work.

9 SANTAELLA, Lucia. “Um poeta em busca do amanhecer da linguage” [“A poet searching for the rise of language”]. Revista Dialética, ano 7, No. 5, Mar. 2001, pp. 24-31.

10 A few examples available in English are some translations of Braga’s poems made by Edwin Morgan in Concrete Poetry (Chapbook 9), fall 1996, pp. 29 –33. An exploration of Braga’s and Gomringer works can be found in and essay by Paul Kloppenborg (“Concrete to Computer: The future of visual poetry”) published in the electronic magazine Periphelion. http://www.webdelsol.com/Perihelion/p-theory.htm

11 One of the videotext works by Julio Plaza made in 1983 is on line. It is an exercise of intersemiotic translation of a poem by Paulo Leminski “Lua na Água” (Moon on Water). http://www.leminski.curitiba.pr.gov.br/arquivos.htm

12 See, for instance, “Page-proofs for page 5 of Un coup de dés.” http://www.uia.ac.be/webger/ger/joyce/ucdd.html

13 MALLARMÉ, Stéphane. “Um Lance de Dados Jamais Abolirá o Acaso.” [Un Coup de Dés Jamais n'Abolira le Hasard. Trans. Haroldo de Campos]. IN: CAMPOS, Augusto de, CAMPOS, Haroldo de and PIGNATARI, Décio. Mallarmé. São Paulo, Perspectiva, 1974.

14 LICHTY, Patrick. “Building a Culture of Ubiquity”. http://www.voyd.com/ubiq/, 2001. DERRIDA, Jacques. Gramatologia. [De la Gramatologie. Trans. Miriam Chnaiderman e Renato Janine Ribeiro] São Paulo, Perspectiva, 1973.

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