Speaking About Genre: the Case of Concrete Poetry , Victoria Pineda

Assessing the question of genre with the help of a particular example, and not from a strictly theoretical point of view, proves to be a multifarious task. The genetic "question" thus becomes a constellation of genetic "questions." This paper will try to analyze some specific problems that arise from the concept of genre when studying the case of concrete poetry: from its beginnings to its development, production, and transmission; from its interpretation to its relation with traditional forms, and finally, in the context of what this paper calls the "intervention of other systems."
In the first place, it might be necessary to justify the use of the term "genre" when applied to concrete poetry. Apart from obvious reasons of methodological convenience, at least two theoretical frameworks (Mignolo's and Fowler's) would most likely endorse the identification of concrete poetry as a genre. According to Walter Mignolo, a genre is identified as a set of ideas linked to a particular label, and associated with a sufficient number of metatexts that account for it.(1) In Alastair Fowler's system, based on the categories of kind, subgenre, and mode, concrete poetry would be a "historical kind," not a "subgenre" (since it does not display the "same external characteristics with the corresponding kind, together with additional specification of content"), nor a "mode" (which is a "selection or abstraction from kind").(2)

I. Birth of a Genre: Polygenesis

In the origins of concrete poetry as a literary genre we find a paradigmatic example of the process that Fowler categorizes under the name of polygenesis. In dealing with the formation of genres, Fowler analyzes different possibilities. Monogenesis would explain how the start of a new genre is related to the achievements of particular writers, for "it remains true that a single writer's creativity can play a decisive part in originating a new kind." However, "in considering individual origins we also have to allow for the possibility of polygenesis," since "comparative studies have steered toward the conclusion that original creativity is often doubled, even in other literatures with their own independent lines of development" (KL 154). This kind of polygenesis precisely explains the case of concrete poetry.

In concrete poetry, however, polygenesis does not refer to two individual writers, as in Fowler's definition, but rather to one author on the one hand, and to a group of three on the other.(3) The one writer is the Swiss-Bolivian Eugen Gomringer who in the early riffles was in Switzerland working on a project he called "constellations" in the wake of Mallarme's Coup de des. Meanwhile, in 1954 Decio Pignatari and the brothers Augusto and Haroldo de Campos put together in Brazil a group they called "Noigandres," following in the steps of Ezra Pound. When the two parties met a few years later, they both realized that the forms they were developing were about the same. They were all engaged in experimenting with "verbovocovisual" (a term dating back to Joyce) values of the text, which partake "of the advantages of non-verbal communication, without renouncing the virtuality of the word" in literature.(4) For his own work Gomringer accepted and assimilated the new nomination "concrete poetry," that the Brazilian group had adopted from Kandinsky, who had used it a few years earlier to refer to pictorial objects that were not an abstraction of something figurative.

As we can see from these facts, the creation of the new genre is quite clearly determined in both time and space. Obviously the birth of concrete poetry did not happen ex nihilo, and even the "creators" of the genre acknowledged their "predecessors": Mallarme, Pound, Joyce, Cummings, and Apollinaire from literature; Mondrian and Max Bill from painting; Eisenstein from cinema; Webern from music. We are not dealing, however, with any of the processes described by Fowler (KL 171) as combination, aggregation ("several complete short works . . . grouped in an ordered collection"), inclusion ("a literary work may enclose another within it"), or generic mixture. In concrete poetry, instead, different elements are taken from different systems and incorporated into a completely new experience. Some of these elements, defined in the "Plano-piloto para poesia concreta" are the "prismatic subdivisions of ideas," the "ideogrammic method," the "organic inter-penetration of time and space," the "typographical techniques," the "perceptive ambivalence," the "montage," and so on.(5)

II. Intervention of Other Systems

The term that identifies the genre, the diversity of the predecessors' fields, and the elements taken from them, are all aspects that uncover one of the major difficulties when trying to define concrete poetry as a genre, namely, the variety of systems that intervene in it.(6) Concrete poetry does not present a case of parallel discourses, as would, for example, literature versus history, philosophy, or journalism, although it does allow for the interplay of various types of "discourse." Music, for example. Musical spaces, electronic music, and, of course, concrete music are some of the elements that affect the transmission of concrete poetry, as we will see later. From sculpture concrete poetry takes the concept of negative spaces,(7) which will also influence its transmission.(8) The contribution of mathematics includes elements from symbolic logic, and the combinatory system (permutation of letters).(9) Graphic art and advertising also play a significant role in the genre.(10) But of course its major influences are derived from painting. We face, then, a "form of poetic objectivation, relevant not only because of its constructive aspect, but also because of its expansion toward the visual, and toward sonority and movement" (Ss 252).(11)

At this point it seems inevitable to pose the question again: Is there a genre theory that accounts for the complex reality of concrete "texts"? Most theoretical approaches (Fowler, Hirsch, Bajtine, Mignolo, Lotman, Imbrie, Genette) deal with linguistic, literary, or discursive aspects of the text. But what about its nonlinguistic, nonliterary, and nondiscursive elements? Let us now look at possible solutions. In approaching the always intriguing question of the relation between poetry and painting, the starting point in contemporary art is, of course, Lessing. We will examine now some of the ideas expressed in his Laocoon,(12) and then we will attempt to trace (reviewing also the work of Benveniste,(13) Calabrese,(14) and Nadin [see Ss]) the different steps that lead to a satisfactory theoretical position.

A. Poetry/Painting; Texts as Units; The Signs of the Text

As it is well known, Lessing is, in the long tradition of commentators on the topos ut pictura poesis, the first author to establish clear distinctions and strict limits between the two arts. His Laocoon was written to counteract the "bad taste" and wrong judgments of the critics of his time, who "engendered in poetry the rage for description, and in painting the rage for allegorising, in the effort to turn the former into a speaking picture without really knowing what she can and should paint, and to turn the latter into a silent poem without considering in what measure she can express general concepts and not at the same time depart from her vocation and become a freakish kind of writing" (L 4).(15)

The essays contained in Laocoon are devoted to evince his beliefs about the unbridgeable gap between poetry and painting. The distance, according to Lessing, affects various levels: writing is progressive whereas painting is the representation of a static moment; writing can represent abstract concepts whereas painting cannot; poetry describes or imitates actions whereas painting imitates bodies;(16) and, above all, painting has to do with space, and poetry has to do with succession in time.(17)

Emile Benveniste can help in this matter. In "Semiologie de la langue," Benveniste analyzes the possible relationships between language and other systems. Although his observations are not entirely satisfactory for the solution of our problem, at least he opens up the possibility of a relationship, which Lessing had completely eliminated. Benveniste points out how language finds its unity and functioning principle in its semiotic character, which defines its nature and integrates it into a set of similar systems: "The character common to all systems and the criteria that govern their belonging to semiology are their being signifiers or signifieds, and their composition into significant units or signs" (Pl 51).(18)

Spoken language has a certain number of phonemes; written language has a certain number of letters; music has a certain number of notes. What about the visual arts? If it is true that in the written (and the spoken) language there is a fixed number of minimal units, phonemes and letters, what would these units be in painting? On the other hand, in the case that these units did exist, would there be rules to govern them in the way that syntactic or phonetic rules govern linguistic signs?(19) On account of these obstacles, Benveniste does not consider visual arts as semiotic systems, and he claims that individual artists create individual systems. The artist "institutes his or her oppositions in traits that he himself or she herself makes significant in their order" (Pl 58). In other words, "the significant relationships of artistic 'language' are to be discovered inside a work. Art is here just a particular piece of art, in which the artist freely places oppositions and values . . . according to criteria - conscious or unconscious - to which the whole composition bears witness" (Pl 59).(20)

But even in the case that the status of "system" could be granted to painting and literature, and that the relationship between the two systems could be fully explained, we would still be dealing with two systems that face each other, and not with two systems within one and the same "text."

Omar Calabrese proposes certain modifications to Benveniste's assumptions. What is really needed, he thinks, is a shift in the point of view. Following Umberto Eco, Calabrese shows the three most serious errors committed when undertaking the study of pictorial semiotics, namely: "the illusion that we can treat visual phenomena as if they were susceptible of sign analysis; the naive and dogmatic application of a linguistic model; the belief in a pictorial language completely constituted and perfectly working" (FS 10). On the contrary, it is necessary to start from a new perspective, "from the analysis of macrostructural, complex elements (which are nevertheless systemic ones) and not from the inquiry of minimal elements" (FS 13). What becomes relevant then as "unit" is the text itself, not the signs that make it up. In this way, linguistic or pictorial signs acquire a new value as components of a text. Therefore, they can both coexist (as in concrete poetry), and the difference in the systems should not disturb this coexistence; all the signs are at the same level.

Nadin's remarks only confirm the idea of equivalence of signs proposed by Benveniste. According to Benveniste, language is the only system whose meaning is articulated around two dimensions, whereas other systems have a unidimensional signification, which can be "either semiotic (politeness expressions, 'mudras') and non-semantic; or semantic (artistic expressions), and non-semiotic" (Pl 65).(21) However, in concrete poetry the system undergoes an alteration explained by Nadin: "Concrete poetry is a para-linguistic reality that may be identified because the linguistic signs which participate in it (together with so many other signs) do not intervene in the making up of meaning as units of languages with a double articulation, but as signs which oppose themselves to the second articulation" (Ss 253),(22) that is, linguistic signs in concrete poetry are equivalent to the elements of "artistic expressions" [expressions artistiques].

B. A "Literary" Genre

But then, to what extent can these texts be considered as "literature"? In what sense can they be "read" as "poetry"? Or, using Carole Ann Taylor's words, "Under what circumstances does a combination of visual and verbal media achieve the status of poetry and under what circumstances does the logic of vision and that of language interfere with each other in ways that cannot convincingly be labeled 'poetic'?"(23)

To get more deeply into the theories of "the literary" obviously goes far beyond the scope of the ideas presented in this paper, and so we do not have all the arms to fight the battle. But we do have Certain elements available which can help us observe how concrete poetry is located (according to some) or not (according to others) within the realm of literature. These elements include the traditional association of poetry and painting, the genre creators' testimony, and a set of metatexts that identify and define it. In his outline of the history of concrete poetry, Armando Zarate emphasizes the common origin of poetry and painting: "In spite of the obliging diligence of reciters, written poetry seems to unveil or remind that in its origin, it was born also a form of painting. This written word that entered, millennia ago, the magic circle, the sacred, the hieroglyph, is again [in concrete poetry], curiously enough, the word that breaks into pieces, the word that checks itself and comes back to its original nature, devoid of 'thing,' but a living matter and act."(24) The closeness of the two arts was first explained by Aristotle, and reformulated once again during the Renaissance.(25) Two centuries after Tasso, the topic still constituted the object of a good number of studies, such as Lessing's Laocoon. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, a renewed interest for experimentation in the field joins the old theoretical preoccupations. The practice of making literature into a picture was not entirely new, of course. The tradition began in ancient Greece (third century B.C.), was later developed in the Middle Ages (carmina figurata), and the Renaissance (emblems), and was even incorporated into the novel (Rabelais's Pantagruel).(26) The long path lead to the proliferation of what one might call "visual poems": Mallarme (Un Coup de des), Apollinaire (Calligrammes), Paul Eluard (Quelques-uns des mots), Ezra Pound (Cantos), E. E. Cummings (Is 5), Joyce (Finnegans Wake), Vicente Huidobro (Horizonte cuadrado), Octavio Paz (Blanco).

The evolution of traditional poetic forms, from more or less fixed rules to a more "free" poetry, alters the condition of poetry itself. Nadin observes how art has evolved during this century in such a way that it has acquired a new fundamental characteristic: specificity, concreteness. In this sense, poetic modernism responds to poetry's assimilation of its own mechanisms, and its abandonment of all ornamentation that blocks the access to poetic meaning: "Both progressive withdrawal of rhyme, measure, and rhythm, and even of metaphor, and de-poetization (realized by means of poetry . . .) represent an attack, from the inside, on the form, which is supposed to mask, to disguise, and to make difficult the access to poetic meaning" (Ss 251).(27)

Concrete poetry is just one instance that reveals the results of the process. This seems to be also the creators' intention, as Augusto de Campos states in "A moeda concreta da fala": "in poetry, by definition, all must be functional," and later, "the revolt of concrete poetry is not against language. It is against its nonfunctionality and its formulization. It is against appropriation by discourse which makes a formula of it."(28)

These words betray, at a second level, something crucial: In the "writing" of concrete poetry there is some kind of "poetic awareness" in the sense that what is being created is more or less consciously taken as poetry and nothing else. The essays and manifestos included in Teoria da Poesia Concreta point toward this direction. A few quotations will suffice: "a poem does not mean this or that, it means itself";(29) "if, in Sartre's opinion, poetry distinguishes itself from prose in that in prose words are signs whereas in poetry they are 'things,' here this distinction of generic kind steps up to an even sharper, more literal stage";(30) "concrete poetry places the poem under the focus of a rigorously organizing conscience, which acts upon the poetic material in the broadest, most consistent manner";(31) "concrete poetry substitutes space for the verse line, as the poem's formal base."(32)

The publication of metatexts in specialized journals, and the interest for this new poetic form in the field of literary studies by a good number of university departments, further prove that the community accepts these texts as "literary." And although it is a fact that concrete poetry is also the object of a few studies in publications related to typography (Journal of Typographic Research, Visible Language), even those articles give us testimonies such as Mary Ellen Solt's: "Poets, typographers, and critics involved in the international concrete poetry movement have tended to overstress the relationship to constructive art, forgetting that poetry is first and foremost a form of literature,"(33) or Mike Weaver's: "concrete poetry is an aesthetic movement in poetry."(34) Nadin's statement follows the same path: "Form of poetic objectivation" (Ss 258); "the poetics of concretism - for it is poetics we are all dealing with" (Ss 251), and so forth.(35) There are some experts, however, who considering "emotion and subjectivity as inherent qualities of the lyric genre" (AP 242), take concrete poetry as just "an interesting but unpoetic manipulation of concepts" (AP 224). As we have pointed out, though, concrete poetry seeks precisely to free itself from all subjectivity, shifting the "lyrical" focus, and placing it in the aesthetic side of the process, as it always happens with any kind of message whose dominant function is centered on the message itself.

III. Production and Transmission; Poets and Typographers

The fact that the interrelation of systems also affects production techniques puts us in a new problematic situation. Production and transmission of concrete poetry cannot be achieved through conventional methods only. Photography, engraving, color, graphic design, collage, moving pictures . . . have become part of these texts, and that produces very peculiar "poem books," when it does not jeopardize their very existence. Many times what we see in anthologies are not the "real" poems, but mere "reproductions" (while the originals are shown at exhibitions). It cannot be forgotten that concrete poetry has evolved "along the lines of industrial design and architecture."(36) That is why now poets influence the graphic arts, and "the anthologies of concrete poetry have become veritable picture books" (234).

Poets are aware of how strong the link between poetry and graphic art is, and how greatly they influence each other, and they want to take advantage of the new possibilities. "If concrete poetry is to remain a viable new genre, its visual potential must be liberated rather than restricted" (TV 109); "most [concrete poets] are unwilling to commit themselves exclusively to one type of style and to close the door against any of the visual and expressive possibilities available in the typographical medium" (TV 111). Therefore in concrete poetry the aesthetic qualities of the shape of letters and other graphic signs are consciously used by the poet in order to intensify the meaning of the words. Hence, the poet ought to be acquainted with typographic techniques, at least in theory. Practice is, of course, a different story, as Solt emphasizes quoting Gomringer: "When concrete poets try to be graphic artists and graphic artists try to be poets, the results are frequently inferior poetry, inferior design, or both" (TV 112). For in the production of this genre, unlike traditional poetry, the intervention of two (maybe more if we add performance) "experts" is needed. Poets usually send suggestions to the typographer regarding the treatment they want for their texts. These suggestions are not normally transcribed when poems are printed, but Solt gives some examples of notes that she herself sent to the press accompanying her poems. In one of these notes, she makes clear that the poem "leaf" "requires a graceful serif face so that the hieroglyphic 'f' in subtly bolder type can be seen to fall through the poem. An italic face would overdo it, I feel. The poem should be placed upper-right on the page to suggest the poems written on Japanese scrolls [Typeface: Garamond]" (TV 118). We see how decisively the transformations in the poetic structure affect the production and transmission of written material.

In addition, another quality of concrete texts must be taken into account: since they are "poems," they should be able to be recited. Of course, recitation must necessarily undergo some kind of change, too. In the first place, it seems obvious that very few concrete poems could be recited without losing their true sense. What is usually done then is to adapt the poems to music, so that in exchange for the loss of visual force, oral/auditive expression is very much reinforced. The role of music, so extensively praised by the Noigandres group, becomes crucial in the performance of the texts. Pignatari remembers how a few poems, accompanied by Anton Webern's music and "adapted to voice were executed in the Teatro de Arena of Sao Paulo in November of 1955 by the 'Ars Nova' musical group."(37) Ronald Sousa also describes one of these readings, in this case of a poem by Pignatari: "'Beba Coca-Cola' has been performed in high choral style - completed with recorded belches for punctuation - in an arrangement by Klaus Dieter-Wolff as a part of a recording entitled 'Madrigal Ars Viva.'"(38) The combination of poetry and music is of course subject to a number of variations, since the elements in the poetic text can be reorganized, repeated, or even modified. Therefore the reading of concrete poetry "does not depend, as traditional poetry does, upon a fixed, linear text for its communication" (210). The role not only of the performer or the adapter, but also of the receptor of concrete poetry, becomes fundamental, as explained by Claus Cluver: "Construction of variants is an operation many concrete texts invite the reader to perform."(39)

IV. Poem/Metapoem; Difficulties in Interpretation; Importance of Perception; The Function of Metatexts

The last question this paper will approach refers to the interpretation of concrete poetry. Due to all the novelties present in the genre, the reader, or let us say the receptor, of concrete poems must make an effort of adjustment at two levels. First, readers must adapt their expectations until they find the new "type of meaning," using E. D. Hirsch's terminology.(40) Second, in concrete poetry a second level of adjustment has to take place: expectations about the function of interpretation itself must also be modified. Cluver claims that concrete texts "do not curtail the referential qualities of the verbal material of which they are composed. . . . They communicate primarily their own structure, which is their proper 'content'" (RV 138). Or, as we saw earlier, language has lost its second level of articulation. That is why for the unwarned reader, "the very label 'poem' may arouse many expectations that the text will not fulfill" (RV 140). The most widespread proposal on how to read a concrete poem, defended by Cluver, Nadin, and Weaver, tends to the abandonment of what is usually taken as "interpretation," and its substitution by a more useful activity: perception.(41) Traditionally, the reader "is used to looking 'through' a text rather than 'at' it" (RV 140). The concept of perception, outlined here in such a shallow manner, is broadly developed by Mike Weaver, who asserts that "the act of perception itself is the first preoccupation of concrete poetry" (CP 294). The emphasis falls on formal values, "on the micro-aesthetic of perception rather than on the macro-aesthetic of attitude," in such a way that "energy is directed towards solving problems of scale, movement, sequential relations, time, stamina, and, above all, the identification of forms" (CP 294). All that is asked from the "receptors" (new form of "readers") is that they have their capacity of sensory stimulation ready, and just that, since "a capacity for fantasy, or self-stimulation of the notoriously 'literary' kind, is not required. To participate in the concrete poem means no more (no less) than paying active attention in perceiving" (CP 295).

Weaver's opinion, somewhat radical, eliminates the possibility of interpretation as an intellectual exercise. Mihai Nadin, along the same line, allows nevertheless for a certain degree of intellectual activity: "Poetic meaning is not perceived by reason alone (after a certain decoding process), or by sensitivity alone (perception of the shape, for example), but by both of them - influencing each other - at the same time" (Ss 257).(42) At any rate, both Weaver and Nadin are advocating the importance of sensory experience as a process, which had already been proposed by Susan Sontag: "Interpretation takes the sensory experience of the work of art for granted, and proceeds from there."(43)

The adjustment of expectations about the function of interpretation is fundamental for the acceptance of concrete poetry as a genre. Carole Ann Taylor's study offers a remarkable example of what happens, or may happen, when the adjustment does not take place. Taylor's criticism of concrete poetry shows an attitude linked to the traditional concept of interpretation in literature. Even her treatment of the relation between poetry and painting reminds us of Lessing's ideas: "Poems elicit a sense of beginning and ending whereas paintings elicit little sense of starting and finishing" (AP 232). As far as expectation adjustment is concerned, it is noteworthy that Taylor deems "profundity," "duration," and "social function" essential features of poetry. Since concrete poetry does not respond to these prerequisites, it should be ruled out from poetic discourse, for "these techniques abolish sequence by abolishing the internal relations between words that we usually think of as providing the richness and depth of poetry" (AP 236). And yet such a process is seen by Augusto de Campos as a waning of the word's strength, since it "deprives the word of its own vitality, transforming it then in a tumulus-taboo, dead cell in a living organism" (Mc 114).(44) The poem communicates itself; there is nothing "profound" about it: all is in the surface.

On the other hand, the structure of concrete poetry, its sometimes ephemeral configuration, its closeness to graphic art, advertising, and mass media techniques, inscribe the genre within the communication process to which the modern consumer is accustomed: newspaper headlines, simplified syntax. In other words, "high speed communication,"(45) which by the way justifies and validates the theoretical principles that concrete poets hold.(46) Again, this peculiarity is seen by Taylor as one more "weakness" of concrete poetry, because "such objects may fascinate momentarily, but the durability of their appeal seems limited" therefore running the risk of reducing "messages to mementos" (AP 237).

Finally, a third manifestation of the lack of adjustment takes place in the pragmatic value granted to poetry. Taylor accuses concrete poetry of restricting itself to "celebratory, affirmative values, a pleasure with the tendency to turn away from the real world's pain," and because of that, "such poetry cannot give birth to a sustained, focussed criticism of personal and social malaise, cannot make fine and particularized enough distinctions to shake us out of apathy or - however delightful, however pleasureable - to open our eyes to the connections between our own patness and the suffering of others" (AP 234).

These words, however, are far from agreeing with Augusto de Campos's opinion on the "social mission" of poetry: "The true social mission of poetry would be to stir latent energies in language so as to overthrow its petrifying dogmas, and to revitalize it. This is a mission that takes place in the ethic and aesthetic exigences of true poetry, which prefers running the risk of being unknown rather than being labelled by the inquisitorial patterns of language" (Mc 114).(47)

The comparison of the two statements uncovers a fundamental aspect of the question of genre, namely, the way in which metatexts function in the process of text reception as establishers of a "reading norm." At a different level it can also be observed that metatexts have, or they can have, or they think they do have, the ability of solving the genre problem, at least partially: metatexts analyze texts and the circumstances that surround them, or that arise from them, and with all this material, they come to general conclusions about the inclusion or exclusion of a text in a genre, about "the literary," about "labels," and so forth.

The "problems" of concrete poetry do not end here. What remains to be examined includes, for example, the evolution of the genre (how semiotic poetry, where verbal signs have definitely been eliminated, comes from concrete poetry), its present state, or the questions generated by a "literary" genre arising within the semiotics of the visual. All of it, however, would fall outside the scope of these pages, focused only on the subject of genre. In them, this paper has tried to illustrate with the example of concrete poetry some of the many problems that the question of genre may stir up at a theoretical level, and reciprocally, to elucidate, with the help of a few theoretical principles, the comprehension of concrete poetry as a literary genre.

UNIVERSIDAD DE EXTREMADURA



NOTES

1 Walter Mignolo, Elementos para una teoria del texto literario (Barcelona, 1978).

2 Alastair Fowler, Kinds of Literature: An Introduction to the Theory of Genres and Modes (Cambridge, Mass., 1989), pp. 55-56; hereafter cited in text as KL.

3 The external history of the genre can be followed in Mary Ellen Solt's anthology Concrete Poetry: A World View (Bloomington, Ind., 1968). Other aspects are studied by Eniko Bollobas, "Poetry of Visual Enactment: The Concrete Poem," Word and Image, 2 (1986), 279-85; Antonio Chicharro Chamorro, "Notas para un analisis de 'la poesia concreto-visual,'" in Estudios sobre literatura y arte dedicados al profesor Emilio Orozco Diaz (Granada, 1979), vol. 1, pp. 377-88; Claus Cluver, "Brazilian Concrete: Painting, Poetry, Time, and Space," in Literature and the Other Arts, vol. 3 of Proceedings of the IXth Congress of the International Comparative Literature Association, ed. Zoran Konstantinovic, Steven P. Scher, and Ulrich Weisstein (Innsbruck, 1979), pp. 207-13, and "From Imagism to Concrete Poetry: Breakthrough or Blind Alley?" in Amerikanische Lyrik: Perspektiven und Interpretationen, ed. Rudolf Haas (Berlin, 1987), pp. 113-30; Liesbeth Crommelin, Klaukteksten, konkrete poesie, visuale teksten (Amsterdam, 1971); Harald Hartung, Experimentelle Literatur und Konkrete Poesie (Gottingen, 1975); John Jacob, "Principles of Concrete Structuralism," in Visual Literature Criticism, ed. Richard Kostelanetz (Carbondale, Ill., 1980), pp. 125-28; Thomas Kopfermann, Theorische Positionen sur Konkreten Poesie (Tubingen, 1975); G. M. Lang, "From the Pictograph to the Metapoem: Realms of Concrete Literary Reference in Brazilian Concrete Poetry," Revista Canadiense de Estudios Hispanicos, 3 (1978-79), 101-20; Enrique Sacerio-Gari, "The Wake of Form in Concrete Poetry," Poesis, 7 (1986), 15-26; Von fur uber Heinz Gappmayr, ed. Peter Weiermair (Zirndorf, 1985).

4 Augusto de Campos, Decio Pignatari, and Haroldo de Campos, "Plano-piloto para poesia concreta," originally published in Noigandres (1958), and included later in Teoria da Poesia Concreta. Textos Criticos e Manifestos. 1950-1960 (Sao Paulo, 1975). All quotations from manifestos are taken from this edition. "Das vantagens da comunicacao nao-verbal, sem abdicar das virtualidades da palavra" (p. 157). Translations of this and other non-English texts throughout this paper are mine, except those from Laocoon.

5 "subdivisions prismatiques de l'idee," "metodo ideogramico," "interpenetracao organica de tempo e espaco," "recursos tipograficos," "ambivalencia perceptiva," "montagem" (p. 156).

6 The term "system" is used here in a very broad sense, without considering in detail in what manner, and to what extent, painting, sculpture, or music are true "systems," or what are the rules that govern them.

7 As implied in Alfred J. MacAdam, "Decio Pignatari: Retrato en Blanco y Negro," Revista Iberoamericana 43 (1977), 98-99. See also Roland Grass, "Concrete Treatment of Space," in Kostelanetz, Visual Literature Criticism, pp. 135-40.

8 See figs. 91, 104, and 107 in Solt, Concrete Poetry.

9 See Armando Zarate's comment (Antes de la vanguardia, ed. Rodolfo Alonso [Buenos Aires, 1976], p. 113) on Peirce and Morris's "New Poetry, New Language." See also Fowler's example (p. 157) and Mihai Nadin's analogy of a concrete poem being at the same time a mathematical game ("Sur le sens de la poesie concrete," Poetique, 42 [1980], 250-64, 262); hereafter cited in text as Ss.

10 Jon M. Tolman ("The Context of a Vanguard: Toward a Definition of Concrete Poetry," Poetics Today, 3, no. 3 [1982], 149-66), explaining how art and business are not necessarily exclusive, provides us with this anecdote: "Pignatari himself established a successful ad agency in Sao Paulo for a number of years, and one of his ads is usually included in concrete anthologies. In his 'Disenformio' (an anti-diarrheal medicine) the letters of the product invade and consume the 'intestinal disturbance.' The ad is at once a highly effective commercial message (part of whose effectiveness is subliminal) and a demonstration that what works has artistic value" (p. 161). This is not an isolated case, as anyone can verify at some ophthalmologists' offices.

11 "forme d'objectivation poetique, pertinente par son aspect constructif ainsi que par l'expansion vers le visuel, le sonore et le mouvement."

12 Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Laocoon or the Limits of Painting and Prose, ed. William A. Steel (London, 1930); hereafter cited in text as L.

13 Emile Benveniste, Problemes de linguistique generale (Paris, 1974), vol. 2, esp. ch. 3, "Semiologie de la langue"; hereafter cited in text as Pl.

14 Omar Calabrese, "From the Semiotics of painting to the Semiotics of Pictorial Text," Versus, 25 (1980), 3-27; hereafter cited in text as FS.

15 This single consideration would evict at once concrete poetry from the domains of art. Or maybe art forms such as concrete poetry would help to evict considerations like this one.

16 It would, however, be necessary to review the meaning of "action" in the context of figurative representation as gesture, posture, and so on.

17 It is worth noting, though, how Lessing himself offers a solution to his own dilemma, touching at the same time on the question of reception. He admits that works of art "are made not merely to be seen, but to be considered, to be long and repeatedly contemplated. . . . The more we see, the more must we be able to add by thinking" (L, p. 14), implying that temporal succession is not completely ignored in painting.

18 "Le caractere commun a tous les systemes et le critere de leur appartenance a la semiologie est leur propriete de signifier ou signifiance, et leur composition en unites de signifiance, ou signes."

19 Of course the same questions could be formulated in relation to literature. But since literature uses language as a vehicle of expression, one would tend to consider that the "units" of literature are the units of language. And yet it seems clear that literature does not mean written (or spoken) language.

20 "institue ses oppositions en traits qu'il rend lui-meme signifiants dans leur ordre"; "les relations signifiantes du 'langage' artistique sont a dicouvrir i l'interieur d'une composition. L'art n'est jamais ici qu'une oeuvre d'art particuliere, ou l'artiste instaure librement des oppositions et des valeurs . . . selon des criteres, conscientes ou non, dont la composition entiere porte temoignage et devient manifestation." This statement on the other hand, would fit the parameters of concrete poetry, but then again the linguistic component would be being ignored, and the problem would remain unsolved.

21 "ou semiotique (gestes de politesse; 'mudras'), sans semantique; ou semantique (expressions artistiques), sans semiotique."

22 "La poesie concrete est une realite para-linguistique qui peut etre identifiee par cela que les signes linguistiques que participent a sa realite (a cote de tant d'autres signes) ne participent pas a la constitution du sens en tant qu'unites de langage doublement articule mais en tant que signes qui s'opposent a la seconde articulation."

23 Carole Ann Taylor, A Poetics of Seeing: The Implications of Visual Form in Modern Poetry (New York, 1985); hereafter cited in text as AP. The usefulness of this study is two-fold: first, for suggesting the very question; secondly, for revealing an approach to visual poetry that could exemplify the problem of "interpretation" of concrete poetry. The title of the chapter that examines concrete texts ("No Ideas, Even in Things") and the bias in the formulation of the question quoted are, in my opinion, highly significant.

24 Zarate, Antes de la vanguardia, p. 67. "Pese a la diligencia oficiosa de los recitadores, la poesia que se escribe parece revelar o recordar que esta nacio tambien como una forma de la pintura. Esta palabra escrita, que hace milenios entro en el circulo de lo magico, de lo sagrado, del numero, del jeroglifico, vuelve a ser, curiosamente, la palabra que se fragmenta, que se ausculta y se reintegra a su naturaleza elemental, profana de 'cosa,' pero en tanto que es materia y acto vivo."

25 See, for example, Bernardo Tasso's "Ragionamento della Poesia": "According to Aristotle's opinion, poetry is an imitation of human actions, very similar, as Horace writes, to painting, because both imitate" ("La poesia, secondo la mente d'Aristotele, e una imitazione delle azioni umani, molto simile [si come Orazio scrive] alla pittura, perche l'una e l'altra imita"), quoted in Edward Williamson, Bernardo Tasso (Rome, 1951). Literature on the subject is so copious that even the most "selected" bibliography would exceed by far the limits of these pages. Let us only mention, for the sake of tradition, the famous study by R. W. Lee "Ut Pictura Poesis: The Humanistic Theory of Painting," Art Bulletin, 22 (1940), 197-269.

26 See a partial study of this tradition in Jose Romera Castillo, "Poesia figurativa medieval: Vigilan, monje hispano-latino del siglo X, precursor de la poesia concreto-visual," 1616, 3 (1980), 135-56.

27 "L'abandon progressif de la rime, de la mesure et du rythme, de la metaphore meme, la depoetisation (realisee avec les moyens de la poesie . . .) representent une attaque, de l'interieur, sur la forme censee masquer, dissimuler, rendre difficilement accessible l'acces au sens poetique."

28 Augusto de Campos,"A moeda concreta da fala," in Teoria da Poesia Concreta, p. 115; hereafter cited in text as Mc. "Na poesia, por definicao, tudo deve ser funcional"; "A revolta da poesia concreta nao e contra a linguagem. E contra a infuncionalidade e a formulizacao da linguagem. E contra a sua apropriacao pelo discurso que a converte em formula."

29 Decio Pignatari, "De poimento," in Teoria da Poesia Concreta, p. 9. "Um poema nao quer dizer isto nem aquilo, mas diz-se a si proprio."

30 Augusto de Campos, "Poesia Concreta," in Teoria da Poesia Concreta, p. 34. "Se, no entender de Sartre, a poesia se distingue da prosa pelo fato de que para esta as palavras sao signos enquanto para aquela sao 'coisas,' aqui essa distincao de ordem generica se transporta a um estagio mais agudo e literal."

31 Haroldo de Campos, "Evolucao de Formas: Poesia Concreta," in Teoria da Poesia Concreta, p. 51. "A poesia concreta coloca o poema sob o foco de una consciencia rigorosamente organizadora, que atua sobre o material de poesia de maneira mais ampla e mais consequente possivel."

32 Haroldo de Campos, "Aspectos da Poesia Concreta," in Teoria da Poesia Concreta, p. 100. "A poesia concreta substitui o verso, como base formal do poema, pelo espaco."

33 Mary Ellen Solt, "Typography and the Visual Concrete Poem," Visible Language, 6 (1972), 116; hereafter cited in text as TV.

34 Mike Weaver, "Concrete Poetry," Journal of Typographic Research, 1 (1967), 294; hereafter cited in text as CP.

35 "Forme d'objectivation poetique"; "la poetique du concretisme - car il s'agit bien d'une poetique."

36 Eugen Gomringer, "Poetry as a Means for Structuring of a Social Environment," Visible, Language, 10 (1976), 237; hereafter cited in text.

37 Decio Pignatari, "Concrete Poetry: A Brief Structural-Historical Guideline," Poetics Today, 3, no. 3 (1982), 192.

38 Ronald W. Sousa, "Concrete Poetry: A Contrastive Approach," Kentucky Romance Quarterly, 23 (1976), 209; hereafter cited in text.

39 Claus Cluver, "Reflections on Vervivocovisual Ideograms," Poetics Today, 3, no. 3 (1982), 140; hereafter cited in text as RV.

40 E.D. Hirsch, Validity in Interpretation (New Haven, 1967). For the explanation of this concept see ch. 3, "The Concept of Genre."

41 Obviously these "rules" on how to read concrete poetry are merely descriptive. This paper just wants to illustrate how metatexts propose solutions to the problem of reception.

42 "Le sens poetique n'est pas percu par la seule raison (apres un certain decodage) ou par la seule sensibilite (perception de la forme, par exemple) mais bien toujours par les deux a la fois, qui s'influencent reciproquement."

43 Susan Sontag, Against Interpretation and Other Essays (New York, 1961), p. 13.

44 "exaure a palavra sua vitalidade propria, tranformando-a logo num tumulo-tabu, celula-morta de un organismo vivo."

45 Tolman, "The Context of a Vanguard," 161.

46 Susan Sontag describes in a few words this type of art, "whose momentum is so rapid, whose address is so direct that the work can be . . . just what it is," in Against Interpetation, p. 11.

47 "A verdadeira missao social da poesia seria essa de arregimentar as energias latentes na linguagem para destronar os seus dogmas petrificadores, vivificando-a, donde a extremada exigencia etico-estetica da poesia realmente digna desse nome, que prefere correr o risco de ver 'desconhecida sua existencia' a ser etiquetada pelos padroes inquisitorios da linguagem."

reproduced from: http://www.ubu.com/papers/pineda.html

ART or BREND? Henry Flynt

1. Perhaps the most diseased justification the artist can give of his profession is to say that it is somehow scientific.

. . .

It is the creative personality him- or herself who has the most reason to object to the "scientific" justification of art. Again and again, the decisive step in artistic development has come when an artist produces a work that shatters all existing "scientific" laws of art, and yet is more important to the audience than all the works that "obey" the laws.


2. The artist or entertainer cannot exist without urging his or her product on other people. In fact, after developing his or her product, the artist goes out and tries to win public acceptance for it, to advertise and promote it, to sell it, to force it on people. If the public doesn't accept it as first, he or she is disappointed. He or she doesn't drop it, but repeatedly urges the project on them.

People have every reason, then, to ask the artist: Is your product good for me even if I don't like or enjoy it? This question really lays art open. One of the distinguishing features of art has always been that it is very difficult to defend art without referring to people's liking or enjoying it. (Functions of art such as making money or glorifying the social order are real enough, but they are rarely cited in defense of art. Let us put them aside.) When one artist shows his latest production to another, all he can usually ask is "Do you like it?" Once the "scientific" justification of art is discredited, the artist usually has to admit: If you don't like or enjoy my product, there's no reason why you should "consume" it.

There are exceptions. Art sometimes becomes the sole channel for political dissent, the sole arena in which oppressive social relations can be transcended. Even so, subjectivity of value remains a feature which distinguishes art and entertainment from other activities. Thus art is historically a leisure activity.


3. But there is a fundamental contradiction here. Consider the object which one person produces for the liking, the enjoyment of another. The value of the object is supposed to be that you just like it. It supposedly has a value which is entirely subjective and entirely within you, is a part of you. Yet--the object can exist without you, is completely outside you, is not your or your valuing, and has no inherent connection with you or your valuing. The product is not personal to you.

Such is the contradiction in much art and entertainment. It is unfortunate that is has to be stated so abstractly, but the discussion is about something so personal that there can be no interpersonal examples of it. Perhaps it will help to say that in appreciating or consuming art, you are always aware that it is not you, your valuing--yet your liking it, your valuing it is usually the only thing that can justify it.

In art and entertainment, objects are produced having no inherent connection with people's liking, yet the artist expects the objects to find their value in people's liking them. To be totally successful, the object would have to give you an experience in which the object is as personal to you as your valuing of it. Yet you remain aware that the object is another's product, separable from your liking of it. The artist tries to "be oneself" for other people, to "express oneself" for them.


4. There are experiences for each person which accomplish what art and entertainment fail to. The purpose of this essay is to make you aware of these experiences, by comparing and contrasting them with art. I have coined the term `brend' for these experiences.

Consider all of your doings, what you already do. Exclude the gratifying of physiological needs, physically harmful activities, and competitive activities. Concentrate on spontaneous self-amusement or play. That, is concentrate on everything you do because you like it, because you just like it as you do it.

Actually, these doings should be referred to as your just-likings. In saying that somebody likes an art exhibit, it is appropriate to distinguish the art exhibit from his or her liking of it. But in the case of your just-likings, it is not appropriate to distinguish the objects valued from your valuings, and the single term that covers both should be used.

When you write with a pencil, you are rarely attentive to the fact that the pencil was produced by somebody other than yourself. You can use something produced by somebody else without thinking about it. In your just-likings, you never notice that things are not produced by you. The essence of a just-liking is that in it, you are not aware that the object you value is less personal to you than your very valuing.

These just-likings are your "brend." Some of your dreams are brend; and some children's play is brend (but formal children's games aren't). In a sense, though, the attempt to give interpersonal examples of brend is futile, because the end result is neutral things or actions, cut off from the valuing which gives them their only significance; and because the end result suggests that brend is a deliberate activity like carrying out orders. The only examples for you are your just-likings, and you have to guess them by directly applying the abstract definition.

Even though brend is defined exclusively in terms of what you like, it is not necessarily solitary. The definition simply recognizes that valuing is an act of individuals; that to counterpose the likes of the community to the likes of the individuals who make it up is an ideological deception.


5. It is now possible to say that much art and entertainment are pseudo-brend; that your brend is the total originality beyond art; that your brend is the absolute self-expression and the absolute enjoyment beyond art. Can brend, then, replace art, can it expand to fill the space now occupied by art and entertainment? To ask this question is to ask when utopia will arrive, when the barrier between work and leisure will be broken down, when work will be abolished. Rather than holding out utopian promises, it is better to give whoever can grasp it the realization that the experience beyond art already occurs in his or her life--but is totally suppressed by the general repressiveness of society.


Note: the avant-garde artist may raise a final question. Can't art or entertainment compensate for its impersonality by having sheer newness as a value? Can't the very foreignness of the impersonal object be entertaining? Doesn't this happen with my "Mock Risk Games," for example?

The answer is that entertainmental newness is also subjective. What is entertainingly strange to one person is incomprehensible, annoying or irrelevant to another. The only difference between foreignness and other entertainment values is that brend does not have more foreignness than conventional entertainment does.

As for objective newness, or the objective value of "Mock Risk Games," these issues are so difficult that I have been unable to reach final conclusions about them.


published 1968

copied from: http://www.henryflynt.org/aesthetics/artbrend.html

The Artist's Reserved Rights Transfer And Sale Agreement (1971), Seth Siegelaub

Introduction to the Agreement made by Siegelaub in Leonardo, vol. 6, 1973.

1. The Agreement

The three-page Agreement on the following pages has been drafted by Bob Projansky, a New York lawyer, after my extensive discussions and correspondence with over 500 artists, dealers, collectors, museum people, critics and others involved in the day-to-day workings of the international art world.

The Agreement has been designed to remedy some generally acknowledged inequities in the art world, particularly artists' lack of control over the use of their work and participation in its economics after they no longer own it.

The Agreement form has been written with special awareness of the current ordinary practices and economic realities of the art world particularly its private, cash and informal nature, with careful regard for the interests and motives of all concerned.

It is expected to be the standard form for all transfer and sale of all contemporary art and has been made as fair, simple and useful as possible. It can be used either as presented here or slightly altered to fit your specific situation. If you have questions as regards any part of the agreement, you should consult your attorney.

2. Enforcement

First, let us put this question in perspective: most people will honor the Agreement because most people honor agreements. Those few people who will try to cheat you are likely to be the same kinds who will give you a hard time about signing the Agreement in the first place. Later owners will be more likely to try to cheat you than the first owner, with whom you or your dealer have had some face-to-face contact but there are strong reasons why both first and future owners should fulfill the contract's terms.

What happens if owner No. 2 sells your work to owner No. 3 and does not send you the transfer form? (He is not sending you the money, either.) Nothing happens. (You do not know about it yet.)

Sooner or later you do find out about it because it takes a lot of effort to conceal such sales and the 'grapevine' will get the news to you (or your dealer) anyway. To conceal the sale, owner No. 3 has to conceal the work and he is not going to hide a good and valuable work just to save a little money. And if he ever wants to sell it, repair it, appraise it or authenticate it, he MUST come to you (or your dealer). When you do find out about such a transaction-and you will-you sue owner No. 2, who will owe you 15% of the increase based on the price to owner No. 3 or on the value at the time you find out about it, which may be higher. Clearly, a seller (in this case No. 2) would be extremely foolish to take this chance, to risk having to pay a lot of money, just to save a little money.

As to falsifying values reported to the artist, there will be as much pressure from the new owner to put a falsely high value as from the old owner to put in a low value. There are real difficulties inherent in getting two people to lie in unison, especially if it only benefits one of them-the seller. In 95% of the cases the amount of money to be paid to the artist will not be enough to compel the collectors to lie to you.

You will note that in the event you have to sue to enforce any of your rights under the Agreement, article 19 gives you the right to recover reasonable attorney's fees in addition to whatever else you may be entitled to.

3. Summation

We realize that this Agreement is essentially unprecedented in the art world and that it just may cause a little rumbling and trembling; on the other hand, the ills it remedies are universally acknowledged to exist and no other practical way has ever been devised to cure them.

Whether or not, you, the artist, use it, is of course up to you; what we have given you is a legal tool that you can use yourself to establish ongoing rights when you transfer your work. This is a substitute for what has existed before-nothing.

We have done this for no recompense, for just the pleasure and challenge of the problem, feeling that should there ever be a questions about artists' rights in reference to their art, the artist is more right than anyone else.

-Seth Siegelaub, 1973.

The Agreements and the corresponding statement appear courtesy of The Siegelaub Collection & Archives at the Stichting Egress Foundation, Amsterdam.

Above copied from: http://www.primaryinformation.org/index.php?/projects/siegelaubartists-rights/

P R O C E S S I N G N O V E L T Y a transdisciplinary intermedia symposium on event-related potential, Julainne Sumich

The focus is on a transdisciplinary approach that can enlarge the research base for study and practice in Intermedia & The Timebased Arts. The interactions of different media, different systems, involve and evolve different kinds of movement and as such intermedia activities exist in connection with time. Consideration of the idea of novelty as an intermedia process presented from the perspective of different disciplines in relation to the event of this symposium has the potential give rise to new orientations in art theory and practice.

The orienting response is an involuntary shift of attention that appears to be a fundamental biological mechanism necessary for survival. Orienting is a rapid response to new (never experienced before), unexpected (out of context) or unpredictable stimuli, which essentially functions as a �what-is-it� detector�The detection of the event precedes orienting and, if it is sufficiently deviant, engenders the involuntary capture of attention, enabling the event to enter consciousness, thus permitting an evaluation of the stimulus. This could lead, if the event is deemed significant, to behavioural action. 1

The title draws on the language of neuroscience and biobehaviour and questions concerning what attracts attention; how that attraction or stimulus is processed, oriented, how it affects action; what the potential of its affect might become.

Keyterms: affect, attention; attraction; current source density map; event-related potential; environment; galvanic skin response; mismatch negativity; novelty; oddball event response; raw voltage map; world.

These terms have much in common with the event-making process art and technology of the 1960s in the U.S.A., Europe, and the U.K. stemming from diversely assembled collectives of artists, engineers, behavioural scientists, architects, writers, theorists such as USCO; the Intermedia Systems Corporation; E.A.T. Experimental Art and Technology; the Experimental Intermedia Foundation; Fluxus. Gene Youngblood gives an account of the thinking and action behind these Happenings in his book �Expanded Cinema� [1970] which begins with an introduction by the architect and engineer, Richard Buckminster Fuller. 2 Their events were a response to that decade�s psychedelia (the human mind or soul made visible) and the affect of new potential offered by computer technologies; events that took the interaction of art and technology beyond the art object into expanded fields of process or post-object art, where boundaries between distinct media art forms became increasingly blurred and practices increasingly intermedia. 3

In New Zealand at the University of Auckland Philip Dadson initiated the setting-up of a new section of Intermedia and the Time-based Arts within the Elam School of Fine Arts in 1982. Dadson had already established an innovative approach to making art from sound, amongst which was his combination of experimental instruments, constructed from readymade industrial and natural materials, inspired by experiences of Scratch orchestra, Fluxus, contemporary and world music. It was during sabbatical leave in New York where he had visited and performed at the Experimental Intermedia Foundation that Dadson became intrigued by the practice of intermedia and the novelty of the name, and saw it as fitting the program he envisioned for the time-based arts on his return to Elam. Course-work embraced the moving image, sound art, performance and installation art as both individual and collaborative practices, and with interdisciplinary potential in association with other art forms such sculpture, kinetics, music. With an experimental emphasis the program�s research base is the exploration and development of the synergistic potential between the processes of media. Aspects of Intermedia some of which are described below form the theoretical component of the course.

Intermedia is not an art discipline in the traditional sense. Its attention is on the sensorial and conceptual processes between media that orient themselves according to event-related potential. Fluxus, the international group of artists whose punning name mirrors their nonconformist attitude, exemplified the �oddball� events in process art and were �noted for their Happenings, actions, publishing, and mailing activities" 4 Alongside the critical sense of humour that often permeates the diverse range of process art was a serious intention to merge art and life, the possibility of an art-making autonomous in its movement. Process artists also identified with the Surrealists� alliance to �psychic automatism� often expressing this refusal of conscious control by working collaboratively. For some this characteristic meant that once its elements were assembled whatever happened from their convergence whether or not aesthetically appealing was accepted as the work � the claim being that their combined affect was synonomous with a natural process. 5 As such, the process can be compared to events occurring naturally in the brain in response to whatever stimuli, or to put it another way its affect can be related to an event-related potential sign of the brain�s evaluation of novelty. Historical precedents for such event-related potential in art and technology are the �noise-makers� of Futurism and Dada in the early 20th century as well as processes such as Sergei Eisenstein�s �montage of attractions� and �intellectual montage� in film, Dziga Vertov�s Kino-Eye, and the �readymade� conceptual art and �gap music�of Marcel Duchamps; the intention of all being to attract attention, to animate questions on perception.

In light of current ways of imaging the world the question concerning art and technology is how do we make the working of the human mind visible now? How do we process novelty in our own time?

Julainne Sumich
Convenor
February 2004


Additional note

Re: The use of Neuroscience terminology

The speakers are free to interpret the key terms from the language of neuroscience according to their own take on 'processing novelty' within their own research field. So I expect some will refer to them in a scientific manner and others in a more metaphorical way. The affect of this in the transdisciplinary context might lead to novel outcomes that can also influence the personal research of all participants.


1 Friedman, David et al, The novelty P3: an event-related brain potential (ERP) sign of the brain's evaluation of novelty, Neuroscience and Behavioural Reviews 25 (2001) 356. http://www.elsevier.com/locate/neubiorev.
2 http://www.artscilab.org/expandedcinema/foreword.pdf
http://dept.english.upenn.edu/~wh/stern-gerd.htm
http://www.c3.hu/events/96/niblock/
http://the-artists.org/MovementView.cfm?id=8A01EE94%2DBBCF%2D11D4%2DA93500D0B7069B40

3 For a recent definition of Intermedia art see Polli, Andrea et al . Erasing Boundaries: Intermedia Art in the Digital Age . SIGGRAPPH 2001 (June 2003) http://www.siggraph.org/artdesign/gallery/S01/panels.htm

4 Walker, John A. Art Since Pop . (London, Thames and Hudson, 1975), 49-50

5 Ibid, 34-35.

above copied from: http://www.intermedia.ac.nz/processingnovelty/brief.htm

monsieur antipyrine's manifesto, Tristan Tzara

14th july 1916

DADA is our intensity: it erects inconsequential bayonets and the Sumatral head of German babies; Dada is life with neither bedroom slippers nor parallels; it is against and for unity and definately against the future; we are wise enough to know that our brains are going to become flabby cushions, that our anti dogmatism is as exclusive as a civil servant, and that we cry liberty but are not free; a severe necessity with entire discipline nor morals and that we spit on humanity.

DADA remains within the framework of European weaknesses, it's still shit, but from now on we want to shit in different colours so as to adorn the zoo of art with all the flags of all the consulates.

We are circus ringmasters and we can be found whistling amongst the winds of fairgrounds, in convents, prostitutions, theatres, realities, feelings, restaurants, ohoho, bang bang.

We declare that the motor car is a feeling that has cosseted us quite enough in the dilatoriness of its abstractions, as have transatlantic liners, noises and ideas. And while we put on a show of being facile, we are actually searching for the central essence of things, and are pleased if we can hide it; we have no wish to count the windows of the marvellous elite, for DADA doesn't exist for anyone, and we want everyone to understand this. This is Dada's balcony, I assure you. From there you can hear all the military marches, and come down cleaving the air like a seraph landing in a public baths to piss and understand the parable.

DADA is neither madness, nor wisdom, nor irony, look at me, dear bourgeois.

Art used to be a game of nuts in May, children would go gathering words that had a final ring, then they would exude, shout out the verse, and dress it up in dolls' bootees, and the verse became a queen in order to die a little, and the queen became a sardine, and the children ran hither and you, unseen.

Then came the great ambassadors of feeling, who yelled historically in chorus:

Psychology Psychology hee hee

Science Science Science

Long live France

We are not naive

We are successive

We are exclusive

We are not simpletons

and we are perfectly capable of an intelligent discussion.

Be we, DADA, don't agree with them, for art isn't serious, I assure you, and if we reveal the crime so as to show that we are learned denunciators, it's to please you, dear audience, I assure you, and I adore you.

above copied from:

Concepts, Notations, Software, Art, Florian Cramer

March 23rd, 2002

Software and Concept Notations
Software in the Arts

To date, critics and scholars in the arts and humanities have considered computers primarily as storage and display media, as something which transmits and reformats images, sound and typography. Reflection of the as such invisible layer of software is rare. Likewise, the term ``digital art'' has been associated primarily with digital images, music or audiovisual installations using digital technology. The software which controls the audio and the visuals is frequently neglected, working as a black box behind the scenes. ``Interactive'' room installations, for example, get perceived as a interactions of a viewer, an exhibition space and an image projection, not as systems running on code. This observation all the more applies to works in which it is not obvious at all that their production relied on programmation and computing. John Cage's 1981 radio play ``Roaratorio'', for example, appears to be a tape montage of a spoken text based on James Joyce's ``Finnegans Wake'', environmental sounds recorded in several cities of the world and Irish folk music, edited with analog recording technology. Yet at the same time it is an algorithmic artwork; the spoken text was extracted from the novel using a purely syntactical, formal method (mesostychs of the name ``James Joyce''), and the montage was done according to a random score generated on a computer at the Parisian IRCAM studios. While the book-plus-CD set of ``Roarotorio'' documents the whole composition extensively, containing the audio piece itself, a recording and a reprint of John Cage's reading, a recording and a reprint of an interview, an inventory of the cities where sound was recorded, it includes the computer-generated score itself only in a one-page excerpt and nothing at all of the computer program code which generated the random score.1

The history of the digital and computer-aided arts could be told as a history of ignorance against programming and programmers. Computer programs get locked into black boxes, and programmers are frequently considered to be mere factota, coding slaves who execute other artist's concepts. Given that software code is a conceptual notation, this is not without its own irony. In fact, it is a straight continuation of romanticist philosophy and its privileging of aisthesis (perception) over poeisis (construction),2 cheapened into a restrained concept of art as only that what is tactile, audible and visible. The digital arts themselves participate in this accomplicity when they call themselves [new] ``media art''. There's nothing older than ``new media'', a term which is little more than a superficial justification for lumping together a bunch of largely unrelated technologies, such as analog video and computing, just because they were ``new'' at a particular time. If one defines as a medium something that it is between a sender and a receiver, then computers are not only media, but also senders and receivers which themselves are capable of writing and reading, interpreting and composing messages within the limitations of the rule sets inscribed into them. The computer programs for example which calculate the credit line of checking accounts or control medical instruments in an emergency station can't be meaningfully called ``media''. If at all, computer processes become ``media'' only by the virtue that computers can emulate any machine, including all technical media, and by the virtue of the analog interfaces which transform the digital zeros and ones into analog sound waves, video signals, print type and vice versa.
A Crash Course in Programming

A piece of software is a set of formal instructions, or, algorithms; it is a logical score put down in a code. It doesn't matter at all which particular sign system is used as long as it is a code, whether digital zeros and ones, the Latin alphabet, Morse code or, like in a processor chip, an exactly defined set of registers controlling discrete currents of electricity. If a piece of software is a score, is it then by definition an outline, a blueprint of an executed work?

Imagine a Dadaist poem which makes random variations of Hugo Ball's sound poem ``Karawane'' (``Caravan''):

KARAWANE

jolifanto bambla ô falli bambla
grossiga m'pfa habla horem
égiga goramen
higo bloiko russula huju
hollaka hollala
anlogo bung
blago bung
blago bung
bosso fataka
ü üü ü
schampa wulla wussa ólobo
hej taat gôrem
eschige zunbada
wulebu ssubudu uluw ssubudu
tumba ba-umpf
kusagauma
ba-umpf

The new Dada poem could simply consists of eight variations of the line ``tumba ba-umpf''. The author/performer could throw a coin twice for each line and, depending on the result, choose to write down either the word ``tumba'' or ``ba-umpf'', so that the result would look like:

tumba tumba
ba-umpf tumba
tumba ba-umpf
tumba ba-umpf
ba-umpf ba-umpf
ba-umpf tumba
tumba ba-umpf
tumba ba-umpf

The instruction code for this poem could be written as follows:

1. Take a coin of any kind with two distinct sides.
2. Repeat the following set of instructions eight times:
1. Repeat the following set of instructions twice:
1. Throw the coin.
2. Catch it with your palm so that it lands on one side.
3. If the coin shows the upper side, do the following:
* Say "tumba"
4. Else do the following:
* Say "ba-umpf"
2. Make a brief pause to indicate the end of the line.
3. Make a long pause to indicate the end of the poem.

Since these instructions are formal and precise enough to be as well executed by a machine (imagine this poem implemented into a modified cuckoo clock), they can be translated line by line into a computer program. Just as the above instruction looks different depending on the language it is written in, a computer program looks different depending on the programming language used. Here I choose the popular language ``Perl'' whose basic instructions are rather simple to read:

for $lines (1 .. 8)
{
for $word (1 .. 2)
{
$random_number = int(rand(2));
if ($random_number == 0)
{
print "tumba"
}
else
{
print "ba-umpf"
}
print " "
}
print "\n"
}



The curly brackets enclose statement blocks executed under certain conditions, the $ prefix designates a variable which can store arbitrary letters or numbers, the ``rand(2)'' function generates a random value between 0 and 1.9, ``int'' rounds its result to either zero or one, `` '' stands for a blank, ``
n'' for a line break. This program can be run on virtually any computer; it is a simple piece of software. Complex pieces of software, such as computer operating systems or even computer games, differ from the above only in the complexity of their instructions. The control structures - variable assignments, loops, conditional statements - are similar in all programming languages.

Unlike in the instruction for throwing coins, the artists' work is done once the code is written. A computer program is a blueprint and its execution at the same time. Like a pianola roll, it is a score performing itself. The artistic fascination of computer programming - and the perhaps ecstatic revelation of any first-time programmer - is the equivalence of architecture and building, the instant gratification given once the concept has been finished. Computer programming collapses, as it seems, the second and third of the three steps of concept, concept notation and execution.

Contrary to conventional data like digitized images, sound and text documents, the algorithmic instruction code allows a generative process. It uses computers for computation, not only as storage and transmission media. And this precisely distinguishes program code from non-algorithmic digital code, describing for example the difference between algorithmic composition on the one hand and audio CDs/mp3 files on the other, between algorithmically generated text and ``hypertext'' (a random access database model which as such doesn't require algorithmic computation at all), or between a graphical computer ``demo'' and a video tape. Although one can of course use computers without programming them, it is impossible not to use programs at all; the question only is who programs. There is, after all, no such thing as data without programs, and hence no digital arts without the software layers they either take for granted, or design themselves.

To discuss ``software art'' simply means to not take software for granted, but pay attention to how and by whom programs were written. If data doesn't exist without programs, it follows that the separation of processed ``data'' (like image and sound files) from ``programs'' is simply a convention. Instead, data could be directly embedded into the algorithms used for its transmission and output to external devices. Since a ``digital photograph'' for example is bit-mapped information algorithmically transformed into the electricity controlling a screen or printer, via algorithmic abstraction layers in the computer operating system, it follows that it could just as well be coded into a file which contains the whole transformation algorithms themselves so that the image would display itself even on a computer that provides no operating system.3
Software Art
Executable Code in Art

If software is generally defined as executable formal instructions, logical scores, then the concept of software is by no means limited to formal instructions for computers. The first, English-language notation of the Dadaist poem qualifies as software just as much as the three notations in the Perl programming language. The instructions only have to meet the requirement of being executable by a human being as well as by a machine. A piano score, even a 19th century one, is software when its instruction code can be executed by a human pianist as well as on a player piano.

The Perl code of the Dada poem can be read and executed even without running it on machines. So my argument is quite contrary to Friedrich Kittler's media theory according to which there is either no software at all or at least no software without the hardware it runs on:4 If any algorithm can be executed mentally, as it was common before computers were invented, then of course software can exist and run without hardware. - A good example are programming handbooks. Although they chiefly consist of printed computer code, this code gets rarely ever executed on machines, but provides examples which readers follow intellectually, following the code listings step by step and computing them in their minds.

Instead of adapting Dadaist poetry as software, one could regard some historical Dadaist works as software right away; above all, Tristan Tzara's generic instruction for writing Dada poems by shuffling the words of a newspaper article5:

To make a Dadaist poem:
Take a newspaper.
Take a pair of scissors.
Choose an article as long as you are planning to make your poem. Cut out the article.
Then cut out each of the words that make up this article and put them in a bag.
Shake it gently.
Then take out the scraps one after the other in the order in which they left the bag.
Copy conscientiously.
The poem will be like you.
And here you are a writer, infinitely original and endowed with a sensibility that is charming though beyond the understanding of the vulgar.

The poem is effectively an algorithm, a piece of software which may as well be written as a computer program.6. If Tzara's process would be adapted as Perl or C code from the original French, it wouldn't be a transcription of something into software, but a transcription of non-machine software into machine software.
Concept Art and Software Art

The question of what software is and how it relates to non-electronic contemporary art is at least thirty-two years old. In 1970, the art critic and theorist Jack Burnham curated an exhibition called "Software" at the Jewish Museum of New York which today is believed to be first show of concept art. It featured installations of US-American concept artists next installations of computer software Burnham found interesting, such as the first prototype of Ted Nelson's hypertext system ``Xanadu''. Concept art as an art ``of which the material is `concepts,' as the material of for ex. music is sound'' (Henry Flynt's definition from 19617) and software art as an art whose material is formal instruction code seem to have at least two things in common:

1. the collapsing of concept notation and execution into one piece;
2. the use of language; instructions in software art, concepts in concept art. Flynt observes: ``Since `concepts' are closely bound up with language, concept art is a kind of art of which the material is language''.8

It therefore is not accidental that the most examples of pre-electronic software art cited here are literary. Literature is a conceptual art in that is not bound to objects and sites, but only to language. The trouble the art world has with net.art because it does not display well in exhibition spaces is foreign to literature which always differentiated between an artwork and its material appearance.

Since formal language is a language, software can be seen and read as a literature.9

If concepts become, to quote Flynt again, artistic``material'', then concept art differs from other art in that it actually exposes concepts, putting their notations up front as the artwork proper. In analogy, software art in particular differs from software-based art in general in that it exposes its instructions and codedness. Since formal instructions are a subset of conceptual notations, software art is, formally, a subset of conceptual art.

My favorite example of both concept art in Flynt's sense and non-computer software art is La Monte Young's ``Composition 1961'', a piece of paper containing the written instruction ``Draw a straight line and follow it''. The instruction is unambiguous enough to be executed by a machine. At the same time, a thorough execution is physically impossible. So the reality of piece is mental, conceptual.

The same duplicity of concept notation and executable code exists in Sol LeWitt's 1971 ``Plan for a Concept Art Book'', a series of book pages giving the reader exact instructions to draw lines on them or strike out specific letters.10 LeWitt's piece exemplifies that the art called concept art since the 1970s was by far not as rigorous as the older concept art of Henry Flynt, La Monte Young and Christer Hennix: While the ``Composition 1961'' is a concept notation creating an artwork that itself exists only as a concept, mentally, LeWitt's ``Plan for a Concept Art Book'' only is a concept notation of a material, graphic artwork. Unlike the concept art ``of which the material is `concepts''', LeWitt's piece belongs to a concept art that rather should be called a concept notation art or ``blueprint art''; an art whose material is graphics and objects, but which was instead realized in the form of a score. By thus reducing its its own material complexity, the artwork appears to be ``minimalist'' rather than rigorously conceptualist.

A writing which writes itself, LeWitt's ``Plan'' could also be seen in a historical continuity of combinatory language speculations: From the permutational algorithms in the Sefer Jezirah and ecstatic Kabbalah to the medieval ``ars'' of Raimundus Lullus to 17th century permutational poetry and Mallarmé's ``Livre''. The combinatory most complex known permutation poem, Quirinus Kuhlmann's 1771 sonnet ``Vom Wechsel menschlicher Sachen'' consists of 13*12 nouns can be arbitrarily shuffled so that they result in 10114 permutations of the text.11 Kuhlmann's and La Monte Young's software arts meet in their aesthetic extremism; in an afterword, Kuhlmann claims that there are more permutations of his poem than grains of sand on the earth.12 If such implications lurk in code, a formal analysis is not enough. Concept art potentially means terror of the concept, software art terror of the algorithm; a terror grounded in the simultaneity of minimalist concept notation and totalitarian execution, helped by the fact that software collapses the concept notation and execution in the single medium of instruction code. - Sade's ``120 days of Sodom'' could be read as a recursive programming of excess and its simultaneous reflection in the medium of prose.13 The popularity of spamming and denial-of-service code in the contemporary digital arts is another practical proof of the perverse double-bind between software minimalism and self-inflation; the software art pieces awarded at the transmediale.02 festival, ``tracenoizer'' and ``forkbomb.pl'' also belong to this category.

La Monte Young's ``Composition 1961'' not only provokes to rethink what software and software art is. Being the first and still most elegant example of all artistic jamming and denial-of-service code, it also addresses the aesthetics and politics coded into instructions. Two years before Burnham's ``Software'' exhibition, the computer scientist Donald E. Knuth published the first volume of his famous textbook on computer programming, ``The Art of Computer Programming''.14 Knuth's wording has adopted in what Steven Levy calls the hacker credo that ``you can create art and beauty with computers''.15 It is telling that hackers, otherwise an avant-garde of a broad cultural understanding of digital technology, rehash a late-18th century classicist notion of art as beauty, rewriting it into a concept of digital art as inner beauty and elegance of code. But such aesthetic conservativism is widespread in engineering and hard-science cultures; fractal graphics are just one example of Neo-Pythagorean digital kitsch they promote. As a contemporary art, the aesthetics of software art includes ugliness and monstrosity just as much as beauty, not to mention plain dysfunctionality, pretension and political incorrectness.16

Above all, software art today no longer writes its programs out of nothing, but works within an abundance of available software code. This makes it distinct from works like Tzara's Dada poem which, all the while it addresses an abundance of mass media information, contaminates only the data, not its algorithm; the words become a collage, but the process remains a synthetic clean-room construct.

Since personal computers and the Internet became popular, software code in addition to data has come to circulate in abundance. One thus could say that contemporary software art operates in a postmodern condition in which it takes pre-existing software as material - reflecting, manipulating and recontextualizing it. The ``mezangelle'' writing of mez, an Australian net artist, for example uses software and protocol code as material for writings in a self-invented hybrid of English and pseudo-code. Her ``net.wurks'' are an unclean, broken software art; instead of constructing program code synthetically, they use readymade computations, take them apart and read their syntax as gendered semantics. In similar fashion, much software art plays with control parameters of software. Software artworks like Joan Leandre's ``retroyou'' and ``Screen Saver'' by Eldar Karhalev and Ivan Khimin are simply surprising, mind-challenging disconfigurations of commercial user software: a car racing game, the Microsoft Windows desktop interface. They manage to put their target software upside down although their interventions are technically simple and don't involve low-level programming at all.
Software Formalism vs. Software Culturalism

Much of what is discussed as contemporary software art and discourse on has its origin in two semi-coherent London-based groups. The older one around Matthew Fuller, Graham Harwood and the groups I/O/D and Mongrel is known, among others, for the experimental web browser ``WebStalker'', which instead of formatted pages displays their source code and link structures, the ``Linker'', a piece of ``social software'' (to use a term by Fuller) designed to empower non-literate users to design their own digital information systems, and ``natural selection'', a politically manipulated web search engine. Fuller also wrote a scrupulous cultural analysis of Microsoft Word's user interface and an essay with the programmatic title ``Software as Culture''. The other group involves the programmer-artists Adrian Ward (whose ``Auto-Illustrator'' won the transmediale.01 software art prize) and Alex McLean (whose ``forkbomb.pl'' won the transmediale.02 software art prize), the theoretician Geoff Cox and participants in the mailing list ``eu-gene'', the web site http://www.generative.net and the ``DorkBot'' gatherings in London (which involve poetry readings of program code). Both groups take exactly opposite standpoints to software art and software criticism: While Fuller/Harwood regard software as first of all a cultural, politically coded construct, the eu-gene group rather focuses on the formal poetics and aesthetics of software code and individual subjectivity expressed in algorithms.

If software art could be generally defined as an art

* of which the material is formal instruction code, and/or
* which addresses cultural concepts of software,

then each of their positions sides with exactly one of the two aspects. If Software Art would be reduced to only the first, one would risk ending up a with a neo-classicist understanding of software art as beautiful and elegant code along the lines of Knuth and Levy. Reduced on the other hand to only the cultural aspect, Software Art could end up being a critical footnote to Microsoft desktop computing, potentially overlooking its speculative potential at formal experimentation. Formal reflections of software are, like in this text, inevitable if one considers common-sense notions of software a problem rather than a point of departure; histories of instruction codes in art and investigations into the relationship of software, text and language still remain to be written.



©This document can be freely copied and used according to the terms of the Open Publication License http://www.opencontent.org/openpub

References

[Cag82]
John Cage. Roaratorio. Ein irischer Circus über Finnegans Wake. Athenäum, Königstein/Taunus, 1982.
[CWM01]
Geoff Cox, Adrian Ward, and Alex McLean. The Aesthetics of Generative Code, 2001. http://www.generative.net/papers/aesthetics/index.html.
[Fly61]
Henry Flynt. Concept art. In La Monte Young and Jackson MacLow, editors, An Anthology. Young and MacLow, New York, 1963 (1961).
[Hon71]
Klaus Honnef, editor. Concept Art. Phaidon, Köln, 1971).
[Kit91]
Friedrich Kittler. There is no software, 1991. http://textz.gnutenberg.net/textz/kittler_friedrich_there_is_no_software.txt.
[Kuh71]
Quirinus Kuhlmann. Himmlische Libes=küsse. ?, Jena, 1671.
[Lev84]
Steven Levy. Hackers. Project Gutenberg, Champaign, IL, 1986 (1984).
[Mol71]
Abraham A. Moles. Kunst und Computer. DuMont, Köln, 1973 (1971).
[Tza75]
Tristan Tzara. Pour fair une poème dadaïste. In Oeuvres complètes. Gallimard, Paris, 1975.

©This document can be freely copied and used according to the terms of the Open Publication License http://www.opencontent.org/openpub
Footnotes:

1[Cag82] - Regarding randomness generated with computers, the software artist Ulrike Gabriel says that it doesn't exist because the machine as a fact by itself is not accidental.

2A similar angle is taken in the paper ``The Aesthetic of Generative Code'' by Geoff Cox, Adrian Ward and Alex McLean, [CWM01]

3I would not be surprised if in a near future the media industry would embed audiovisual data (like a musical recording) directly into proprietary one-chip hardware players to prevent digital copies.

4[Kit91]

5[Tza75]

6My own Perl CGI adaption is available under "http://userpage.fu-berlin.de/~cantsin/permutations/tzara/poeme_dadaiste.cgi"

7[Fly61]

8ibid.

9But since formal language is only a small subset of language as a whole, conclusions drawn from observing software code can't be generally applied to all literature.

10[Hon71], p. 132-140

11[Kuh71]

12ibid.

13As Abraham M. Moles noticed already in 1971, [Mol71], p. 124

14knuth:art

15according Steven Levy [Lev84]; among those who explicitly subscribe to this is the German Chaos Computer Club with its annual ``art and beauty workshop''.

16which is why I think would be wrong to (a) restrict software art to only properly running code and (b) exclude, for political reasons, proprietary and other questionably licensed software from software art presentations.

Original-URL:
http://userpage.fu-berlin.de/~cantsin/homepage/writings/software_art/
concept_notations//concepts_notations_software_art.html

Above copied from: http://www.netzliteratur.net/cramer/ concepts_notations_software_art.html

futurist photodynamism, anton giulio bragaglia

1st july 1913

To begin with, Photodynamism cannot be interpreted as an innovation applicable to photography in the way that chronophotography was. Photodynamism is a creation that aims to achieve ideals that are quite contrary to the objectives of all the representational means of today. If it can be associated at all with photography, cinematography and chronophotography, this is only by virtue of the fact that, like them, it has its origins in the wide field of photographic science, the technical means forming common ground. All are based on the physical properties of the camera.

We are certainly not concerned with the aims and characteristics of cinematography and chronophotography. We are not interested in the precise reconstruction of movement, which has already been broken up and analysed. We are involved only in the area of movement which produces sensation, the memory of which still palpitates in our awareness.

We despise the precise, mechanical, glacial reproduction of reality, and take the utmost care to avoid it. For us this is a harmful and negative element, whereas for cinematography and chronophotography it is the very essence. They in their turn overlook the trajectory, which for us is the essential value.

The question of cinematography in relation to us is absolutely idiotic, and can only be raised by a superficial and imbecilic mentality motivated by the most crass ignorance of our argument.

Cinematography does not trace the shape of movement. It subdivides it, without rules, with mechanical arbitrariness, disintegrating and shattering it without any kind of aesthetic concern for rhythm. It is not within its coldly mechanical power to satisfy such concerns.

Besides which, cinematography never analyses movement. It shatters it in the frames of the film strip, quite unlike the action of Photodynamism, which analyses movement precisely in its details. And cinematography never synthesises movement, either. It merely reconstructs fragments of reality, already coldly broken up, in the same way as the hand of a chronometer deals with time even though this flows in a continuous and constant stream.

Photography too is a quite distinct area; useful in the perfect anatomical reproduction of reality; necessary and precious therefore for aims that are absolutely contrary to ours, which are artistic in themselves, scientific in their researches, but nevertheless always directed towards art.

And so both photography and Photodynamism possess their own singular qualities, clearly divided, and are very different in their importance, their usefulness and their aims.

Marey's chronophotography, too, being a form of cinematography carried out on a single plate or on a continuous strip of film, even if it does not use frames to divide movement which is already scanned and broken up into instantaneous shots, still shatters the action. The instantaneous images are even further apart, fewer and more autonomous than those of cinematography, so that this too cannot be called analysis.

In actual fact, Marey's system is used, for example, in the teaching of gymnastics. And out of the hundred images that trace a man's jump the few that are registered are just sufficient to describe and to teach to the young the principal stages of a jump.

But although this may be all very well for the old Marey system, for gymnastics and other such applications, it is not enough for us. With about five extremely rigid instantaneous shots we cannot obtain even the reconstruction of movement, let alone the sensation. Given that chronophotography certainly does not reconstruct movement, or give the sensation of it, any further discussion of the subject would be idle, except that the point is worth stressing, as there are those who, with a certain degree of elegant malice, would identify Photodynamism with chronophotography, just as others insisted on confusing it with cinematography.

Marey's system, then, seizes and freezes the action in its principal stages, those which best serve its purpose. It thus describes a theory that could be equally deduced from a series of instantaneous photographs. They could similarly be said to belong to different subjects, since, if a fraction of a stage is removed, no link unites and unifies the various images. They are photographic, contemporaneous, and appear to belong to more than one subject. To put it crudely, chronophotography could be compared with a clock on the face of which only the quarter-hours are marked, cinematography to one on which the minutes too are indicated, and Photodynamism to a third on which are marked not only the seconds, but also the intermovemental fractions existing in the passages between seconds. This becomes an almost infinitesimal calculation of movement.

In fact it is only through our researches that it is possible to obtain a vision that is proportionate, in terms of the strength of the images, to the very tempo of their existence, and to the speed with which they have lived in a space and in us.

The greater the speed of an action, the less intense and broad win be its trace when registered with Photodynamism. It follows that the slower it moves, the less it will be dematerialised and distorted. The more the image is distorted, the less real it will be. It will be more ideal and lyrical, further extracted from its personality and closer to type, with the same evolutionary effect of distortion as was followed by the Greeks in their search for their type of beauty.

There is an obvious difference between the photographic mechanicality of chronophotography -embryonic and rudimentary cinematography - and the tendency of Photodynamism to move away from that mechanicality, following its own ideal, and completely opposed to the aims of all that went before (although we do propose to undertake our own scientific researches into movement).

Photodynamism, then, analyses and synthesises movement at will, and to great effect. This is because it does not have to resort to disintegration for observation, but possesses the power to record the continuity of an action in space, to trace in a face, for instance, not only the expression of passing states of mind, as photography and cinematography have never been able to, but also the immediate shifting of volumes that results in the immediate transformation of expression.

A shout, a tragical pause, a gesture of terror, the entire scene, the complete external unfolding of the intimate drama, can be expressed in one single work. And this applies not only to the point of departure or that of arrival - nor merely to the intermediary stage, as in chronophotography - but continuously, from beginning to end, because in this way, as we have already said, the intermovemental stages of a movement can also be invoked.

In fact, where scientific research into the evolution and modelling of movement are concerned, we declare Photodynarnism to be exhaustive and essential, given that no precise means of analysing a movement exists (we have already partly examined the rudimentary work of chronophotography).

And so - just as the study of anatomy has always been essential for an artist - now a knowledge of the paths traced by bodies in action and of their transformation in motion will be indispensable for the painter of movement.

In the composition of a painting, the optical effects observed by the artist are not enough. A precise analytical knowledge of the essential properties of the effect, and of its causes, are essential. The artist may know how to synthesise such analyses, but within such a synthesis the skeleton, the precise and almost invisible analytical elements, must exist. These can only be rendered visible by the scientific aspects of Photodynamism.

In fact, every vibration is the rhythm of infinite minor vibrations, since every rhythm is built up of an infinite quantity of vibrations. In so far as human knowledge has hitherto conceived and considered movement in its general rhythm, it has fabricated, so to speak, an algebra of movement. This has been considered simple and finite (cf. Spencer: First Principles - The Rhythm of Motion). But Photodynamism has revealed and represented it as complex, raising it to the level of an infinitesimal calculation of movement (see our latest works, e.g. The Carpenter, The Bow, Changing Positions).

Indeed, we represent the movement of a pendulum, for example, by relating its speed and its tempo to two orthogonal axes.

We will obtain a continuous and infinite sinusoidal curve.

But this applies to a theoretical pendulum, an immaterial one. The representation we will obtain from a material pendulum will differ from the theoretical one in that, after a longer or shorter (but always finite) period, it will stop.

It should be clear that in both cases the lines representing such movement are continuous, and do not portray the reality of the phenomenon. In reality, these lines should be composed of an infinite number of minor vibrations, introduced by the resistance of the point of union. This does not move with smooth continuity but in a jerky way caused by infinite coefficients. Now, a synthetic representation is more effective, even when its essence envelops an analytically divisionist value, than a synthetic impressionist one (meaning divisionism and impressionism in the philosophical sense). In the same way the representation of realistic movement will be much more effective in synthesis - containing in its essence an analytical divisionist value (e.g. The Carpenter, The Bow, etc.), than in analysis of a superficial nature, that is, when it is not minutely interstatic but expresses itself only in successive static states (e.g. The Typist).

Therefore, just as in Seurat's painting the essential question of chromatic divisionism (synthesis of effect and analysis of means) had been suggested by the scientific enquiries of Rood, so today the need for movemental divisionism, that is, synthesis of effect and analysis of means in the painting of movement, is indicated by Photodynamism. But - and this should be carefully noted - this analysis is infinite, profound and sensitive, rather than immediately perceptible.

This question has already been raised by demonstrating that, just as anatomy is essential in static reproduction, so the anatomy of an action - intimate analysis - is indispensable in the representation of movement. This will not resort to thirty images of the same object to represent an object in movement, but will render it infinitely multiplied and extended, whilst the figure present will appear diminished.

Photodynamism, then, can establish results from positive data in the construction of moving reality, just as photography obtains its own positive results in the sphere of static reality.

The artist, in search of the forms and combinations that characterise whatever state of reality interests him, can, by means of Photodynamism, establish a foundation of experience that will facilitate his researches and his intuition when it comes to the dynamic representation of reality. After all, the steady and essential relationships which link the development of any real action with artistic conception are indisputable, and are affirmed independently of formal analogies with reality.

Once this essential affinity has been established, not only between artistic conception and the representation of reality, but also between artistic conception and application, it is easy to realise how much information dynamic representation can offer to the artist who is engaged in a profound search for it.

In this way fight and movement in general, light acting as movement, and hence the movement of light, are revealed in Photodynamism. Given the transcendental nature of the phenomenon of movement, it is only by means of Photodynamism that the painter can know what happens in the intermovemental states, and become acquainted with the volumes of individual motions. He will be able to analyse these in minute detail, and will come to know the increase in aesthetic value of a flying figure, or its diminution, relative to light and to the dematerialization consequent upon motion. Only with Photodynamism can the artist be in possession of the elements necessary for the construction of a work of art embodying the desired-for synthesis.

With reference to this the sculptor Roberto Melli wrote to me explaining that, in his opinion, Photodynamism 'must, in the course of these new researches into movement which are beginning to make a lively impression on the artist's consciousness, take the place which has until now been occupied by drawing, a physical and mechanical phenomenon very different from the physical transcendentalism of Photodynamism. Photodynamism is to drawing what the new aesthetic currents are to the art of the past.' . . .

Now, with cinematography and Marey's equivalent system the viewer moves abruptly from one state to another, and thus is limited to the states that compose the movement, without concern for the intermovemental states of the action; and with photography he sees only one state. But with Photodynamism, remembering what took place between one stage and another, a work is presented that transcends the human condition, becoming a transcendental photograph of movement. For this end we have also envisaged a machine which will render actions visible, more effectively than is now today possible with actions traced from one point, but at the same time keeping them related to the time in which they were made. They will remain idealised by the distortion and by the destruction imposed by the motion and light which translate themselves into trajectories.

So it follows that when you tell us that the images contained in our Photodynamic works are unsure and difficult to distinguish, you are merely noting a pure characteristic of Photodynamism. For Photodynamism, it is desirable and correct to record the images in a distorted state, since images themselves are inevitably transformed in movement. Besides this, our aim is to make a determined move away from reality, since cinematography, photography and chronophotography already exist to deal with mechanically precise and cold reproduction.

We seek the interior essence of things: pure movement; and we prefer to see everything in motion, since as things are dematerialised in motion they become idealised, while still retaining, deep down, a strong skeleton of truth.

This is our aim, and it is by these means that we are attempting to raise photography to the heights which today it strives impotently to attain, being deprived of the elements essential for such an elevation because of the criteria of order that make it conform with the precise reproduction of reality. And then, of course, it is also dominated by that ridiculous and brutal negative element, the instantaneous exposure, which has been presented as a great scientific strength when in fact it is a laughable absurdity.

But where the scientific analysis of movement is concerned - that is, in the multiplication of reality for the study of its deformation in motion - we possess not merely one but a whole scale of values applied to an action. We repeat the idea, we insist, we impose and return to it without hesitation and untiringly, until we can affirm it absolutely with the obsessive demonstration of exterior and internal quality which is essential for us.

And it is beyond doubt that by way of such multiplication of entities we will achieve a multiplication of values, capable of enriching any fact with a more imposing personality.

In this way, if we repeat the principal states of the action, the figure of a dancer - moving a foot, in mid-air, pirouetting - will even when not possessing its own trajectory or offering a dynamic sensation, be much more like a dancer, and much more like dancing, than would a single figure frozen in just one of the states that build up a movement.

The picture therefore can be invaded and pervaded by the essence of the subject. It can be obsessed by the subject to the extent that it energetically invades and obsesses the public with its own values. It will not exist as a passive object over which an unconcerned public can take control for its own enjoyment. It will be an active thing that imposes its own extremely free essence on the public, though this will not be graspable with the insipid facility common to all images that are too faithful to ordinary reality.

To further this study of reality multiplied in its volumes, and the multiplication of the lyrical plastic sensation of these, we have conceived a method of research, highly original in its mechanical means, which we have already made known to some of our friends.

But in any case, at the moment we are studying the trajectory, the synthesis of action, that which exerts a fascination over our senses, the vertiginous lyrical expression of life, the lively invoker of the magnificent dynamic feeling with which the universe incessantly vibrates.

We will endeavour to extract not only the aesthetic expression of the motives, but also the inner, sensorial, cerebral and psychic emotions that we feel when an action leaves its superb, unbroken trace.

This is in order to offer to others the necessary factors for the reproduction of the desired feeling.

And it is on our current researches into the interior of an action that all the emotive artistic values existing in Photodynamism are based.

To those who believe that there is no need for such researches to be conducted with photographic means, given that painting exists, we would point out that, although avoiding competing with painting, and working in totally different fields, the means of photographic science are so swift, so fertile, and so powerful in asserting themselves as much more forward looking and much more in sympathy with the evolution of life than all other old means of representation.

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