A Map of Different Digital Poetries by Jorge Luiz Antonio

 

 

 

      A Map of Different Digital Poetries

      by Jorge Luiz Antonio (PUC SP, Brazil )

      English revision by Maria do Carmo Martins Fontes (PUC SP, Brazil)

 

      INTRODUCTION

      We can now affirm that part of poetry that is in books, magazines and

      newspapers, from many countries, has moved to the floppy disk, cd-rom,

      computer hard disk or to the site URL. In spite of this, many books,

      magazines and newspapers go on publishing verbal, visual and sound

      poetries which are simply circulating also in the new digital-electronic

      media, without, in many cases, assimilating what the new media provide.

      There is no doubt that poetry still go on existing, and that poetry has

      adapted to the new media, though always maintaining the origin, the root,

      in other words, something that reminds verbal, visual, or sound existing

      poetries. It is also true that there is an innovative poetry that

      circulates on digital-electronic media.

      Many denominations for this kind of poetry reflect concepts that

      demonstrate an effort to set boundaries for this kind of poetic

      communication. Because it is a world phenomenon, these terms are sometimes

      translated in each country's language, but most of them are kept in

      English.

      Many scholars seek to delimitate this new poetry and, in a certain way,

      differentiate it from other arts and literature. There are general

      denominations that remain as concepts which cover different forms

      throughout time such as experimental poetry, new visual poetry, new media

      poetry, or digital poetry. In most cases the expression visual poetry

      appears, without distinguishing it from a historical perspective or

      according to the use of different supports (paper, canvas, wood, etc.).

      Our aim here is hence to map the existing digital poetry and, to a certain

      extent, configure it as one of the digital media discourse genres,

      stemming from the genre idea as a combinatory of elements. There is

      certain risk in using the term genre, because it reminds us of Aristotle,

      poetry, prose and drama, and the like. It appears to be a preset

      classification. But in this present study nothing is ready, everything

      changes as we access a different site, as we present or listen to a new

      presentation in a congress, festival, encounters, in an egroup's

      discussion, and so on. It is work in progress, or even work in process.

      Something that happened, that happens, that will happen, that is

      happening, that has happened, that has been happening. The creations are

      coming out on digital media, the reflections about them are generating

      essays, and all of them are forming a theory and practice collection that

      forms a hypertextual, interactive and multi-faceted whole, typical of

      knowledge itself, not only the digital one.

      Mapping the digital poetry as the continuation of oral poetry, which was

      declaimed supported by old musical instruments as the lyre and the flute

      in Classical Antiquity, is to establish an abstract route moving from its

      spoken to its written form. The poetry which was originally accompanied by

      musical instruments (Medieval Troubadourism) was followed by poetry

      without music (Humanism and Renascence), which, when read, rescued the

      orality and musicality of its previous forms, and evoked images through

      the singular syntactic constructions that produced rhyme, metrics,

      comparison, metaphors and metonymies, among other things.

      The constant need for searching new languages in order to express the art

      that comes from the existence of new technology, from the use of

      interacting languages (Machado's concept (1)), the continuous relationship

      between art and science, and the new media utilization as a means of

      poetic expression: these seem to be the first elements we can identify as

      we look for new artistic communication media, among which we find poetic

      communication, that is, digital poetry. Like the character from "Asas"

      (Wings), by Mario de Sá-Carneiro (2), or the bizarre American woman and

      her five senses' party in "A Confissão de Lúcio" (Lúcio's Confessions)

      (3), another type of communication comes up closely to Andrews' electric

      word and his langu(im)age concept (4), a product in/of/from the

      cyberspace. As it is a recent search, there is not only a single digital

      poetry, but many forms of it which express the various endeavors of fusion

      / interaction / dialogue among languages.

      We can paraphrase Lavoisier's law, slightly modified: in the poetry's

      world, everything which is created remains transformed, adapted. Today's

      poetry brings in itself yesterday's essentiality, absorbs what is

      contemporary as a form of expression and turns these resources into a

      powerful ally to stay alive and to expand itself on the new media, keeping

      itself at once entire and adapted. That is the way the history of poetry

      seems to have been for us: the declaimed poetry, with all its mnemonic

      resources of rhyme, rhythms and metrics, survived in people's memory and

      was registered in books. Yet, it was always remembered and revered as the

      sound and word art. Poetry stopped being accompanied by musical

      instruments, as it was the case in medieval troubadour poetry, to become

      printed. It took several forms, became spatial, shaped itself in plastic

      forms like the visual ones, incorporated images, and survived, always, as

      poetry.

      And today, with the arrival of the computer and the revolution it brought

      to our lives, poetry has remained as the art of the word in

      digital-electronic media. Like the books, which changed from printed to

      electronic, the printed poetry also became electronic. And it will remain,

      in a certain way, indivisible, differentiated, precise in its contours,

      even when it is adapted to other emergent media.

      In short, the hypotheses that guide this paper are the following: the

      digital artistic texts differ from other texts (verbal, visual,

      audiovisual etc) in that they use the computer as a mediator between man

      and the sign production with esthetic aims. One of the most fascinating

      aspects of this study is that digital poetry is not limited only by the

      use of the computer as a support, for it also comes in paper, video,

      movie, holography, performance, and so on. The media are large and reach

      many fields of knowledge. We can notice poetry in television programs, in

      video demonstrations, almost all of it made through digital proceedings.

      We can choose the best way to select and combine the medium we would like

      to work with (5).

      In a general sense, the digital artistic texts are seen from two

      viewpoints: the digital arts or the digital poetics, with the predominance

      of infographic images, holding a certain similarity with visual arts, and

      the digital poetry, as the union of poem, moving image and sound in the

      digital-electronic environment, by means of interactivity,

      hypertextuality, hypermedia and interface.

      As this paper aims at mapping several digital poetries from many countries

      in order to classify them as genres of other existing poetries, we define

      digital poetry as the several creative and artistic products which use the

      word, the sound and the image bearing the poetic function. These products

      use the features stored in internal and external hard disks, floppy disks,

      cd-roms, videos, cassette-tapes, and internet sites.

      

      THE DIFFERENT DIGITAL POETRIES

      There is a significant variety of poetries which circulate in the

      digital-electronic media (internal or external hard disks, floppy disks,

      cd-roms, videos, microcomputers, internet). Without having the aim to

      exhaust the subject, neither to trace a historic route, there follows a

      mapping of the several kinds of digital poetry.

      1 - There is verbal poetry, which circulated in books, magazines and

      newspapers, and is now using the cyberspace. It is a transposition of

      media, not only an updating, a fad or an optimization of another space: it

      means a poet's attitude, and also a reader's one, in relation to the

      modifications this exchange imposes. It is not only the changing of the

      media as a way to reach more readers, but also the shaping of the graphic

      spatial disposition of this poetry by computational rules. It is the

      poetry which was digitalized in a microcomputer, with the use of text

      and/or image editor, which now is part of a "digital" literature, that is,

      it occupies the virtual medium. If it can be seen only as a historical

      aspect - the first poems collected in electronic anthologies -, it is

      necessary to emphasize that the contact with this kind of poetry is the

      relationship between man and machine, which results in another form of

      reading, even though this poetry doesn't present innovative elements, even

      though it is nothing but a printed poetry that now occupies the

      cyberspace, as a kind of reproduction of the print environment.

      2 - There is sound poetry, which was transmitted orally as art of spoken

      word, which has also become digital, mainly by the use of

      electric-electronic-digital resources, like the sound laboratories. This

      poetry, which had a great development during the historic vanguards

      (Futurism, Dadaism, Cubism, etc.), is created by means of sounds which are

      separated, in a certain way, from the meaning (the phonemes don't form a

      word) and it represents a kind of digital poetry, usually named sound

      poetry. In some cases, it is separated from sound and digital, because the

      sound poetry is to be heard only, as Philadelpho Menezes's sound poetry

      (Menezes 1996, and Menezes et al 1998). In other situations, especially in

      several sites (Jim Andrews, Komninos Zervos, etc.), sound poetry is a part

      of other languages, a kind of interacting languages (verbal, visual,

      sound, electronic, digital poetries).

      3 - All types of visual poetry are spontaneously and naturally adapted in

      the computational medium. It is an adaptation of supports, like Arnaldo

      Antunes' (6), Elson Fróe's (7), Melo e Castro's (8) sites, among others.

      Considering its graphic and spatial characteristics, the same occurs with

      the concrete poem, as Augusto de Campos says: "Since I, in the 90's, could

      put a hand on a personal microcomputer, I noticed that the poetic

      practices in which I am involved, emphasizing the materiality of words and

      their interrelationship with the non-verbal signs, have a lot to do with

      computer programs. The first animations came out from graphic and sound

      virtuality of the pre-existing poems" (Campos 1999).

      We can affirm that the Brazilian concrete poetry, the Portuguese

      experimental poetry, as well as the later visual poetry, which are going

      to be "updated" on the new medium, can be called as the precursors of

      digital poetry.

      There is no doubt that visual poetry has its own characteristics which

      differ a lot from digital poetry in various aspects such as support

      material, paper, the handicraft that drawing uses, colors and materials

      from the plastic arts, the use of the three dimensions limit, certain own

      individuality of the handicraft, and so on. For Capparelli et al the

      difference is: "Visual poem and cyberpoem have an indetermination of

      content present in the object and/or attributed by the reader. In the

      visual poem both are imbricated, despite the higher or lower reader's

      ability to notice the links; however, they are finite by the very nature

      of the object. Differently from the visual poem, the cyberpoem demands a

      skillful and attentive reader, someone who has technical abilities.

      Through the interactivity the reader becomes the work's co-author. The

      old-fashioned idea of authorship is challenged. In the visual poem, the

      authorship can be shared." (Capparelli et all 2000).

      4 - The concept of writing machine, borrowed from linguistics and

      developed by the Bense's and Moles' informational esthetics, is going to

      incorporate the use of machines as the possibility of "creating artificial

      texts with meaning" (Moles 1990: 149): "The writing of a text using a

      machine, be it real, a great computer, be it "imaginary", that is,

      constituted of a series of operations to be made or to be ordered by

      operators without intelligence - is finally the synonym of intellectual

      creation" (idem: ibidem).

      It is experimental literature: "It comes from a very general definition of

      language - it is a system of signs and symbols brought together according

      to certain rules - and proposes a new idea of literary message,

      distinguishing in the analysis the content and the continent, the semantic

      aspect and the esthetic one." (idem: 150)

      This is the concept of poster attributes constellation, proposed by Moles:

      "It is a graphic crystallization of laws of association that the spirit

      follows in joining a central sign (inducting word) with a series of other

      signs (inducted word)" (idem: 151). In our opinion, the hypertext

      principle seems to lie here: the spatial relation of the word, as in the

      diagram-poem Diagram 4.1 by Jim Rosenberg, the virtual poem VP12 by

      Ladislao Pablo Györi or the hypermedia poetry Antologia Laboríntica by

      André Vallias.

      5 - The text below shows one of the first uses of computational technology

      as a form of artistic and literary expression, the permutational poetry,

      in which a storage of word is treated by the resources of a machine, and

      then produces similar texts, based on a computer program. Moles and

      Barbosa studied exhaustively the subject and published several theoretical

      studies and anthologies. This is an example taken from the Italian Nanni

      Balestrini in early 60's: MENTRE LA MOLTITUDE DELE COSE ACCADE I CAPELLI

      TRA LE LABBRA ESSE TORNANO TUTTE E ALLA LLORO RADICE L ACCECANTE GLOBO DI

      FUOCO GIACQUERO IMMOBILI SENZA PARLARE TRENTA VOLTE PIU LUMUNINOSO DEL

      SOLE FINCHE NON MOSSE LE DITA LENTAMENTE SI ESPANDE RAPIDAMENTE CERCANDO

      DI AFFERRARE LE SOMMITA DELLA NUVOLA MENTRE LA MOLTITUDINE DELLE COSE

      ACCADE L ACCECANTE GLOBO DI FUOCO ESSE TORNANO TUTTE ALLA LORO RADICE SI

      ESPANDE RAPIDAMENTE FINCHE NON MOSSE LE DITA LENTAMENTE E QUANDO RAGGIUNGE

      LA STRATOSFERA GIACQUERO IMMOBILI SENZA PARLARE TRENTA VOLTE PIU LUMINOSO

      DEL SOLE CERCANDO DI AFERRARE ASSUME LA BEN NOTA FORMA DI FUNGO (9)

      6 - Other endeavors to analyze and map different digital poetries have

      been made by scholars like Funkhouser, Barbosa, Moles, Bense, Machado,

      Tolva, Parente, Vallias, Capparelli, Andrews, etc. Poets like Nanni

      Balestrini, André Vallias, Melo e Castro, Augusto de Campos, Cláudio

      Daniel, Ladislao Pablo Györi, Jim Andrews, Ted Warnell, etc., who have

      been devoted to the relationship between art and technology, have

      established denominations and differentiations for their poetic

      experiences with the computer. Moreover, we have had individual (certain

      poet-operators) and collective (particular ways of producing digital

      poetry) constitutive elements.

      Printed and electronic magazines and newspapers (in floppy disk, cd-roms,

      cassette tapes, video cassettes, internet) have presented many essays

      about the subject.

      Many issues of Dimensão: Revista Internacional de Poesia (10) present

      opinions of theorists and digital poets. In the 1995 issue, Cláudio Daniel

      (Brazil) discussed the relationship between poetry and computer as a form

      of differentiated poetic expression, and Ladislao Pablo Györi (Argentina)

      introduced some criteria for virtual poetry which uses the third dimension

      and is made in virtual space. In the 1998 issue, E. M. de Melo e Castro

      (Portugal and Brazil) presented a kind of theoretical-practical manifesto

      which developed the concept of 3D transpoetic, with a series of 13

      infopoems, synthesized in 1997 and 1998 in a PC, in Windows 95

      environment, using the softwares Adobe Photoshop 4.0, Fractint V18 and

      Corel Motion 3D 6. In the 1999 issue, Melo e Castro and his students

      presented many comments about this kind of digital poetry. The newspaper

      Folha de S. Paulo, in its section called "Folha Informática", introduced

      many and different experiences related to digitality under the generic

      denomination of digital poetry, without establishing any difference

      regarding verbal, visual, sound, electronic or digital poetries. Some

      authors, theoreticians, and also study centers, are cited: Eduardo Kac

      (11), Ted Warnell (12), Electronic Poetry Center in Buffalo (13), USA,

      Janam Platt, Loss Pequeño Glazier (14), Mark Napier, Mark America, among

      others. Besides introducing some sites of digital poetry, the newspaper

      presents some studies and sites about digital literary theory, by Allien

      Flower, Augusto de Campos, Cyber Poetry Gallery, Komninos Zervos, George

      Landow, Hypermedia Research Center, Jim Rosenberg, Parallel Notion,

      Christopher Funkhouser, John Cayley, etc. The articles printed on that

      newspaper try to delimitate the concept of digital poetry, including an

      interview with Augusto de Campos and Mark Amerika. As a first study,

      trying to be general and to reach all fields of knowledge, though not

      deeply, the material should be better developed in a further edition.

      7 - Funkhouser refers to a "poetry created by writers (and

      programmers/producers) who rely on the computer to bring their visions to

      the world through the effusive light and linkage of the screen"

      (Funkhouser 1996:1/7). For him, "all poetry which uses a computer screen

      as hypertextual interface falls into at least one of the following five

      categories" (idem: ibidem):

      Hypermedia - includes graphics, moving visual images, and soundfiles

      linked with (or instead of) printed text; a variety of intertextual

      associations and graphical combinations are possible.

 

      Hypercard: Alphabetic and visual texts are arranged in a series of digital

      filecards and linked to each other; some files include sound; the

      supercard enables the use of video.

 

      Hypertext: Historically written text only, with links to other writing;

      some titles include static visual images; it has been gradually evolving.

 

      Network hypermedia - Predominantly exists on the World Wide Web (WWW);

      currently without synchronous sound and video capabilities.

 

      Text-generating software - Programs which automatically arrange words and

      images.

 

      8 - Focusing different cyberpoetries based in technologies, Capparelli,

      Gruszynski and Kmohan (2000) have come to the following classification:

      galleries and collections net - texts blocks or galleries, more

      specifically visual poems; poems factory - computer programs which

      generate text; sound poetry - some sound poetry sites which recapture

      experiences from Marinetti's Futurism and Hugo Ball's Dadaism; declaimed

      poetry - sites in which, for example, an actor or the poet him/herself

      reads out his/her poems; new visual poetry - experiences which go beyond

      the traditional visuality, producing 3D visual poems; kinetic poetry -

      poetic genre in which animations are created in poetry by means of various

      techniques;

      9 - Among some study centers spread around the world, the Estúdio de

      Poesia Experimental (Studio of Experimental Poetry) (15), site from the

      Pontifical Catholic University of São Paulo, Brazil, which was coordinated

      by professor Philadelpho Menezes (1960-2000), presents many verbal, visual

      and sound poems that configure an on-line poetry anthology, with poems by

      Katalin Ladik (Yugoslavia), Eugen Gomriger (Switzerland), Ana Hatherly

      (Portugal), among others. This site makes links with other poets from many

      countries, turning the EPE into an online digital poetry world's

anthology.

      10 - Although classified as digital poetics by Plaza and Tavares, we can

      refer to Ricardo Araújo's experiences with Augusto de Campos, Haroldo de

      Campos, Décio Pignatari, Arnaldo Antunes and Júlio Plaza's poems, which

      are transformed into videopoetry and analyzed in the book Poesia Visual e

      Vídeo Poesia (1999).

      11 - At the Communication and Semiotics Program at the Pontifical

      University of São Paulo, Brazil, a site called Interlab - Intersemiotics

      Studies on Hypermedia and Labyrinth (16) presents some digital arts by

      Silvia Laurentiz, Daniela Kutschat, Rejane Cantoni, and Lucia Leão. For

      our study, the important contribution is Sílvia Laurentiz's (17)

      recreation of the poem "O Eco e o Icon" (1994), by E. M. de Melo e Castro,

      in 3D visual and sound interactive environment, produced in VRML2, in

1997.

      12 - There is a "group of experiences which represents the convergence

      between verbal language, image (static or dynamic), and audio in poetry

      (Capparelli 2000). It is the hypertext poetry which presents "like a

      number matrix in files and columns in the memory of a computer. Numbers

      and pixels can be changed and manipulated, individually or in groups, and

      the set can be translated into images on a TV monitor, or even in a

      printed form. Any change in the numbers matrix implies a change in image."

      (Plaza and Tavares 1998: 73).

      13 - The interpoetry, that is, the hypermedia interactive poetry, created

      by Philaldelpho Menezes and Wilton Azevedo, is another contribution to the

      digital poetry: "Interpoetry has two meanings: interaction and

      inter-signal poetry. The name, inter-signal poetry, summarizes the idea of

      poetry that uses verbal and non-verbal signs. In the second semester of

      1997 we started to produce poems in which sounds, images and words are

      mixed, a complex inter-signal process, in a technological environment that

      favors the presence of verbal, visual and sound signs, together with

      hypermedia programs." (Menezes in Domingues 1999/2000: 98).

      14 - Leading the creative use of the electronic media to the specific

      objectives, creating a relationship between word and image by means of an

      image editor: this is one of the many Melo e Castro and his Brazilian and

      Portuguese students' experiences. In his route through verbal, visual,

      concrete and digital poetry, Melo e Castro uses many denominations for the

      digital poetry he creates. Infopoetry has the first meaning of

      permutational poetry as he presented in Álea e Vazio (18), poetry book of

      1971, especially with the poem "Tudo pode ser dito num poema (19)" (Castro

      1990: 225-226). Videopoetry will be a concept, and in this field he is a

      pioneer in Portugal, which presents the first relationship between poetry

      and video, in Roda Lume, 1968-1969, Signagens, 1985-1989, and Sonhos de

      Geometria, 1993. Besides being a poet, Melo e Castro is also dedicated to

      essay writing. Among his several critical and theoretical works, he is the

      author of Poética dos Meios e Arte High Tech (1988) (20), in which he

      discusses the media poetics (the intersemiotic net between oral and

      visual, the photographic vision, movie, and mail art) and high tech art

      (infoart, infopoetry, videopoetry, holopoetry, fractal esthetics, zero

      gravity poetics, dematerialization, teleart, robotics, etc.). The same

      infopoetry becomes another concept, that is, the poetry treatment related

      to an image, which was called in his first experiences "Infopoesia /

      Videopoesia: 1985-1993", and they are brought together in Visão Visual

      (1994). In Finitos mais Finitos (1996), the poet registers two experiences

      of 1995: the first, named infopoetry, resulted from a working paper in

      Yale Simphosophia on Experimental, Visual and Concretic Poetry in 1960, in

      Yale University, USA. This is already an experimentation that associates

      word and image in a microcomputer, by means of Adobe Photoshop. The

      second, called Cibervisuais (Cybervisuals), was part of the exhibition

      "Poesia Visiva e Dintorni" in Spoleto Museum, in Perugia, Italy, also in

      1995. During 1997, Melo e Castro was an invited professor at Communication

      and Semiotics Program at PUC SP and he conducted two courses: one on

      Infopoetry and Sound Poetry, and another on Infopoetry in 3D. From these

      courses, he created two other concepts: the 3D transpoetics, which

      represents his individual and his students' poetic experiences with Adobe

      Photoshop 4.0, Fractint V.18 and Corel Motion 3D 6; and pixel poetics,

      which resulted in Algorritmos (1998).

      15 - Holopoetry and the media poetry by Eduardo Kac, using interactive

      work, transgenic art, telepresence art, and so on, are one of the most

      important digital poetics. Holopoetry is a "new verbal/visual language

      that exploits the formal semantic and perceptual fluctuations of

      word/image in the holographic space-time", whereas the telepresence art is

      "a new artistic creation area based upon the dislocation of cognitive and

      sensitive processes from the participant to a telerobot's body, which is

      placed in another space geographically remote.

      16 - André Vallias is a graphic designer who works with multimedia, visual

      poetry and electronic art. He had exhibitions in Germany, Vienna and

      Tokyo. His digital poetry includes word and images in an interactive

      action: each letter or fragment of image allows access to different parts

      of his "Antilogia laboríntica [poema em expansão]". There is a fusion of

      the present poetry, and many times it is written, with or without cuts,

      and the set combines high-quality webdesign with an excellent visual

      effect.

      17 - "Computers poem", or "electronic poetry", by Gilberto Prado (from

      Unicamp - State University of Campinas, Brazil) and Alckmar Luiz dos

      Santos (from Federal University of Santa Catarina), is a kind of digital

      poetry which presents a relationship that links Brazilian verbal poetry,

      image and sound: a multimedia artist and a poet, both university

      professors, join their theoretical, practical and creative knowledge in a

      product that combines plastic arts and literature.

      Without trying to exhaust the subject, which is in process and progress

      day by day, these are some of the possible different digital poetries we

      have searched up to present moment, which does not allow us to present a

      general panorama, like Funkhouser or Capparelli, but enables us to notice

      a delimitation: the denomination digital poetry refers to experiences that

      involve a fusion of poetry with digital image in their various forms.

 

      VARIOUS NAMES FOR DIGITAL POETRY

      What terminology can be given to the poetry that yields, goes beyond,

      superposes, interposes, passes by the word and "goes" to the computer? If

      the mapping of the constituents of digital poetry as a genre has been a

      constant problem, the denomination of these experiences has been another

      and difficult problem also. Our searches lead us to a various names that

      are sometimes based on experience, and sometimes based on the different

      ways of making digital poetry. The list below is the first result of our

      study: the title of the poetry, its brief description, and the authors who

      named it. We adopted the alphabetical order.

      Cine(E)Poetry - creative work of film and poetic video makers. The group

      involved in this experience called LTV (Literary Television), is from the

      USA, and was previously known as Film Workshop. They collected a very big

      file to be distributed to television, cable broadcaster, educational

      institutions, and internet webcasters. The Cine(E)Poetry makes experiments

      with visual image, using a video arrangement, film, animation, sound and

      computational techniques, and all these non-verbal languages share a

      special focus with spoken and written poetry as something essential as a

      whole.

      Click Poetry - David Knoebel's site (http://www.clickpoetry.com) (1996)

      and his concept of uniting voice, words and images by means of clicking a

      mouse.

      Computer poem - Théo Lutz (1959, Germany), Nanni Balestrini (1970, Italy).

 

      Cybervisual - named by E. M. de Melo e Castro for a series of infopoems

      which were presented in a collective exhibition in Italy.

      Diagram-poem - non-linear experiences by Jim Rosenberg since 1966, with a

      series of multi-linear poems called "Word Nets", that, from 1968 on,

      evolved to the "Diagram Poems". Digital Clip-poem - Augusto de Campos in

      his site (1997).

      Digital poetry - newspaper Folha de S. Paulo (1999); term used since 1990,

      especially derived from digital poetics.

      Electric word - although using word, instead of poetry, Jim Andrews

      presents some considerations about the use of the poetic word in a

      digital-electronic context. (Andrews 1997-1999).

      Electronic poetry - generic name given to the poetic experiences on the

      computer (Funkhouser 1996).

      Experimental poetry - name adopted by many countries, poets and poetic

      movements: the Portuguese Experimental Poetry (decades of 60's and 70's),

      a general Hispanic-Brazilian-American movement, according to Clement

      Padin, from 1950 to 2000. In the International Poetry Festival of

      Medellin, in Colombia, in December 2000, it also designated: visual

      poetry, gesture poetry, poetic performances, poetic actions and

      interventions, videopoetry, virtual, digital or multimedia poetry,

      holopoetry, and sound poetry.

      Galleries and net anthologies - texts blocks or galleries, more

      specifically visual poems (Capparelli et al 2000);

      Holopoetry - denomination given by Eduardo Kac in 1983.

      Hypermedia poetry- "includes graphics, moving visual images, and

      soundfiles linked with (or instead of) printed text; a variety of

      intertextual associations and graphical combinations are possible"

      (Funkhouser 1996: 1/7)

      Hypercard: Alphabetic and visual texts are arranged on a series of digital

      filecards and linked to each other; some files include sound; the

      supercard enables the use of video (Funkhouser 1996: 1/7)

      Hypertext: Historically, written text only, with links to other writing;

      some titles include static visual images; gradually evolving (Funkhouser

      1996: 1/7).

      Hipertextual poetry - George Landow (1995), use of non-linear model,

      applying hypertext. Infopoetry - Melo e Castro, with two different

      meanings, one in Álea e Vazio (1971) and another, in the paper The Cryptic

      Eye at Yale University in 1995.

      Internet poetry - poetry in WWW. Interpoetry or hypermedia interactive

      poetry - Philadelpho Menezes and Wilton Azevedo (1997/1998).

 

      Intersign poetry - Menezes (1999) in the Studio of Experimental Poetry at

      the Communication and Semiotics Program at PUC SP.

 

      Kinetic poetry - poetic genre in which animations are created in poetry by

      means of various techniques (Capparelli et al 2000).

 

      Looppoetry - a cd-rom and concept created by Wilton Azevedo (2001) which

      expresses the sameness as a poetical expression in multimedia environment.

 

 

      Net poetry - poetry in the WWW.

 

      Network hypermedia - Predominantly exists on the World Wide Web (WWW);

      currently without synchronous sound and video capabilities (Funkhouser

      1996:1/7).

 

      New media poetry - term used by Eduardo Kac in an anthology of essays

      under the same title (1996) written by Jim Rosenberg, Philippe Bootz, E.

      M. de Melo e Castro, André Vallias, Ladislao Pablo Györi, Eduardo Kac,

      John Cayley and Eric Vos.

 

      New visual poetry - experiences which go beyond the traditional visuality,

      producing 3D visual poems (Capparelli et al 2000)

 

      Palm poetry - an experience made by Fatima Lasay (2001)

      (http://digitalmedia.upd.edu.ph) and his students of Digital Media for DMF

      2001 at the University of Philippines and for II Interpoetry Exhibition at

      the Universidade Presbiteriana Mackenzie, in Brazil.

 

      Permutacional poem - Nanni Balestrini (1970, Italy), Silvestre Pestana

      (1981, Portugal) and others.

 

      Pixel poetry or pixel poetics - Melo e Castro (1998).

 

      Poem on computer - Gilberto Prado and Alckmar Luiz dos Santos (1995).

 

      Poems factory - computer programs which generate text (Capparelli et al

      2000); Poetechnic or digital poetics - Plaza and Tavares (1998: 119) do

      not separate poetry from poetics, for they only denominate digital poetics

      the several ways of making infographic image. The word, for the authors,

      is the infographic image inserted in a larger context, although it has

      meaning with the image, besides it, and/or independent of it. Plaza and

      Tavares use Luigi Pareyson's concept of poetics (the various forms of

      poetics have operative and historical characteristics) and Umberto Eco's

      (poetics is an operational program initially proposed, or even better, it

      corresponds to the project of formation or attribution of a given work).

 

      Skin poetry - an experience made by Aloice Cristina C. Secco, Cecilia N.

      I. Saito, Heloisa Helena da F. Carneiro Leão e Vera Sylvia Bighetti in a

      cd-rom (2001) for the II Interpoetry Exhibition.

 

      Sound poetry - some sound poetry sites which recapture experiences from

      Marinetti's Futurism and Hugo Ball's Dadaism (Capparelli et al 2000);

      Text-generating software - Programs which automatically arrange words and

      images (Funkhouser 1996:1/7). 3D transpoetic - Melo e Castro (1998).

 

      Videopoetry- although it refers to poetry made with video techniques (Melo

      e Castro, Arnaldo Antunes and Julio Plaza, for example), the expression

      can mean the video treatment to poems, as Ricardo Araújo did with some

      Brazilian poets.

 

      Videotext - language media and distributor of information by means of a

      telephone as a means of broadcasting. Despite the use of the suffix text,

      it was used for poetic production (Plaza 1986).

 

      Virtual poetry or vpoem - Ladislao Pablo Györi (1995).

 

      Web poetry - poetry in WWW since 1990.

      As stated before, this list has not had the intention of covering the

      subject as a whole, but only intended to show many names which have been

      appearing as the digital poetry is being developed.

 

      A KIND OF CONCLUSION

      By decomposing the whole in parts, as we have done, does it allow us to

      delimitate a "form" of digital poetry? Is it a valid process?

      The sample we have collected throughout this essay has shown us different

      routes which configure the digital poetry as one of the genres of the

      present poetries. Above all, it is possible to notice that the use of the

      poetic word as an unchaining element of the reading process that links

      word, image and sound in a digital-electronic context.

      >> NOTES and BIBLIOGRAPHY

      

      Also by Jorge Luiz Antonio

      Review: O Branco e o Negro >>

      Back to DMF2001 Homepage

      Updated January 18, 2002

      Copyright 2001 Digital Media Festival.

      All rights reserved to individual artists.

      Fatima Lasay, Faculty-in-charge FA100/FA101/VC36

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