Part 1
ELECTRONIC POETRY Two
Latin-American
Precursors: Eduardo Kac and Ladislao Pablo Györi
by Clemente Padín
One of the infallible methods of transgressing the codes of any language,
that is to say, its mechanisms of emission, transmission and reception of
messages (writing/support/reading) and, therefore, to generate a greater number
of bits of
information because of the unpredictability of the contents they
involve is to use new supports or channels. Generally,
action of
the new medium contributes immensely to the form of the expression, the genuine
producer of the poetic as long as there are "readjustments of
content" (Umberto Eco, 1977). On the contrary, the mere
transposition of one language into another, without great changes nor
informative increases, occurs when the new medium takes place only in the form
of content.
As we know, aesthetic information was and will be bound to the physical
properties of the support, and the supports, in themselves, are
(in)significant. However, something happens when a significant unites itself to
a support. Something causes the original meaning of the sign to be transformed
by that
conjunction; thus their semantic expression would be impossible to obtain with
any other media or channels.
For example: the book-poem "A Ave" by Wlademir
Dias-Pino (Río de Janeiro, 1956) is a book-object without which
the poem would die out, since it could not be registered in other supports
without altering its sense (even they were more versatile or modern, like the
magnetic tape of the audio or video or the disk of the computer) since the
algorithms of reading could not be reproduced, that is to say, the turning of
the pages and the covers, the texture, the opacity, the color, the
perforations, etc.,
elements
that, appraised as a whole, are going to display the aesthetic information
contained in the book through the process of reading or
manipulating or paginating the object-book.
It is also asserted that it is not the same "to write" poems
that adapt the new medium to the forms already effective or foreseen by the
official literary system in a mere transposition, to create new forms starting
from the languages which characterize the
new
channels or supports. The same approach governs the new electronic media: it is
not only necessary to make use of their communicational possibilities, those
that will be discovered via experimentation, as long as modifiers or enrichers
of the form of the expression, but, also, like possible transmitters of
concepts for which verbal language has been overcome, for instance, the concept
of "field" or "infinite," among others.
At this point we are tempted to chronicle all the facts through which this
situation has been reached: from Stéphane Mallarmé and Guillaume
Apollinaire to Hugo Ball and Kurt Schwitters, from E.E.Cummings and James Joyce
to the Concretists, from N.H.Werkmann and Raoul Hausmann to the Letrism by
Isidore Isou, from the phonic poems by Henri Chopin and Arrigo Lora-Totino to
the Hypertext by Theodor Nelson, but, limitations of space hinder us. New
media, mainly electronic, bring forth the program, envisioned by
Mallarmé, about synthetical forms of thought and expression,
ideogrammarian and synchronous, causing, of course, new formulations and new
facts and discoveries which, in their turn, generate other facts in an endless
development, semiosis (although this could be frozen, in
any moment, for the option of any receiver).
The works of two Latin American poets stand out in this sense: the
Brazilian Eduardo Kac, creator of holographic poetry (toward 1983,
together with the holographical technician Fernando Catta-Petra) and the
Argentinean Ladislao Pablo Györi, creator of virtual poetry (toward
1994, though he has elaborated computer projects since 1984).
CONCLUSION
In spite of everything, unbelief and postmodernism, creation is still going
on in Latin America. It also continues the research and experimentation, not
only of new materials and communication media (fax, Internet, etc.) but, also,
of new ways for the poetic expression. Not simply accompanying the advances of
electronic technology (computers, laser, etc.) but still more impelling (as
Walter Benjamin has pointed out) the media by highlighting, through the
artistic experimentation, their
"productive"
possibilities, either aesthetic or scientific or technical.
"Do not expect but poison of stagnant water," William Blake
warned us and, closer, Karl Popper declares that major advances in
any field of the human activity are achieved upon questioning that already
known and effective for each system; not only what the "word" or the
"verb" has consecrated, by means of power or what the system has
legitimated, via ideology, but even everything connoted as
"unalterable," "necessary" or "essential" by the
Establishment.
Only, the irrepressible empiria, the experimentation aided by creative
negation will bring us fresh and luminous airs like these.
padin2
Montevideo, Uruguay, October 1995.
Clemente Padin