Rice/Tree/Burial with Time Capsule: The work of Agnes Denes

The following is copied from the portfolio site of Agnes Denes. Photos of the work can also be viewed at that location.

Rice/Tree/Burial was first realized in 1968 in Sullivan County, New York, in a private ritual. It was a symbolic "event" and announced my commitment to environmental issues and human concerns. It was also the first exercise in Eco-Logic—an act in eco-philosophy. I coined the words to be used this way emphasizing the importance of eco-logical thinking. This work is considered the first ecological realization in public art.

I planted rice to represent life (initiation and growth), chained trees to indicate interference with life and natural processes (evolutionary mutation, variation, decay, death), and buried my Haiku poetry to symbolize the idea or concept (the abstract, the absolute, human intellectual powers, and creation itself). These three acts constituted the first transitional triangulation* (thesis, antithesis, synthesis) and formed the Event. According to evolutionary theories, Event is the only reality, while the reality we perceive is forever changing and transforming in an expanding evolutionary universe in which time, space, mass, and energy are all interconnected and interdependent.

Rice represented a universal substance referring to sustenance and the life-giving element, while the seed itself denoted the nucleus, first principle or cause—the beginning. The act of sowing implied the source of growth, the introduction of a thing into another environment in order to initiate a process, the setting of something into motion (fertilization, conceiving, induction).

The chaining of trees signified linkage, connective units and associations, flexibility and restraint. It implied bondage, defeat, interference with growth—decay. The act of chaining brought attention to the mysterious life-force of an organism and its partial triumph over boundaries and restraints—its uneven, limited transcendence. Chaining trees also expressed choice, the selection and defining necessary in the creative process.

The texture of the forest, having been interrupted by the reordering of its elements, yielded unique structures of isolated or combined sculptural forms. The chains became additional limbs and blended into their surroundings to become visible only in certain lights, angles, and perspectives, conveying the conflicting and interdependent aspects of art and existence, illusion and reality, imagination and fact. The chained trees stood as monuments to human thought versus nature.

The burial of my haiku formed the essence of thinking processes (consciousness, deductive reasoning, and the logic of emotions). It represented the concept as essence of invention, which connects and defines life and death and acts as modifier and rationale for both.

I kept no copies of my poetry, thereby relinquishing, "giving up to the soil," something personal and precious—an act that also symbolized the self-denial and discipline required by this new analytical art form.

The act of burial, or placing into the ground and receiving from it, a cause-and-effect process, marks our intimate relationship with the earth. On the one hand, it indicates passing, returning to the soil, disintegration, and transformation; on the other, generation and life-giving, placing in the ground for the purpose of planting. It is also a metaphor for human intelligence and transcendence through the communication of ideas - in this case, to future descendants.

All three imply change from one form to another, cyclic phenomena, transformation—as from chaos to order and back. Consequently, all three idea representatives or metaphors—the rice, the tree, the burial—become analogous, interactive and interdependent, creating the tension of opposing forces acting on each other and the momentum necessary to pass from one state to another and into further propositions. Their interaction creates a counterbalance as they pass into each other's realm or meaning to become successively interchangeable through their inherent polarity.

The ritual marked the beginning of my involvement with the creation of a "visual philosophy," a complex process which explores essences as forms of communication. It finds methods to put analytical propositions into visual form, defines elusive processes and creates analogies among divergent fields and thought processes. It challenges the status quo and tests its own validity.

In the summer of 1977, the ritual was re-enacted and realized on a full scale at Artpark (Lewiston, New York), completing the first cycle in the evolutionary process of my work and marking an important phase in its development. This periodical summation is a natural evolutionary phenomenon. Organisms probe their environment to find best possible ways to survive by developing memory and the ability to compare. In our limited existence this long view of reaching back and re-examining provides answers as to where we have been and where we are going.

I planted a half-acre rice field 150 feet above the Niagara gorge. The site marked the birthplace of Niagara Falls between Canada and the U.S., twelve thousand years ago. The rice grew up mutant, an unforeseen consequence of Artpark having been a dump-site near Love Canal.

I chained the trees in a sacred forest that was once an Indian burial ground, long since looted and desecrated, working under the watchful eyes of the Indians who seemed to hover over us in the trees and cover our bodies in the form of eerie spiders.

I then climbed out to the edge of Niagara Falls and filmed it for seven days, adding the forces of nature, as a fourth element, to this cycle of dialectics. With this act I also affirmed that my art functioned on the edge of the unknown in a delicate balance of the universals and the self, of the moment and of eternity—and was not afraid to assume the risks such art must take.

The shaky ledge from which I filmed had been dynamited to control the retreat of the falls. Soon after my filming, it fell into the white foam below.

The time capsule was buried at Artpark at 47° 10' longitude and 79° 2' 32" latitude. It contained no objects other than the microfilmed responses to a questionnaire that had traveled around the world, and a long letter I wrote addressed "Dear Homo Futurus."

The questionnaire was composed of existential questions concerning human values, the quality of life, and the future of humanity. The responses were primarily from university students in various countries where I spoke or had exhibitions of my work. Within the context of the time capsule the questionnaire functioned as an open system of communication, allowing our descendants to evaluate us not so much by the objects we created—as is customary in time capsules—but by the questions we asked and how we responded to them.

The microfilm was desiccated and placed in a steel capsule inside a heavy lead box in nine feet of concrete. A plaque marks the spot: at the edge of the Indian forest, surrounded by blackberry bushes. The time capsule is to be opened in 2979, in the 30th century, a thousand years from the time of the burial.

There are, still within the framework of this project, several time capsules planned on earth and in space, aimed at various time frames in the future.

manifesto, paul de vree

manifesto 1967

ALL PREDICATION IS AN ASSAULT UPON THE FREEDOM OF MAN. POETRY, AS I CONCEIVE OF IT, IS NO LONGER THE HANDMAIDEN OF PRINCES, PRELATES, POLITICIANS, PARTIES, OR EVEN THE PEOPLE. IT IS AT LAST ITSELF: A PHONETIC PHENOMENON IN ITSELF VOCAL OF PSYCHOPHYSICAL ORIGIN AND OBJECTIVELY STRUCTURED WITH THE HELP OF WORDS, SOUNDS AND MECHANICAL AND GRAPHIC MEANS (RECORDINGS AND SCRIPTS)

THE PURELY VISUAL VERBAL DOES NOT EXIST. IT ROUSES ALWAYS THE SOUND OR NOISE FROM WHENCE IT SPRINGS AND FOR WHICH IT IS THE SIGN. THE POEM IS EITHER AN AUDIBLE EMISSION OF RESPIRATION (AUDITION) OR A SILENT ONE (READING), CREATIVELY ADULATED, PROVOKED BY THE NEED TO SAY SOMETHING, IT REFERS TO NOTHING OTHER THAN THE SENSIBILITY OF BEING (PRESENT AND PLANETARY) THIS IS WHAT I UNDERSTAND AS THE OBJECTIVE INTENTION OF VOCAL SONORITIES: A COMMUNICATION IN CONCERT OF SPONTANEOUSLY CREATIVE VIBRATIONS.

PHONETIC POETRY CANNOT EXIST WITHOUT A REINVENTION OF THE RECITATION, THAT IS TO SAY THE SONORIZATION OR THE MANIPULATION OF SOUND. ACTUALLY ALL DEPENDS UPON THE NEW POSSIBILITIES OF MECHANICAL EXPRESSION FOR REALIZATION OF THE TRANSMISSION OF THE TOTAL SENSIBILITY OF THE POEM, ITSELF AT BOTTOM PART OF THE TOTAL KINETIC SPECTACLE WHICH HENRI CHOPIN PROVIDES THROUGH THE INEVITABLE USE OF THE MACHINE WHICH BREAKS THE VOICE UP INTO WAVES.

THE SOUND WORK IS THE RESULT OF TEAMWORK UNDER THE DIRECTION OF THE POET, AND THE IDEAL REPRODUCTION IS THAT WHICH IS CUT ON HIGH-FIDELITY RECORDS. THERE AGAIN THE MACHINE IS INDISPENSABLE. IT GOES \WITHOUT SAYING THAT THE RECITOR (IF IT IS NOT THE POET) AND THE ENGINEER OF SOUNDS (\WHERE MY RECORDINGS ARE CONCERNED) HAVE CONTRIBUTED PERSONALLY TO THE ORIGINALITY OF THE REALIZATION. THE DAWN OF THE ERA OF ELECTRONIC POETRY IS NO LONGER A FIGMENT OF THE IMAGINATION.

above copied from: http://www.391.org/manifestos/1967pauldevree_manifesto.htm

Excerpt from Introduction to the Discourse on the Paucity of Reality (1924), André Breton

Poetry evidences in our days such peculiar requirements. See what importance it attaches to the possible, and its love of the improbable. What is, or what might be—how insufficient that appears to be. Nature, it denies your rule. Objects, what does it care about your properties? . . .
Now consider words . . . Words are likely to group themselves according to individual affinities, which generally have the effect of making them re-create the world each instant upon its old model. Everything goes on, then, as though a concrete reality existed outside the individual; I might say, as if such reality were immutable. In the establishment of pure fact, pure and simple, if that is what we are after, we must have absolute certainty in order to advance something new, something the nature of which would shock common sense . . .
But, as I have already said, words, by virtue of the characteristics we find in them, deserve to have another decisive function. Nothing serves to modify them, since they respond in their own way with such promptness to our appeal. It is enough that our criticism should bear on the laws governing their assemblage. Does not the mediocrity of our universe depend essentially on our power of enunciation? In its most sterile seasons, poetry has often furnished proof of this; what debauches of starry skies, precious stones, dead leaves. Thank God a slow but sure reaction against this has finally developed in men's minds. Things said over and over again today meet a solid barrier. They have riveted us to this vulgar universe. It is from them we have acquired this taste for money, these constraining fears, this feeling for the native land, this horror of our destiny. I believe it is not too late to recoil from this deception, inherent in the words we have thus far used so badly. What is to prevent me from throwing disorder into this order of words, to attack murderously this obvious aspect of things? Language can and should be torn from this servitude. No more descriptions from nature, no more sociological studies. Silence, so that I may pass where no one has ever passed. Silence! After you, my beautiful language!
The object of language, they say, is to be understood. But understood how? Understood no doubt by me, when I listen like a child asking for the continuation of a fairy tale. Let them beware! I know the meaning of all my words and follow naturally a syntax (syntax which is not, as certain fools believe, a discipline). This being the case, I cannot see why there should be an outcry when they hear me declare that the most satisfactory image of the earth I can offer at this moment is that of the cardboard hoop. If such an ineptitude has never been advanced before me, then certainly it is not an ineptitude. Furthermore, I cannot be taken to account for a statement of this kind without my demanding the context. A rather dishonest person one day, in a note contained in an anthology, made a list of some of the images presented to us in the work of one of our greatest living poets. It read:
'The next day the caterpillar dressed for the ball' . . . meaning 'butterfly'.
'Breast of crystal . . . meaning carafe'.
Etc,
No, indeed, sir. It means nothing of the kind. Put your butterfly back in your carafe. You may be sure Saint-Pol-Roux said exactly what he meant.
Do not forget if for no other reason the belief in a certain practical necessity prevents us from ascribing to poetic testimony an equal value to that given, for instance, to the testimony of an explorer . . . To satisfy this desire for perpetual verification, I recently proposed to fabricate, in so far as possible, certain objects which are approached only in dreams and which seem no more useful than enjoyable. Thus recently, while I was asleep, I came across a rather curious book in an open-air market near Saint-Malo. The back of the book was formed by a wooden gnome whose white beard, clipped in the Assyrian manner, reached to his feet. The statue was of ordinary thickness, but did not prevent me from turning the pages, which were of heavy black cloth. I was anxious to buy it and, upon waking, was sorry not to find it near me. It is comparatively easy to recall it. I would like to put into circulation certain objects of this kind, which appear eminently problematical and intriguing. I would accompany each of my books with a copy, in order to make a present to certain persons. Perhaps in that way I should help to demolish those concrete trophies which are so odious, to throw further discredit on those creatures and things of 'reason'.
Who knows? There might be idle machines of a very scientific construction: Plans for immense cities might be minutely outlined which, although we never could carry them out, at least might classify the present and future capitals. Absurd automatons, perfected to the last degree, which would function like nothing else on earth, might give us an accurate idea of action.
Must poetic creations assume that tangible character of extending, strangely, the limits of so-called reality? May the hallucinatory power of certain images and the true gift of evocation which certain people possess, independently of the faculty of memory, no longer be misunderstood? The God within us does not, indeed, rest on the seventh day. We still have the first pages of Genesis to read. It perhaps remains for us only to hurl on the ruins of the ancient world the foundations of our new terrestrial paradise. Nothing yet is lost, for we know by certain signs that the great illumination follows its course. The perils into which reason leads us, in the most general and debatable sense of the word, in subjecting the works of the spirit to its irrevocable dogmas, in depriving us of the mode of expression which harms us the least—this peril, doubtless, is far from being dispelled. The deplorable inspectors who pursue us even after we leave school make their rounds of our homes and our lives. They make sure that we always call a cat a cat and, since after all we accept this to a great extent, they refrain from sending us to the galleys or the poorhouse or the penitentiary. Nevertheless, let us get rid of these officials as soon as possible . . .

above copied from: http://home.wlv.ac.uk/~fa1871/surrext.html

Interactive Poems: intersign perspective for experimental poetry, Philadelpho Menezes

Relazione presentata nel Convegno Internazionale della Associazione degli Studi Parola/Immagine, Los Angeles. Ha come fondo del discorso il lavoro di poesia ipermediale dell'autore.

Pontifical Catholic University of São Paulo (Brazil)

The view that I intend to explore in this paper is that the possibilities opened to poetry by the new technologies of communication may be considered on two levels: (i) the possibilities of interaction with the reader, the most obvious and basic element of NTC, but the one where most theoretical discussion of the novelty of the technologies is concentrated; (ii) the interfaces that NTC imposes inside the communication system, that is, the internal interface between visual, verbal and sound signs of the poem. Despite the fact that my comments are based on poems that I call “intersign poetry”, these questions can be extended over the other communicational fields and products with similar analyses (newspaper, advertisement, encyclopœdic CD-ROMs, dictionaries, etc.). My view is that hypermedia, developed from hypertext, whether in CD-ROMs or in websites, does not come to be used only as an exercise in mechanical interaction with the user, but also to suggest rich ways of mixing different kind of signs, obliging the user to adopt an intellective approach to the exercise of reading. This activity brings the user out of the traditional system of languages, separated into their specific fields, into to an intersemiotic system of communication. If this interface between signs of different languages does not work in a hypermedia construct, NTC is merely reducing the activity of the user to a functional and programmed use of technology and communication. Some might argue that a functional work immediately produces new behaviour patterns and paths to new sensations. This is a predominant trend in contemporary theory of communication since Marshall McLuhan established the concept of medium as a message in itself. Nevertheless, recent theorists of technology have criticised this concept, arguing that without a level of intellective consciousness, it is impossible to establish new ways of relating to machines; without a certain level of reflection, is difficult to know exactly how to exploit the perspectives that the new technogies open up for us.

My analyses dialogue with two importants studies on digital communication published in United States in the 1990s. The first is Hypertext - Th Cconvergence of Contemporary Critical Theory, by George P. Landow, of Brown University (The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997 edition). Landow defines hypertext drawing on different theses such as Vannevar Bush’s conception of memex, Jacques Derrida’s deconstructivism, and Roland Barthes’s analysis of the new relationship between text and reader. Technically, for Landow, hypertext can be defined as a technology of texts put into a web that can make clear the intertextuality inherent in literary works. But, by making rapid and explicit the consultation of subtexts, and by increasing the potentiality of nonlinear and decentered contemporary literature, hypertext changes the conception of text and writing, thus transforming the role of the author and the possibilities of literary education. This new ethic of technological texts must be considered even when we go out of textuality and enter hypermedia programmes, a further development of hypertext, where non-verbal (visual and sound) signs are joined. Hypermedia facilitates working with experimental poetry as hypertext does literary works.

The second approach towards technological writing that I intend to consider is that of Richard A. Lanham in his book The Electronic Word (University of Chicago Press, 1994). Lanham analyses the transformation of the internal feature of the sign, its variable and changeable forms, its ways of organising itself according to the principle of collage. Computer graphics provoke “judgments about scale, a new icon/alphabet ratio in textual communication, nonlinear collage and juxtapositional reasoning (...) - all these constitute a new theory of management”. So Lanham deals with the concept of rhetoric, viewed as a dialetical play established in looking AT a surface pattern of communication and THROUGH it.

By the other side, the experimental poetry appears as an already traditional place for mixing different codes in the modern and contemporary poetics. It is useful to understand clearly what is the concept of “experimental poetry” adopted here: it is a kind of poetry, manifested in some styles and movements in the twentieth, whose form is not displayed in verses. So the concept is rooted in two grounds: I. in the visual field, experimental poetry embraces since the spatialization of verbal texts (like the foremost Mallarmé’s Un Coup de Dés) until poems with printed images (like the italian visive poetry of the 60’s), passing through very well known visual poetics as the chaotic arragments of futurism, the figurative poems of Apollinaire’s calligrammes or the geometric constructivity of the concretism; ii. in the sound field, experimental poetry contains since phonetic ruptures of dada’s poems until the polipoetry concept of Enzo Minarelli’s creation in the 80’s, crossing the inventions of the electroacustic poems of Henri Chopin, the French lettrism of the 50’s, some beatnik kind of discourses, among others.

A privileged place for the discussion of these issues, central to the contemporary poetics and aesthetics, is the digital technology because of its opened use possibilities, either the perspectives that they can still offer to the mix the two trends of experimental poetry in only one space of the communicational. Regarding a new spatial configuration that is no longer the codex form of the book, the poetry inevitably trespasses the limits of the verbal sign itself. Overcoming the unchanging and bidimensional space of the page as a support for the printed word, necessarily the possibilities to work with the isolated verbal sign in an instigating way is, we could say, also overcomed inside these news configuration of space. If the hypertext becomes naturally hypermedia by the inclination to the integration of the languages within the digital technologies, the digital poem also becomes a traffic between signs of different languages that, when well done, could be called “intermedia” - I prefer “intermedia” term to indicate the communication of a poem where a semantic and functional integration between different kind of signs is predominant, requiring a exercise of “composition” by the reader/observer. The “multimedia” term is preferable to designate poetic communications where free accumulation and superposition of many signs install a simple illustrated and didascalic ways of relation between signs. However, poetry, before entering the technological space of communication, had already reached, according to the intersign poetics, the object poems and the sound poems where, respectively, elements sucs as interactivity and immateriality, two totems of the emerging (and yet so fragile) theories of poetics in new media, are achieved. What matters also in the use of these new technologies is the easiness and the encouragement towards integrative realizations between languages where non-verbal signs (sound or images) are not reduced to the role of mere elements of reinforcing the verbal feature.

On the basis of these considerations, I have been trying to develop a concept of “interpoetry”, related to exercises in the field of experimental poetry, first with visual poems, later with sound poems. Interpoetry has two meanings: that of interactivity and that of intersign poetry. The fusion of these two meanings in one poem is the concern of my work in the area of interpoetry. I will start with the older meaning: ‘intersign poetry’ is the name I used fifteen years ago(1) to express the idea of a poetry created by the fusion of verbal and non-verbal signs. At that time, I was concerned with exploring the characteristics of a visual poetry that, produced in the years after the concretist movement, distinguished itself from the tradition of experimental poetry up to the time of concretism: the tradition of making the visual element derive from the verbal element. From the figurative poems of Greek Antiquity to the concrete poetry of the 1950s and 1960s, every type of visual poetry in one form or another exploits the graphic form of the text, the word or the letter, that is, the various visual forms taken by the verbal sign. In some rare cases, when drawings or engravings enter the space of the poem, the visual element acts as an illustration of the text. The idea of intersign poetry was to use visual images (drawings, photos, numbers, or other graphic elements) as compositional components of the poem through formal interrelationship and semantic interpenetration with the verbal sign; from this, the coming to fruition of intersign poem is the function of an exercise in decoding, interpretation, and decifering that the reader/observer must undertake in the light of the montage of visual and verbal signs present in the poem. Thus intersign poetry emerges as a kind of visual poetry which negates past forms of visual poetry.

These questions led me to an idea that has guided my work since: poetry is a specific form of organising signs in a poem (formal fusion plus semantic montage); it is a language. It is neither a problem specific to the verbal code nor a problem of the techniques through which this language is exhibited or transmitted. Hence, when in the first half of the 1990s I began experimenting with the possibilities of sound poetry, I sought to try to introduce these concepts into the field of sounds by producing poems in which non-verbal sounds played, in the sound poem, the role of images in the visual intersign poem: to create formal fusions that produced not only acoustic effects but more especially meanings deciferable through intellectual interpretation(2).

In the second half of 1997, I began producing poems in which sounds, images and words coalesce, in a complex intersemiotic process, in a technological environment which precisely facilitated the simultaneous presence of verbal, visual and acoustic signs: hypermedia programmes. The idea here was to avoid doing what the visual poem up till concretism had always done: make the visual follow on from the verbal. Or what recited poetry always did: illustrate the reading of the text with music or incidental sounds.

But it was also necessary to avoid the equivocal discourse produced by artists who worked with the new technologies: these latter assume that the mere use of new technologies produces new languages, that is, new ways of combining codes. In practice, this does not happen. Technologies like videotext, computer graphics and holography, present new environments in which the signs of the poem are placed; that is, they suggest new ways of organising these images into spacial and temporal structures, different from those of the printed page. But this does not mean to say that the poem automatically takes advantage of these new structures. Technology suggests; it does not impose. And what we see today is a traditional visual poetry ( principally following concretist and futurist forms) reproduced in terms of the new technologies.

Intersign poems are not “experiments of poetic written texts”, but intersigned processes of word, image, sound, movement, varied ways of reading, where the image, the sound and the movement are not simply features of the word. Interpoetry sets out consciously to occupy the structures provided by the new medias, modifying the relationships between image, sound and word within the specific environments which only hypermedia makes possible. There are two levels of structure which may be considered typical of interpoetry:

1. the mode of relating image, sound and word, which gives continuity to the processes operative within visual and sound intersemiotic poetry, establishing the basis of intersign poetry in hypermedia, obeying a certain specific development of the poem within the time and space of hypermedia.

2. Forms of relationship with the reader and the question of interactivity. The intervention of the reader/user amplifies the forms of participation that the avant-gardes had introduced into art, breaking with the classic contemplative role of the reader/observer. The option of multiple paths for the reading of the interpoem gives rise to two circuits of association: a network of connections based on the technological links made available by hypermedia; a network of associations set up between the data of the poem, which refer to eachother, subterranean to the virtual links, and which could be called post-virtual. The suggested links (interpretative associations) thus supplant and subvert the links that are offered (virtual paths). The interpoem thus establishes the primacy of ‘suggestion’ over ‘explanation’, one that characterizes technological art in general. And it underlines the rethorical question put by Lanham: the superficies of technical links, this opened way to be read, keeps our attention AT the communicative features of the poem as a kind of game; the web of suggestions made by virtual (or mental) links requires our reading THROUGH the communicative features up to semantic conections. It could be said that the rethorical structure of reading an interpoem lies and relies upon the oscillation between “explanation” and “suggestion”, “technical links” and “semantic links”.

The intersigned fusion conducts, after all, the creative exercise towards the fusion between the text genres, where the poetry penetrates the field of theory, tale and encyclopedic information. Everything proceeds to the creation of big systems of communicating chambers where the narrative fiction, the game, the poetry, the scientific research, the daily information and the interpersonal contact can be moments of the same productive exercise.The fusion of genres is, furthermore, natural to interpoetry: visual poetry, sound poetry, theoretical text, encyclopœdic information, fiction, lies, games, all are possible paths within the interpoem. Questions are further raised by the perspective of incorporating narrative forms, by the production of works which could be called ‘interprose’ and which could appear as a follow-up to interpoetic work.



References:

Theory



. AA.VV.: “Visual Poetry: na international anthology”, Visible Language, Vol. 27, n. 4, Providence, Rhode Island School of Design, 1993.

. BARILLI, Renato: Retórica, Lisboa, Presença, 1979.

. BARTHES, Roland: "O grau zero da escritura" in Novos ensaios críticos, São Paulo, Cultrix, 1974.

. BOLTER, Jay David: Writing Space – The computer, Hypertext, and the history of writing, Hillsdale/New jersey, Lawrence Erlbaum, 1991.

. BUSH, Vannevar: "As we may think" in Druckrey, Timothy (ed.), Eletronic Culture - Technology and Visual Representation, Quebec, Aperture Foundation, 1996, pp. 29-45.

. COSTA, Mario: O sublime tecnológico, São Paulo: Experimento, 1995.

. DELANY, Paul e LANDOW, G. (ed.): Hypermedia and Literary Studies, Cambridge/Londres, MIT Press, 1991.

. DOMINGUES, Diana (ed.): Arte no Século XXI - A humanização das tecnologias, São Paulo, Ed. Unesp, 1997.

. ECO, Umberto: Lector in Fabula, Milão, Bompiani, 1983.

. HAYLES, N. Katherine: Chaos and Order: Complex Dynamics in Literature and Science, Chicago/ Londres, Univ. of Chicago Press, 1991.

. HAYLES, N. Katherine: How we became posthuman, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1999.

. LANDOW, George: Hyper/Text: the convergency of Contemporary Critical Theory and Technology, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992.

. LANHAM, Richard: The Eletronic Word -Democracy, Technology and the Arts, Chicago/Londres, Univ. of Chicago Press, 1993.

. LÉVY, Pierre: O que é o virtual?, São Paulo: 34, 1996.

. --------------: Cibercultura, São Paulo, 34, 1999.

. LYOTARD, Jean-François: O Pós-moderno, Rio de Janeiro, José Olympio, 1986.

. MCLUHAN, Marshall: Os meios de comunicação como extensões do homem, São Paulo: Cultrix, 5a. ed., 1979.

. MENEZES, Philadelpho: Poetics and Visuality, translation Harry Polkinhorn, San Diego State University Press, 1995.

. MENEZES, Philadelpho: Poesia Concreta e Visual, São Paulo, Ática, 1998.

. MENEZES, Philadelpho (org.): Poesia Sonora: poéticas experimentais da voz no século XX, São Paulo: EDUC (Editora da PUC), 1992.

. MENEZES, Philadelpho: "Poesia Visual: reciclagem e inovação", em revista Imagens, número 6, Campinas, Editora da Unicamp, 1996, pp. 39/48.

. MENEZES, Philadelpho: "Poetics and new technologies of communication: a semiotic approach" in Face - Revista de Semiótica e Comunicação, D.1, 1998, site: www.pucsp.br/~cos-puc/face

. MEYER, Kenneth: “Dramatic narrative inVirtual Reality”, in Frank BIOCCA e Mark R. LEVY (eds.), Communication int eh Age of Virtual Reality, Hillsdale, New Jersey, Lawrence Erlbaum, 1995, pp. 219/259.

. MURRAY, Janet: Hamlet on the Holodeck – The future of narrative in Cyberspace, Cambridge, MIT Press, 1997.

. NEGROPONTE, Nicholas: A vida digital, São Paulo, Companhia das Letras, 1995.

. ONG, Walter J.: Orality and literacy – The technlogizing of the word, Londres, Routledge, 1989.

. PIAULT, Fabrice: Le Livre - La fin d'un régne, Paris, Stock, 1995.

. --------: "New Media poetry - Theory and Strategies" in Visible Language, 30.2, Providence, Rhode Island School of Design, pp. 214-133.



Cd-roms:

. JOYCE, Michael: Afternoon, a story, Watertown, Eastgate, 1987.

. MOULTHROP, Stuart: Victory Garden, Watertown, Eastgate, 1991.

. MENEZES, P. e AZEVEDO, W.: Interpoesia, São Paulo, EPE-PUC/Dep.Artes Mackenzie, (no prelo).



Above copied from: http://www.geocities.com/Paris/Lights/7323/philadelpho.html

A Slap in the Face of Public Taste, David Burliuk, Alexander Kruchenykh, Vladmir Mayakovsky, Victor Khlebnikov

To the readers of our New First Unexpected.

We alone was the face of our Time. Through us the horn of time blows in the art of the world.

The past is too tight. The Academy and Pushkin are less intelligible than hieroglyphics.

Throw Pushkin, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, etc., etc. overboard from the Ship of Modernity.

He who does not forget his first love will not recognize his last.

Who, trustingly, would turn his last love toward Balmont’s perfumed lechery? Is this the reflection of today’s virile soul?

Who, faint-heartedly, would fear tearing from warrior Bryusov’s black tuxedo the paper armor-plate? Or does the dawn of unknown beauties shine from it?

Wash your hands which have touched the filthy slime of the books written by the countless Leonid Andreyevs.

All those Maxim Gorkys, Krupins, Bloks, Sologubs, Remizovs, Averchenkos, Chornys, Kuzmins, Bunins, etc. need only a dacha on the river. Such is the reward fate gives tailors.

From the heights of skyscrapers we gaze at their insignificance!...

We order that the poets’ rights be revered:

To enlarge the scope of the poet’s vocabulary with arbitrary and derivative words (Word-novelty).
To feel an insurmountable hatred for the language existing before their time.
To push with horror off their proud brow the Wreath of cheap fame that You have made from bathhouse switches.
To stand on the rock of the word “we” amidst the sea of boos and outrage.
And if for the time being the filthy stigmas of your “common sense” and “good taste” are still present in our lines, these same lines for the first time already glimmer with the Summer Lightning of the New Coming Beauty of the Self-sufficient (self-centered) Word.

Above copied from: http://www.unknown.nu/futurism/slap.html

Digital poetics or On the evolution of experimental media poetry, Friedrich W. Block

(Online version without notes and references. Print version is forthcoming in Eduardo Kac (ed.): New Media Poetry)


I. Introduction or From technological leveling off to poetological positioning

The academic and literature critical discussion on new media poetry or about digital texts swings to and fro, in method and conception between two poles: one is the 'work immanent' approach of structure description and classification, and the other the deduction of abstract media esthetics. At a tangent to this the communication on media, culture and media art has been more or less committed to the priority of technological reasoning since the nineties at the latest.

The concern with technology remains a dilemma: Technology has to be taken into account when dealing with concrete structure analyses of works of digital poetry, but some traps lie in wait. Is the knowledge accounted for here really sufficient? I would say that few of those taking part in the discussion who do not actually work in the specific area artistically are capable of programming digital texts (the same may be said of some artists). Another problem is something I have casually termed a new techno-ontology: a ‘cold fascination’ for technological being (also of texts), which flares up briefly with each innovation pressing for the market in the respective field. This includes the far-reaching absence of any ideology criticism of things technical -- mainly in the nineties, where the area of media art as well as digital poetry expanded. In fact the opposite was the case: A 'new' avant-garde consciousness, igniting with current technical achievements and with the connected artistic experiments, is undeniable in the digital poetry discussion: along with the new media, newness according to modern progress and as a value of economic exchange returns with a vengeance. If, however, you take ‘technical’ to mean more than the purely instrumental - the tools of hard and software independent of their cognitive, physical or communicative use - if it is interpreted dynamically as a process and symbolically according to the ancient world’s notion of ‘techne’ (techne as creative workings or as art) then it is clear that the explanation of literature, digital literature indeed, cannot be reduced to technology. In addition questions of perception, communication, social and cultural orders arise. In this case literature must be a multi-dimensional system to which belong, in addition to the works, technical procedures and the corresponding media as well as protagonists with respective cognitive areas, action roles, groupings, institutions, communications and symbolic orders, e.g. such as genre knowledge or programs of poetics. Each dimension is subject to certain coordinated dynamics and historical development.

Bearing this in mind, my contribution will refer to the "program" area. Programs consist of certain strategies, principles, values, work attitudes, questions and objectives which single artistic events and manifestations orient and control with pre or post interventions according to poetics. Programs occur in various planes of complexity which may cross each other. They develop intrinsic values and the specifics of these have to be indicated - usually with type or genre titles or, if required, with group or movement names.

Some examples of programs and partial programs in order of abstraction: Futurism, Zaum, language of stars/Viennese group, literary cabaret, dialect poem / digital poetry, New Media Poetry, L.A.I.R.E., poème à lecture unique. Of course it is not necessarily the norm to interlock more comprehensive programs with partial programs or concretions - since the seventies poetry has, if at all, favored smaller programs: Strategies of individual artists without a clear 'superstructure'. In this respect labels such as 'digital poetry', 'net literature' or "New Media Poetry" may be the cause for surprise these days.

The arbitrarily chosen series (Futurism to digital literature) has been developed here in such a way as to allow for a further generic program term, a term admittedly not so reliable as, say, experimental literature. From this viewpoint, position determination must be to ask how digital poetry should be assessed as a program: idiosyncratic and unique or more as a partial program. The avant-garde consciousness mentioned previously seems to speak for uniqueness, as does the tendency within the discourse to make a clear break with, say, all literature of book and print as well as the cultural history thereof.

The assessment as a partial program, however, is supported by the observation that standing definitions of digital poetry have a large proximity to strategies of existing and historically grown programs - including the mentioned avant-garde consciousness. At the least we can say that they overlap. If this is so, and I assume it is, then there are a number of advantages for the description of digital poetry: Certain strategies and abstract concepts for digital poetry can be enriched semantically and questioned at an 'added value'. This applies to declarations about the performance and function of digital poetry, as well as to the assessment of the quality of single works. Finally, it becomes possible to regard programmatic parallels as well as more general developments in a slightly different light.

As a test of this generic objective, let us dwell on the concept of experimental literature. Since the fifties and increasingly so since the late sixties, the developments have produced a variety of polished procedures and strategies thanks to a strong bias on theory, which are also well-thought-through according to poetics as in no other area of literature. There isn't another literary field in which the concern has been so intensively with new media technologies and with things technical - not simply thematically, regarding content, but primarily in the formal structures themselves. Briefly, once again, before I outline this program with some key strategies here is a compilation of all those qualities the discourse ascribes to digital poetry.



II. Slogans or Popular definitions of digital media poetry

Within the discourse digital poetry is ascribed an identity so long as it specifically deals with the conditions which computer, Internet (computer networks), and certain software programs and programming languages have to offer. This means that digital poetry is defined by the fact that it may be produced, spread, saved, and received only under these conditions, and not in any other way. In the main the following possibilities have been derived from this or are named repeatedly as criteria:

- the mechanical, algorithmic generation of texts (supporting or complete)

- electronic linkage (in the computer, on Intranet or Internet) of fragments and files of the same or also different media types, derived from this the

- multi- or non-linearity of both text structure and individual reading matter and if required

- multimediality and animation of texts in the broadest sense

- interactivity as a 'dialog' between machine (hard and software) and user as a - dependent on the programming -- reversible or irreversible intervention into the display or data base text, as a telematic communication between different protagonists on the computer network; derived from this

- the shift or even de-differentiation of traditional action roles such as author, reader, editor.

These criteria are specific enough to delimit digital literature from other literature. They have but one flaw: they say nothing about the esthetic or artistic state of digital texts. Online shops, route planners, library catalogs, multimedia encyclopedia, scientific mailing lists or newsforums, erotic chats, search machines or even the homepage of one John Smith or Lieschen Müller might just as well be included here. Once again, when technological conceptualization levels off, the old question of poeticism rears its head. At first the answers which were given here were informatively and esthetically aimed at predictability (Birkhoff); later on they were aimed both cognitively and communicatively at semantic framing (convention of esthetics, coding of the art system). But with this the various criteria could only receive some prefix or other (e.g. artistic or literary interactivity) and little else was gained. Only when we proceed semantically according to art specific conditions do we move on from here. This can be tried via single work analyses, or also with contextualization in reference to existing more concrete programs. If, in addition to technological criteria others such as 'reflection', 'production', 'presentation', 'exemplification' of, or 'experiment' with the technological and media possibilities are considered -- then we have already reached the program of experimental poetry.



III. Affiliation or The birth of digital poetry in the spirit of poetic experiment

The idea of the poetic experiment has circulated internationally amongst literary figures and academic observers since the fifties, although it has a far more ancient history. It marks an historical break, following the global catastrophe of World War and Holocaust, when a new generation, 20 to 30 years old at the time, started to seek out up-to-date and more advanced possibilities of poetry writing. Following the experience of a total abuse of language, media and art, the demand, especially in Central Europe, was for a more radical approach than to simply support a 'realistic' representation function of language. The long-forgotten approaches of the avant-garde in the first decades of the century were rediscovered, and similar interests in approximately the same age group where discovered in various regions of the world. Under the label of concrete poetry jointly launched by the Brazilian Noigandres group and Eugen Gomringer in 1955, artists from Europe (also Eastern Europe), North and South America as well as Asia were soon communicating with each other. Often they cooperated in groups and soon started to meet up in international exhibitions, anthologies, editions, journals. When, by the end of the sixties concrete poetry (primarily the Gomringer variety) was found to be too restricted, numerous partial programs appeared on the scene, such as: visual, sound, and action poetry - increasingly overlapping with general genre programs such as Fluxus, pop art, concept art, mail art or copy art.

Especially around 1967/68 an intellectual climate was noted - at least in Europe - within the context of social, political and cultural movements, which today bears fruit for the discourse on digital poetry and media art: along with this transitional period, the family likeness between experimental poetics developed since the fifties and the philosophical reflection on linguistic turn (e.g. Derrida’s "Grammatology, 1967), the medial revolution (e.g. McLuhan‘s "Gutenberg-Galaxy" 1962, in German 1968) as well as science (Hein von Foerster’s and John von Neumann’s Cybernetics) leaps to the eye.

From the beginning experiment as a program concept was intended not so much to aid the classification of certain texts, but rather to help orient in a certain poetic setting repeatedly said to have the following common criteria:

- the interest in a work being with rather than in the language, i.e. the concentration on its semantics and material aspects as well as its use in connection with other sign systems

- the experiment with new perception and communication media

- to make the processes of producing and understanding esthetic forms a central theme

* linkage and integration and therefore also extension of media and procedures used in more traditional forms of art



* the connection of literature with other arts - particularly with contemporary developments in the fine arts and music - and also with science and politics, the reflection on the limits of literature



- the very rational and cognitively oriented attitude of the producers

- their cooperation in groups and their international integration.

The opening out and diffusion of concrete poetry into a variety of different programs - dependent to a large extent on individual artist personalities - is accompanied by the volatile development in the field of technical media. Language artists experimented as early as the sixties with photography (Jochen Gerz), film and TV (Gerhard Rühm, Timm Ulrichs and Klaus-Peter Dencker) with video (Ernesto de Melo e Castro), later on with neon writings (Mauricio Nannuci, Timm Ulrichs) photocopy (Jürgen Olbrich, Emmett Williams), holography (Eduardo Kac, Richard Kostelanetz). In sound poetry the voice is reinforced and distorted using the electronic possibilities of microphone amplification and alienation (François Dufrêne, Henri Chopin). The new radio play established experiences with stereophonic sound systems, cut and original soundtrack (Friederike Mayröcker, Bill Fontana et.al.). Also the typewriter possibilities were played through: This was the leading medium of concrete poetry mainly because of its flexible typography which could be treated independently from the typesetter. Complementarily there are experiments with handwriting - psychograms for the 'technology of self' (Gerhard Rühm, Carlfriedrich Claus, Valeri Scherstjanoi). Of course the book - the absolute criterion of differentiation according to the digital poetry discourse - was tested for possibilities of extension and deconstruction, for example via kinetic transformation (Raymond Queneau), collage transformation(Jiri Kolar, Franz Mon) or sculptural and architectural transformation (Juan Brossa, Ian Hamilton Finlay, Timm Ulrichs).

The beginnings of computer-based literature did not happen in a vacuum, nor - as is often believed - do they lie in American hyper fiction in the late eighties. They originated much earlier within the catchment area of experimental and concrete poetry, and can be described with a far greater continuity than the digital revolution propaganda with its historical break would have us believe:

First 'stochastic' or 'artificial' texts were produced in 1959 by Theo Lutz within the Stuttgart group surrounding Max Bense, with the help of a program run on the large computer Zuse Z 22. Parallel to this experiments and first exhibitions with pictures created digitally were taking place. Jean Baudot (1964 in Montreal) and Gerhard Stickel (1966 in Darmstadt) produced 'automatic texts'. During these experiments it was not so important to interpret the results, not even the concrete processes in the machine. The main question was how the machine should be interpreted with regard to its esthetic function e.g. in relation to the creativity of the human author. These early approaches were accompanied in particular by subtly differentiated poetology which received its impulses from cybernetics, the information theory and semiotics. As early as 1950 - the year of Allan Turing's pioneering essay "Can a machine think?" - the synthesis of man and machine was explained with an ontological bent by Max Bense in "Literaturmetaphysik". The essays of Oswald Wieners, a member and mentor of the Viennese group, are particularly relevant from a poetics point of view. In them the "Turing Machine" is propagated for as a model of understanding and of esthetic processes. In the book "die verbesserung von mitteleuropa, roman" 1969 (the improvement of Central Europe, novel) his "bio-adapter" concept ironically anticipates the move into cyberspace.

In the USA Aaron Marcus has been exploring virtual and interactive text space in his "Cybernetic Landscapes" since the end of the sixties, and has developed a poetics program of interactivity, simulation and movement. In France, too, the poetic analyses of computers has been continuous since the early seventies. Background for this were the statements of the "workshop for potential literature" (OULIPO) whose members Paul Fournel, Italo Calvino and Jacques Roubaud were concerned with different procedures of "computer-aided creation processes". The roots of net literature can also be traced back to the early eighties in France: in the specific sense of literature within computer network systems (videotext projects such as "A.C.S.O.O." or " L' Objet Perdu").

Of course there arealso individual artist personalities whose experiments have gradually led them to be occupied with the hypermedia: This can be said of the French mentioned above, it applies to Reinhard Döhl as a member of the Stuttgart Group, and to Augusto de Campos, one of the fathers of concrete poetry. It is valid for pioneers like Ernesto de Melo e Castro or Richard Kostelanetz, or for one of the leading hypertext poets: Jim Rosenberg, and it also applies to younger representatives such as André Vallias who started out in visual poetry.

Following on from this affiliation of digital poetry, it seems obvious to ask whether certain key strategies of experimental poetry can be used to esthetically enrich technological criteria such as 'programming and source codes', 'animation and processuality', 'interactivity' or 'hypermedia'.



IV. Retroperspective or Digital poetics with strategies of the experimental program

When poetological examples are listed here, then this is not in order to assert the continued existence of a certain movement - e.g. concrete poetry - or even to assert the assumption that digital poetry is epigonal. It is precisely this development of concrete poetry as form or movement which - as said - must be considered to have been complete since the late sixties. The selected examples do, however, stand for the experimental program since the fifties as a whole, as well as for the 'intellectual climate' mentioned earlier. They are only intended to illustrate the importance of poetological ideas and strategies for the development of contemporary media poetry in addition to their realization in individual artworks.



1. ‘Concrete material’ and digital medium

"Concrete poem communicates its own structure: structure-content. Its material: word (sound, visual form, semantical charge). Its problem: a problem of functions-relations of this material. Concrete poem, by using the phonetical system (digits) and analogical syntax, creates a specific linguistical area – "verbivocovisual", which shares the advantage of nonverbal communication, without giving up the word’s virtualities. Chronomicro-metering of hazard. Control. Cybernetics. The poem as a mechanism regulating itself: feed-back."

With the notion of 'concrete' or 'material' a fundamental change of reference and function in literary language usage is called for within the program of experimental poetry - exemplary here, the "Pilot Plan for Concrete Poetry" by the Brazilian Noigandres group in 1958: The esthetic interest focuses primarily on the language as a sign system, as a cognition and communication medium, and as the artistic means of creation. It is language itself which is valid in all its qualities – the perceived qualities in particular - as the material which it is necessary to reflect upon and to form – similar to the material of colors, lines, areas in art ("Art concret" by Theo van Doesburg 1930) or in music where tones and sounds are the material ("Musique concrète" Pierre Schaeffer 1948).

As a complement of form, the concept ‘material’ replaces the old pre-modernist definition of substance (German: "Stoff" - which aimed at spirit, meaning, theme, contents, fable etc.) - initially with a tendency to emphasize strongly the 'material', i.e. perceivable side of the signs. Most recently with concept art (and experimental as conceptual poetry) it has become clear that intellectuality, ideas, semantics, codes, can also function as material in the artistic game.

In the meantime, a more neutral idea on offer is the esthetically current idea 'medium', this being the transformation of ‘material’ in terms of a logic of difference - an abstract and highly integrative media concept as Niklas Luhmann has suggested. With this, experimental poetry would have always been media poetry.

From a semiotic point of view, the program outlined in the "Pilotplan" and other poetics manifestos is concerned with the following: that all esthetic word processing be subject to the priority of 'self reference' or 'exemplification' by language or sign complexes. Or, going with system-theory: one always orientates on a level of second order observation which potentially treats all structure and use possibilities of language - as observation medium - according to form aspects.

The poetological statements repeatedly mention the text being ‘reduced’ to the language material which is clear from a design point of view - often only a word or word fragment on the page, concentration on perceptible graphic or phonetic forms - but which, on the contrary, must be seen theoretically as an increase in complexity in possible meanings. Above all else 'reduction' like 'material' and 'concrete' should be seen as an indicator for the move to a higher self-referential observation level.

In practice this indicates a calculated or method-conducted intervention into the language or non-language codes, e.g. by procedures of isolation, contamination, fusion, permutation. In the "Pilot Plan" this is conveyed by the idea "verbivocovisual", or in the deliberately unusual design of the phonetic system (digital, i.e. isolating and distinguishing single sounds) and syntax (analogue in the sense of area syntax as in visual poetry).

Digital poetry gains the following from these principles: If digital poetry requires a corresponding type or genre name according to poetics, then this should exemplify its specific digital or hypermedia structures and processes, its specific type of media. This means it creates events and situations to observe language-usage within the hypermedia. Of course the material is no longer only the word, nor is it, speaking generally, the medium, the character, the media-codes and notations but, of course, their specific manifestations in computers and computer networks. According to 'material' thought, the procedures which stage source codes, programming and interfaces self-referentially are the most important here. Such exemplification is present - also visibly - e.g. in desired clarity when the difference between HTML code and browser interpretation is produced, as in the Japanese group Exonemo's "Discoder" (the "Jodi" group is another classic), or when different symbol formats are contaminated as in the ASCII-Art-Ensemble, which experiments with the "American Standard Code for Information Interchange" or when Perl scripts are used to compose, as in the case of Alan Sondheim (each poem a small program - also demonstrated with historical affiliation on Florian Cramer's "Permutations" web site). Of course all the other demonstrations of computer-based features need to be included here, such as hypermedia networking, animation, interactivity - this will be looked at in more detail - or simply the discrepancy between hard and software e.g. in Frank Fietzek's "Bodybuilding" installation which uses a prime mover as interface for text production and reception.

With the demand to design the concrete poem like a self-regulating mechanism according to cybernetic, algorithmic methods the "Pilotplan" of 1958 offers the option to exemplify these principals with the Turing Machine - as mentioned this was occurring in Stuttgart practically, at the time of this manifesto’s publication.

2. "movens": animation and information process

The "Pilot Plan" already has something further to offer: the exhibition of the moment of movement by using a so called time-space-isomorphism: "In a first moment of concrete poetry pragmatics, isomorphism tends to physiognomy – that is a movement imitating natural appearance (motion); organic form and phenomenology of composition prevail. In a more advanced stage, isomorphism tends to resolve itself into pure structural movement (movement properly said); at this phase, geometric form and mathematics of composition (sensible rationalism) prevail".

I think that this phase model can be applied to the present development of digital poetry as far as the question of movement is concerned, namely in the distinction between movement as a perception event on the screen on the one hand (animation) and as a structural movement of the calculations or symbolizing processes and action processes on the other (information processing). The current trend shows a tendency towards the second phase.

In addition to the short note in the Noigandres group manifesto there is another stage important for the establishment of the movement strategy within the program of experimental art and literature: A volume appeared in 1960 containing "documents and analyses for literature, fine arts, music, architecture", entitled "movens" and published by Franz Mon in cooperation with Walter Höllerer and Manfred de la Motte. The literary perspective of this enterprise was aimed at formulating experimental poetics in such a way as to embrace the complete arts with the main theme of movement. Essentially it was all about the esthetic production and processing of sign processes. Umberto Eco's book "the open artwork" appeared two years later with a corresponding opinion: The open artwork is produced most consistently when the activity of awareness and interpretation of those who produce and receive the work can be conceptually expected, and it becomes an "artwork in movement".

Procedurally "movens" is a 'retroperspective' (a concept termed by Cathérine David for the "documenta X") when artists like Hans Arp, Alberto Giacometti, Kurt Schwitters or Gertrude Stein are integrated with the past - from the immediate to the avant-garde. These important figures stand for the process character of art. The same is true for the contemporary examples which among others originate from experimental poetry, light and kinetic sculpture, dynamic theater, electronic music or a 'labyrinthian' architecture. The attention is directed towards the dynamic 'material' (once again!) in the broadest sense of language or symbolic processes.

So you see "movens" too makes the connection of kinetics and process orientation within the idea of movement and thereby supports the poetics base for digitally poetic criteria of animation and information processing. Interesting approaches in the area of digital poetry build entirely on this connection - supported technologically. The French e.g. concerned themselves early on with time in digital texts (since the eighties in the groups ALAMO and LAIRE), namely with the temporal relationship of movement on the screen or text animations on the one hand, and perception possibilities, as well as interactive direct access possibilities within this course of motion on the other. The concern is also to explore the tension between the time units of programmed text, perceived text and read text (e.g. Philippe Bootz). Following on from this understanding of time and movement one is today particularly interested in the staging of information processes (in the computer: e.g. the conversion of text into pictures as in the previously mentioned "Verbarium" by Sommerer & Mignonneau, on the net: e.g. "23:40" by Guido Grigat or "mi_ga's" spam mail art or, as in the recent works of Eduardo Kac, also in the tension between artificial and 'natural' data processing).


3. Audience activity and interactivity

The interest in the process has brought about the fact that not only the activity of producers is conceptualized, but also that of the audience. This has also led to interactivity.

In the fifties the art concept was extended to include open structures and processes. This has led generally to an esthetic attention to symbolic, cognitive and communicative processes and also particularly to the direct incorporation of audience or recipient. This applies to intermedia art, action art, happening art, Fluxus and concept art, and it also applies to experimental poetry developing in close contact with these approaches. In detail, the concern here is with the psychophysical conditions in the formulation process -- with a rare concentration and differentiation e.g. in Carlfriedrich Claus' 'Exerzitien'. And at the same time, while the author function is relativized, these are also projected onto a 'new' active recipient who comprehends and completes the creation process. The 'new reader' has become an ideal figure for open and self-reflexive perception, interpretation and comprehension processes. The program of experimental poetry can no longer do without this personal projection.

The interactivity of digital poetry refines this program in the respect that now the ideal becomes technically clear or is 'empirisized': On the one hand, the activity of the user is often programmed - self-referential in the best cases (as a switch, form or input function e.g. in Philippe Bootz' "poème à lecture unique" or in "Assoziationsblaster" by Alvar Freude and Dragan Espenschied) or it is symbolized (e.g. by hyper-textual role play in Luc Courchesne’s "Portrait One"). On the other hand the user appears embodied in the game with the machine or already as its part- e.g. when producing text by means of a bicycle (Shaw’s famous "Legible City") or a prime mover (Fietzek's "Bodybuilding"). At all events interactivity lives off the analogy and the dialog between user and computer, which conceives both as data processing systems with hard and software components which are made to intersect. Even the first text generators were inspired by this analogy - more or less de-constructively.

4 Intermediality and hypermediality

A further strategy in the discourse of digital poetry is hypermediality. This is regarded as an extension of hypertext, only that not only text files, but also audio files, picture files and video files are inter-switched with each other and issued as a "Gesamtdatenwerk" (a ‘complete data work’, an expression termed by Roy Ascott). According to Roberto Simanowski here we are dealing with "the at present [i.e.:1999] perhaps most relevant type of digital literature", which takes the hypertextual inheritance of its predecessor into multimedia. This understanding of hypermediality is, however, reduced to the multimedia surface of the output devices, and insufficiently fulfills the specific requirements of the computer and corresponding artistic works. The digital media hype here is not what is produced with effective publicity at more or less cunning ’verbiaudiovisions’, but rather the fact that each perception medium is coded digitally, i.e. alphanumerically (in the end with '1' and '0'): The interesting poetic works build upon this in accordance with the experimental program and the conceptualization of concrete ‘material' (see IV.1): Moving pictures, indeed whole films are published as a writing process in ASCII (ASCII Art Ensemble); text input is converted into picture structures ("Verbarium"); with user interventions in the HTML source text, the whole text picture generated by the browser for display output becomes deconstructed ("Discoder").

With these procedures concepts like 'multimedia' or ’Gesamtdatenwerk' lead the wrong way (in the direction of mass-media spectacle and back to Richard Wagner's totalitarian 'Gesamtkunstwerk’). The strategies of visual or also sound or concrete poetry are fundamentally more informative when they haven't simply concentrated on linking disparate media but rather on the intermedial exemplification thereof.

The conceptualization of intermediality according to poetics is helpful here as carried out by Dick Higgins in the middle of the sixties in the catchment area of intermedia art and experimental poetry. For Higgins it is all about a 'conceptual fusion' of medial conditioned horizons (i.e. media concepts realized culturally and individually). "Conceptual fusion" refers to the fact that we are not dealing with a mixture of media (this is why the counter-concept 'mixed media' is used in analogy to today's multimedia) but rather with an artificial artistic production of the gap or the break between traditional forms (or coding) of media. This means that those media (writing, pictures, sound etc.) which are accessed, are presented self-referentially as symbolic forms. Conceptually they therefore dissolve themselves - a second order observation - in an imaginary meta medium.

The extension of visual or sound or intermedial poetry with digital or hypermedial literature as in the examples mentioned above consists in the following: The conceptual or also ideational semantics of the thought of fusion (also described as strategy of a diffuse 'meta medium') is conveyed in strategies of technical or syntactic wording in computer symbol languages. Or to use spatial imagery: the horizontal axis of perceptible inter-media (e.g. a "Schriftzeichnung" [written drawing] by Gerhard Rühm) is extended by a vertical axis of programming (e.g. via self-referential interventions in the HTML or Perl script code). This also corresponds to the 'empirisation' - as illustrated on interactivity - of existing strategies of experimental poetry.



V. Résumé or "Texts in the spaces in between"

The attempt to prevent the poetic occupation with digital media from restingon a description which relies on the wordings of the 'consciousness industry' (only today does Ardorno's invective seem charged correctly), this attempt leads to an intermediary discourse which must interweave evolved conceptualizations of poetics and technology.

We hereby avoid an additional accessing of the old dualism of two worlds (C.P. Snow) in which one might simply switch more or usually less competently to the technical side. Opposed to this, literature appears within the program of experiment as a part of the technically and medially coined world which is at the same time recursively observed from a literary angle. This procedure has been the only way to locate the site of digital literature within the net of literatures, i.e. in the system of literary communication. The first reference point of technically oriented or digital poetry is the specific context of - art and literature: its protagonists, works, discourses, programs!

With the allocation of digital poetry to the program of experimental media poetry, its performance and function also brighten (at the same time both externally as a scientific observation and internally as a demand of poetics): If poetry is symbol art and if 'digital' means the technology of universal symbolization (or description), then we are here dealing with the perception and experience of symbolical symbolization -- at the end a 'dia-bolical' venture which literally throws aside the mechanics or the conditions and possibilities of symbolizing. If literature is art or poetry in the word-sense of 'creating and producing' (poiesis) and if 'digital' means technical in the same sense, then things technical - dynamic material and material process at the same time - also appear to be self-referential here. Digital poetry reveals the possibilities of present media cultural practice, i.e. current ways of our world making.

In other words: here we are dealing with the one place in literature in which, as nowhere else, the function of literature in the technical age is made clear, but with a thoroughly critical, yes evil (diabolical) look into the interior dynamics of technical ways of thinking and action patterns. This also implies a continuous ideology criticism of things technical which has yet to be formulated with such clarity elsewhere. From this angle, digital poetry intensifies and illuminates the function which the experimental program has generally fulfilled excellently since the fifties - excellent in so far as the question of technology is treated not only thematically but mainly 'technically' here with all available means. It is this function of the poetical experiment in general which becomes clear through digital poetry and the present discourse, also looking back historically.

Strategy, (inter-) medium or material, movement, activity - under these poetological circumstances, digital texts as experimental poetry always lie somewhere 'in between'. Literally, they are 'media poetry', open texts aimed at complex medial, communicative and cognitive processes. In keeping with Franz Mon (1961) these are "Texte in den Zwischenräumen" - texts in the spaces in between.

Original-URL: http://www.brueckner-kuehner.de/block/p0et1cs.htm

Above copied from: http://www.netzliteratur.net/block/p0et1cs.html

manifesto for a new poetry visual and phonic, Pierre Garnier

1962

Once we lived safely beneath our stratum of air. Now we are waves spouting in the cosmos. How can we expect our words to remain wrapped up in the atmosphere of the sentence?

Let them be reunited, like ourselves, to cosmic space--word constellations on the white page.

Every word is an abstract picture.

A surface. A volume.

A surface on the page. A volume when spoken.

Gamier emphasized the necessity for a break with the old rhythms:

The rhythms of poetry have succeeded in deadening the reader's mind.

We listen to the purring of Racine but do not understand it. In poetry we become aware of the universe--for it to be based upon the enumeration of feet is an absurdity.

It makes no difference whether FER or AVION have one or two syllables. What counts is their meaning, the space which the words themselves occupy upon the printed page,

the vibrations they set up in fact the volume which they enclose-immense and horizontal in the case of FER, infinite but with a note of disquiet for AVION

The structure of the sentence would also have to go:

The structure of the sentence has caused the same damage as the rhythms of poetry. What a difference there is between: "The tiger is coming to drink at the river bank" and the single name: TIGER!

The poet is left with words stripped of all worn out structural trappings:

Words are as hard and as scintillating as diamonds.

The word is an element.

The word is a material.

The word is an object.

For those who know how to look at them, some words possess a remarkable topography.

TRANSATLANTIQUE, for instance, rocks and seas, peaks and abysses--why, even the moon cannot be any richer in craters and parched valleys, in rhythms and beauties.

Words are the visible aspects of ideas just as the trunk and the foliage are the visible aspects of a tree.

Underneath are the roots, the ideas.

We must grind our well-worn language to dust--in other words, make the individual words scintillate.

We must do away with imprecise terms, adjectives, for example--or again use them as nouns, as substance, that is to say, as material.

But the word cannot be set on the page unless it is in harmony with the atmosphere of the poem.

What is more, the value of each word is modified by the fact that the poem belongs no longer to a flux but to a static system.

above copied from: http://www.391.org/manifestos/pierregarnier_manifesto.htm

Manifesto of Polypoetry, Enzo Minarelli

1987

1. Only the development of the new technologies will mark the progress of sound poetry: the electronic media and the computer are and will be the true protagonists.

2. The object "language" must be increasingly investigated in its smallest and largest parts: the word, basis of sound experimentation, takes the characters of multi-word, broken into its inner body, restitched at its exterior. The word must be able to free its own manifold sonorities.

3. The exploitation of sound has no limits. It must be carried beyond the border of pure noise, a signifying noise: linguistic and oral ambiguity has a sense only if it completely uses the instruments of the mouth.

4. The recovery of the sense of time (the minute, the second), apart from the laws of harmony and disharmony, because only through editing is the right parameter of synthesis and balance found.

5. Language is rhythm. Tone values are real vectors of meaning: first an act of rationality, then an act of emotion.

6. Polypoetry is devised and realized for the live show; it gives to sound poetry the role of prima donna or starting point to link relations with musicality (accompaniment or rhythmic line), mimicry, movement, and dance (acting or extension or integration of the sound text), image (television or slide projection, by association, explanation or alternative and redundancy), light, space, costumes, and objects.

Above copied from: http://www.391.org/manifestos/enzominarelli_manifestoofpolypoetry.htm

VISUAL POETRY: Artists' Writing / Writers' Art, Alan Prohm

Poetry is Art

Nothing better illustrates the problem of literature's ambiguous aesthetic status than the term "artists' books". If literature were truly considered an art, this phrase would be redundant. Any cheap paperback edition of Shakespeare, or Baudelaire, or Haavikko, would - quite obviously - count as an "artist's book". But it doesn't.

Why doesn't it? Why, to put it differently, don't students of literature have to take studio courses? Or, the other way around: Why isn't poetry taught in the art department, along with painting and sculpture, or even in the increasingly common "intermedia" or "interarts" programs?

To question the separations that exist between literature and art is to dig at some of the fundamental distinctions structuring western culture and contemporary consciousness: language vs. matter, word vs. thing, thought vs. perception, content vs. form, mind vs. body. However much they may have in common, poetry and painting, poetry and music, literature and art, are taught in different departments, and according to different pedagogies, because they are believed to deal with fundamentally different things, and to involve fundamentally different human faculties.

Visual poetry, on the other hand, one of the many modern trends to begin mixing once-separate art forms, challenges these assumptions. To engage a visual "poem", to try to "understand" it in the multiple ways it requires, is to watch these distinctions lose their certainty. If the distinctions do not disappear altogether, they at least blur significantly: words behave as things, or things as words, thought takes on perceptual qualities and there is often no way of separating the content of a poem from its visible forms, what it means from how it looks.

As the distinctions blur, the modes of culture and consciousness built on them discover new freedoms, new possibilities, new ideas of art emerging out of new relationships between materials and our modes of perceiving or " reading " them. Where a pattern of colors and lines, or the expressive likeness of a natural object, are as important to the logical or lyrical argument of a text as any words that might be there, we are dealing with both art and literature simultaneously, inseparably, as one thing - litarture - not just two things set next to each other. We are not on one side of the cultural divide or the other, and we can no longer use only half our mind to process it.

The Verbal is Visual

Historically, visual poetries originate in an exploration of, or in an exultation in, the visual forms of language. Whether we consider the millennial arts of calligraphy (East Asian, Islamic or European), the ancient tradition of shaped-text or "pattern" poetry (Simias of Rhodes, ca. 300BC; George Herbert, 17 th Century; Guillaume Apollinaire, 1910's, etc.) or the particularly modern practice of spatialized free verse that begins with Stéphane Mallarmé at the end of the 19 th Century, visual poetry emerges where writing realizes the complementary potentials of its own visual forms.

In the case of Mallarmé, for example, whose Un coup de dés jamais n'abolira le hasard ( A Throw of the Dice Will Never Abolish Chance) (1897) represents the true beginning of visual poetry as a sustained and self-aware practice, the visual component was a way for printed language to do more of what it was doing already. Mallarmé, the high poet of Symbolisme , was the most literary, the most dedicatedly verbal of poets, and was not interested in "mixing" the medium of his poetic expression by bringing in foreign visual elements. On the other hand his very dedication to language as an art, to poetry as an art of ideas that is reliant on an art of sound, led him to discover the role typography and spatial form could play in replacing the poet's voice on the printed page. For him the visual layout of a text, varying the typeface, size and positioning of words, was a way of presenting a poem as its own performance score, of delivering language with just the right emphasis or delay to maximize its poetic effect. Visual variations were to produce variations in how the text sounded in the inner ear of the reader, larger words appearing louder, smaller words softer and less intoned, while loose spacing would slow the reading, allowing each word more resonance and ambiguity.

Printed language is always visual, and so if those cheap paperbacks of Shakespeare or Haavikko are poetry, they should count as visual poetry, too. The difference is that in conventional printing, as in conventional writing, the visual aspects of the language are kept as standardized as possible, so as to be effectively invisible. Seeing the text, needing to notice specific articulations in its visible form, would distract from reading it, which in the traditional conception requires us to ignore the body of the text (typography, spacing, margins, ink quality, paper) in order to grasp the spirit. In visual poetry, body and spirit are reunited, and the visible is embraced as a rich possible source of meanings. Potentially, everything is used.

The Visual is Language

The emergence of visual poetry at the experimental margins of literature parallels the rise of print advertising and other forms of visual communication at the heart of modern consumer society. Mallarmé was in part attempting to turn the blatant attention-getting strategies of newspaper typography to higher literary purposes, and the Dadaist, Futurist and Surrealist poets all made active use of the product labels, slogans and commercial iconography that had come to characterize their increasingly visual culture, and to seriously challenge the hegemony of religious and "high art" symbols in the visual imaginary.
The fact that visual poetry today remains a marginal practice, rarely given much attention within the academy, is strange considering mainstream literature's own anxieties in the face of the advancing visualization, or de-literarification, of culture. Where conventional literature now appears marginal, even archaic, within a cultural formation which increasingly privileges modes of viewing and mediated interactivity over traditional reading, visual poetry deserves recognition for having long ago assumed a position much more central to the major media shifts at work within culture.
If visual poetry's founding intuition was that writing was already visual and the visual could be used, its full maturity came with the realization that visual images are already a language, or many languages, available for writing in.

The advancing mastery of visual communication evidenced in advertising and the mass media, together with the semiotic analysis that allowed these media to be understood as linguistic or "language-like" systems, gave rise to the now-common notion of visual language. Obviously, it would seem in retrospect, if there was visual language there should be visual poetry. And particularly in the 1960's and 70's, when the semiotic analysis of visual media was applied to the wide-spread socio-political critique of media's manipulative powers, a growing number of "engaged" writers identified visual language as the key terrain on which to do the poetic work of challenging official systems of representation.

Concrete in the Visual Mix

This second realization, that poetry could move beyond the visual aspects of writing and employ any type of visuals as signs in a poetic construction, was delayed for many years by one of visual poetry's own greatest successes. Emerging in the 1950's (simultaneously in Switzerland and Brazil), the movement known as concrete poetry achieved the highest cultural profile and greatest literary influence visual poetry as such has yet enjoyed. Replacing linguistic syntax with the logics of spatial structure and material presence, concretism sought to evolve a new art of words in which seeing and reading were called upon to do equal work in the production of meaning. The "catchiness" and conceptual poignancy of many concrete poems and the seeming endlessness of the possibilities it offered brought the form a real popularity, and the clarity of its theoretical statements (in particular the writings of Eugen Gomringer and the Brazilian Noigandres poets, Haroldo de Campos, Augusto de Campos and Decio Pignatari), won a small place for it in many academic curricula and literary anthologies from the 60's onward.

Gomringer's stated enthusiasm for concretism as a literary form had a lot to do with his interest in the international signage systems being developed for airports and train stations during the mobility boom of the 1950's. He saw his literary activity as conspiring in the advancement of important worldwide, trans-national modes of communication.

Despite the obvious role imagery and icons would have to play in such languages, his own compositional theory and practice propagated an orthodoxy that effectively excluded the use of non-verbal elements. The (relative) worldwide success and academic influence of concretism thus limited the semiotic range of visual poetry at the moment of its broadest public recognition. It wasn't until that orthodoxy softened, with the "clean" concretism of the 50's yielding to the "dirty" concretism, poesia visiva and poesie élémentaire or "langue DOC(K)S" of the following decades, that the dominant trends in visual poetry resumed the full range of visual language resources available to them. However, because no single movement or trend since concretism has attained the same visibility, the fame of that movement continues to interfere with the spreading of a fuller picture of what visual poetry is or might become. Indeed, for many, "concrete poetry" is "visual poetry", rather than just an historically and generically limited sub-species of it; though this prejudice is fading . Perhaps the single most fully realized vision of what a rigorous visual poetry might be beyond concretism, featuring intricately readable texts of both language and visuals, is to be found in the extensive and beautiful work of Klaus Peter Dencker.

Objects, Actions, Architecture

Visual poetry is often described as an "intermedia", a fusion of different media in an integrated practice. In the simplest version , and this is true for Dencker, the media fused are language and the graphic arts, or language and visual art more generally. Usually what we are dealing with are two-dimensional works on paper, perhaps created for display on a gallery wall but eventually transferable to the pages of a book, where it can be viewed/read in a format comfortably preserving at least some aspects of the conventional poetry experience. But boxes, clothing, short films, odd stage performances, holographic projections, bread, rooms, buildings, and information architectures are all on the long list of media that have been used in avowedly "poetic" productions; some of them without the intervention, written or spoken, of even a single word. Amid such a variety of forms, it would seem that the term "visual poetry" is either ill defined, or too all-encompassing to have any useful meaning. And that may be true. As a literary genre, visual poetry sprawls beyond definable boundaries, but as a culture of experiment and exploration there are certain underlying coherences that unite much of what is otherwise a very disparate corpus.

One underlying logic accounting for many very different kinds of work goes as follows: if poetry is the art of language, any artwork made of words or letters is a poetic work. Language here is taken quite literally, or rather "concretely", pushing the logic of concretism to its material extremes. Thus, especially in the 70's and 80's, a huge range of works is generated by artists/poets exploring the endless ways in which language manifests among the objects and devices of our everyday material culture. Archaic letterpress type, LED screens, the brilliant but obsolete IBM Selectric typewriter ball, ABC refrigerator magnets, letter-shaped pasta, Kellog's-brand "Alphabits" cereal, or things, like bagels, that just look like letters - all these become material inspirations for a new type of poetic play. Sometimes this play consists in composing poetic texts whose meanings incorporate the generally anti-literary values of their material base. But often the play is as much sculpture, performance or conceptual art as it is writing, and the poetry of it has more to do with imagining poetic potentials into objects and devices that are outside of literature, but may ironically reflect new possibilities back onto it. Since these materials highlight how language is embodied as tool or toy in every aspect of life, a major sub-text of such explorations is language's problematic role in constituting us as socialized, gendered and ideological beings.

Another logic that can help us understand another wide range of works is the semiotic logic that sees potentially everything as a sign in a language-like system, and every sign as a possible resource for poetic composition. On the one hand this explains widespread experiments (e.g. Max Ernst's Une semaine de bonté , Giuseppe Steiner's Drawn States of Mind , or the collage works of John Heartfield or Gerhard Rühm) in using visual imagery to construct texts that in some way "read" like poems, often with little or no verbal language involved, or alternatively texts whose poetry arises precisely in the tensions and interplay between visual and verbal meanings (cf. Clemente Padin or Julien Blaine). On the other it explains the fascination with pre-existing visual codes - semaphore, directional signage, assembly instructions, body language, sign language, the "language of flowers", fashion, dance-step notation, gang signals, weather maps, every manner of diagram and technical illustration - and their ambition to recruit the conventional or prosaic meanings of these systems into poetic service. Whether such codes are employed carefully to constitute legible "texts", or more abstractly or playfully, and whether the works employing them are presented on the page or on stage, in the gallery, on screen, or out in the urban environment, they reinforce the notion of poetry even as they abandon the medium it is traditionally done in. The notion that poetry is a liberatory extra, a potential trapped in every system, waiting for release, an imaginative surplus of meaning that breaks the conventions of language to free up new possibilities for expression and experience, this is the age-old mission of poetry served in a new way by these radically innovative forms.

Poetry - the remainder

Historically visual poetry is associated with the exhaustion of traditional literary forms, with the crisis of literature as such. And as a parallel or counter-literary activity, it can be seen as asking, and perhaps answering, two critical, related questions. First, what is left for poetry, when everything has been done, when culture itself, which once held poetry in the highest esteem, seems done with poetry? And secondly, what is left of poetry, when the traditional forms have been abandoned, and we want to keep using the word?

To address the first question first, visual poetry per se may not be the future of poetry, but it is certainly part of the bundle of experimental practices that have already identified and established a future for poetic activity in a post-literary age, where language and literacy themselves are being radically redefined by new modes of inscription and communication. The computer age has given rise already to several waves of poetic innovation, in many of which the efforts and experience of visual poets have played important roles. Appearing in the 1980's, hypertext poetry began exploring the poetic potentials of spatialized, interactive text navigation even before the internet emerged as a mass extension of those potentials into the basic functioning of our wired society. Then, since the 90's, the development of text and text-image animation tools (e.g. Java, Flash , Director) has supported the emergence of new kinetic poetries . These new forms, arising at the forefront of our evolving language- and media-scapes, are fulfilling important potentials intuited since the very beginnings of v isual poetry. On the one hand, expanding on earlier experiments with cinema, they have added movement to the resources of textual presentation, literalizing an effect Mallarmé could only hint at through suggestive typography. On the other hand they have brought the poetic enterprise into an environment of near-total media integration - text, sound, image, animation and video blended in a single compositional platform, and viewable on a single screen, or navigable within a single immersive virtual environment.

Here we have in some sense the imaginable maximum of the poetic text, the complete realization of Apollinaire's famous futuristic vision from 1917:

a new art (vaster than the simple art of words), where, conductors of an orchestra of unheard-of extent, ...[poets] will have at their disposal: the whole world, its noise and its appearances, thought and human language, song, dance, all the arts and all the artifices, more mirages yet than Morgane could have lifted on Mont Gibel, to compose the book seen and read of the future. (Apollinaire, "L'Ésprit nouveau et les poètes")

But add to this still the possibilities of full interactivity, co-authoring, tele-presence, multiple-user interaction, computer text/sound/image generation, and the self-organization of media environments as virtual worlds, and we enter the 21 st Century not merely at the conceivable limit of our conventional notion of a text, but in fact on the doorstep of a radically new and alien paradigm of textual authoring and participatory reception, a paradigm David Seaman refers to as "recombinant poetics", where the poetic enterprise is at work in still half-unknown territories into which our culture, our society and our consciousness are rapidly following.

So plenty left for poetry: to explore the creative potentials of each new (visual) media regime as it emerges. But what is left of poetry, when those explorations lead it beyond the limit of poetry's traditional materials - voice, page, book - beyond even language as traditionally understood? Already the term, "visual poetry", should alert us to a strain this trend of experimentalism is placing (along with its sister forms, sound poetry, action poetry, and computer or "code" poetry) on our fundamental notion of what poetry is. The effect, after over a century of such questioning and experimentation, has been a progressive differentiation of poetry as principle from the conditions of its historical embodiment, a distillation of poetry as an essence out from the conventional poems of words in which that essential thing was first made known, named and propagated. If poetry in this sense is the principle of fundamental creativity and liberatory play within systems of meaning and representation, then moving beyond the traditional forms of literary language and publication can be seen as simple evolution in some cases, or in others as a survival strategy.

If poetry feels endangered today (as it perhaps has always felt endangered), it is not because the cultural institutions of high literary art have lost much of their prestige, nor simply because of any possible decline in literacy or the social importance of words and reading. A greater danger lies in the encroaching uniformity of cultural messaging and human experience, the progressive domination of public discourse and common thought by corporate media, and of corporate media by a narrow set of political allegiances. What is in jeapordy is not state funding for the humanities, but an ecology of human alternatives, as the world increasingly submits to a single political/economic model and to a single version of what to expect from life, entailing the defeatist consensus that no large-scale, substantial change is possible. When poetry, as poetry, is no longer able to exert any effective leverage against these diminishments, there is no point in preserving it in its usual forms. Already in the 1950's the Situationists, who saw poetry as "the revolutionary moment of language" and developed an important critical poetics of visual media, had applied this test to poetry and declared: " One thing we can be sure of is that fake, officially tolerated poetry is no longer the poetic adventure of its era." Instead of continuing poetry within culture, they undertook t he direct poetic adventure of transforming everyday life outside it.

More recently, Steve McCaffery, without altogether abandoning poetry as a cultural activity, has argued "that contemporary poetics has reached an impasse in exclusively poetic territories", and argued that "an exclusive focus on the poem-as-such severely curtails the potential critical range of poetics," and that "for the latter to maintain a vital critical function then a radical readjustment of its trajectories seems required." McCaffery refers to this vocation of poetry outside of poetry as its "parapoetics". More than blending poetry with other media, as in "intermedia", parapoetics implies the contamination of non-literary discourses and societal forms with poetry's essentially critical/creative spirit. Thus, in looking to the future of poetry beyond literature, we can expect certain forms of visual poetry to remain highly relevant for poetically engaging society and the largely visual media that suffuse it. On the other hand, as our society and its forms of communication go on evolving together, we should not be surprised to lose sight of poetry even in the new places we have learned to look for it in. The impulse that first led poets to embrace visual materials, at the onset of our modern media regime, is now urging them to go further, to seek more effective forms in new, unexpected places. To escape the neutralizing and banalizing influence of official culture today, poets may have to go underground entirely, selling off all but the most essential of their creative/critical tools, to reemerge elsewhere without papers, and begin the search employment among the unsuspecting architects, legislators, news broadcasters, marketing executives and economists who seem to run our world.


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