Marc Saporta's Composition No. 1 is an unbound novel that can be read in any order. This essay explores how the novel's indeterminate nature affects the sjuzhet and fabula. It finds that the fabula works in an essentially normal way, but priority is shifted from the reader-determined sjuzhet to the (perceived) author-determined fabula, which shows that readers privilege the author's intention over their own activity and order.
[W]hile the reader determines the order of the pages and thus encounters a nonlinear narrative, she or he does not control the fabula, or chronological story. Instead, like the reader of any narrative text, the reader of Composition No. 1 will more than likely attempt to reconstruct the order of events as Saporta intended them, and with few exceptions, the narrative clues scattered throughout Composition No. 1 allow for this reconstruction.
Herberto Helder died. Helder is one of the most consistent and innovative Portuguese poets of the second half of the 20th century. Even if his later œuvre has been marked by a traditional experimentalist reworking of crafted language, whose poiesis engages with a very idiosyncratic vocabulary, one should not forget Helder’s eclectic trajectory. Having been influenced by, among other movements, Surrealism and international avant-garde experimentalism, Herberto Helder was, firstly together with António Aragão (1964), and secondly with Aragão and E. M. de Melo e Castro (1966), the editor of two important anthologies or cadernos (chapbooks), Poesia Experimental 1 [Experimental Poetry 1] and Poesia Experimental 2 [Experimental Poetry 2]. Both these anthologies opened up most of the major pathways of literary and artistic experimentalism in the 1960s, from which the PO.EX (Experimental POetry) movement emerged. Several genres, formal and thematic threads were originally tried out in these two anthologies and further work of the movement, namely concrete and visual poetry, ‘film poetry,’ sound poetry, ‘object-poetry,’ ‘poetic action’ and happening.
(Source: Author's introduction)
Herberto Helder morreu. Helder é um dos poetas portugueses mais consistentes e inovadores da segunda metade do século vinte. Ainda que a sua obra mais recente tenha sido marcada por um trabalho de reformulação da linguagem que podemos considerar como um experimentalismo tradicionalista, cuja poiesis se empenha e se alicerça num vocabulário idiossincrático, não podemos esquecer a trajectória ecléctica de Helder. Tendo sido influenciado, entre outros, pelo surrealismo e pelo experimentalismo vanguardista internacional, Herberto Helder foi, primeiro com António Aragão (1964), e depois com Aragão e E. M. de Melo e Castro (1966), editor de dois importantes cadernos antológicos, Poesia Experimental 1e Poesia Experimental 2. Os cadernos desencadearam a maior parte dos principais caminhos do experimentalismo literário e artístico dos anos 1960, a partir dos quais o movimento da PO.EX (POesia.EXperimental) emergiu. Diversos géneros, incluindo novas estruturas e temas, foram originalmente testados nos dois cadernos antológicos e no restante trabalho do movimento, como é o caso da poesia concreta e visual, “poesia fílmica”, poesia sonora, “poesia-objecto”, “acção poética” e happening.
(Fonte: Introdução do Autor)
Herberto Helder died. Helder is one of the most consistent and innovative Portuguese poets of the second half of the 20th century. Even if his later œuvre has been marked by a traditional experimentalist reworking of crafted language, whose poiesis engages with a very idiosyncratic vocabulary, one should not forget Helder’s eclectic trajectory. Having been influenced by, among other movements, Surrealism and international avant-garde experimentalism, Herberto Helder was, firstly together with António Aragão (1964), and secondly with Aragão and E. M. de Melo e Castro (1966), the editor of two important anthologies or cadernos (chapbooks), Poesia Experimental 1 [Experimental Poetry 1] and Poesia Experimental 2 [Experimental Poetry 2]. Both these anthologies opened up most of the major pathways of literary and artistic experimentalism in the 1960s, from which the PO.EX (Experimental POetry) movement emerged. Several genres, formal and thematic threads were originally tried out in these two anthologies and further work of the movement, namely concrete and visual poetry, ‘film poetry,’ sound poetry, ‘object-poetry,’ ‘poetic action’ and happening.
(Source: Author's introduction)
(Re)Playing The Lottery is a dynamic reinterpretation of Shirley Jackson's famous short story, "The Lottery." It presents a scenario in which the interactor is a a citizen of the small town on the day of the fateful lottery, and must move through the story by making various choices which result in random outcomes - no matter how many times the story is played, past results are no guide to future outcome. Just as the story hinges on the chance selection of a marked ballot from a box, this piece employs chance selection as its central mechanic, demonstrating one way in which interactive media can help readers inhabit and interrogate existing texts from multiple perspectives. (Source: ELO Conference 2014)
Rui Torres is Associate Professor at University Fernando Pessoa (UFP) in Porto and also author of several works of digital poetry. In this interview he explains how he started working in this field and where his inspiration comes from. Furthermore he explains why he sees the works of electronic literature as literary experiments and his concept of aesthetics taking in account his privilege for multimedia and the active participation of the readers in the creation of some his works. In the end he makes some considerations about preservation and archiving of works of electronic literature.
A Humument, an oracle of love and life: a diversion of chance and change.Combining the 367 full-colour pages of Tom Phillips’ artist’s book, the treated Victorian novel A Humument, with an interactive oracle function, this App displays the luminous artwork in a fun and highly accessible way. The App version includes 39 newly created, previously unpublished pages. Using a chosen date and a randomly generated number the oracle will cast two pages to be read in tandem. You may receive direction, encouragement or warning. The Find wheel spins through the book to quickly navigate the pages visually and find your favourites. Email your personal choices or oracle reading to friends. Sharekit supports image posts to Tumblr, Twitter and Facebook direct from the App.I found this book (or rather, it found me) when I was not quite thirty and have worked on it constantly ever since. It beckoned me on as it yielded strange words and provoked new images and told the fragmentary tale of Irma and Bill Toge. Now I am well over seventy and still revisiting and revising its pages, I find further layers of hidden texts and buried messages. Like the I Ching, the ancient Chinese Book of Changes, chance pairs of pages, taken together and interpreted, act as a guide and cryptic commentary on life in word and picture; a not-too-serious oracle which I now share with you.
(Source: Author's description in the App store)
Poemas combinatórios e generativos, programados de modo a permitir ao leitor alterar dinamicamente, em tempo de execução, os paradigmas que alimentam a sintaxe original; Som gerado aleatoriamente a partir de bases de dados previamente gravadas, com vozes e texturas sonoras; Além de alterar o poema, o leitor pode guardar as suas versões/leituras num weblog disponível na Internet. Duas versões disponíveis (versão horizontal e versão vertical) dão aos leitores a possibilidade de navegar entre distintas tipologias de página: em modo de panorama ou em modo de página html: A versão horizontal (panorama) inclui video, permite ao leitor alterar as palavras e enviar para weblog; A versão vertical (html) permite ao leitor alterar as palavras, alterar as listas e enviar para weblog.
(Source: http://edicoes.ufp.pt/product/humanidades/poemas-no-meio-do-caminho-poe…)
Ana Carvalho: video
Luís Aly: sound
Luís Carlos Petry: images
Nuno F. Ferreira: programmer
Nuno M. Cardoso: voice
Manuel Portela: critical writing
José Augusto Mourão: critical writing
Laura Borràs Castanyer: critical writing
Luís Cláudio Fajardo: critical writing
You and We allowed web visitors to upload texts and images, which were then randomly juxtaposed by the web-based application in time with music. As of July 2013, the piece no longer functioned in the browser.
From Marie-Laure Ryan's article "Cyberspace, Cybertexts, Cybermaps":
The map created by this project, which operates on the word level rather than on the level of lexia, is not only dynamic, but animated and interactive as well. Literalizing the idea of textual architecture, the system asks the user to input words or sentences, and it creates the floor plan of an apartment to accommodate this verbal furniture. Words are assigned to rooms on the basis of semantic content. Twelve types of rooms are paired with twelve semantic categories: living room is themed around the idea of group, dining room needs glamour, kitchen holds food, closet is a place of secrecy, hall suggests motion, foyer stands for change, bedroom means intimacy, bathroom caters to the needs of the body, library is associated with truth, office is where one works, and windows afford vision. (Dillon, Writing with Pictures, ch. 6, p. 9). The various rooms are created as they are needed, and their size and the thickness of their walls increases with every new piece of furniture that needs to be brought in. Different inputs will consequently generate different floor plans. The system ignores the words that it cannot categorize (mostly articles and prepositions), and it tries to pair new words with old ones into meaningful phrases. When the components of the resulting expression come from different rooms, these rooms are made adjacent to each other, the wall between them is taken down, and the group of words floats in the area where the two rooms meet each other. The same rearrangement and tearing down of walls occurs when a word hovers between two categories. Matching the fluidity of the architecture of the floor plan, an architecture undergoing constant transformations, the fluttering of the words and phrases around the rooms suggests the polysemy of language and the impossibility to immobilize its words into rigid semantic categories. We can read the result as a kind of aleatory poetry, or as a story of daily life, with different episodes taking place in different symbolic locations.
