early Brazilian electronic poetry

An engineer by training, Erthos Albino de Souza applied conceptual or physical mathematical models to the construction or deconstruction of texts. The graphic poem Le Tombeau de Mallarmé is a good demonstration of this process. He created a program for distributing temperatures and applied them to a heated fluid that runs through the interior of a tube. This program allowed a different design to be obtained based on the different temperatures of the fluids in the various sections of the tube. But since the engineer-poet coded his graphic system in such a way that each temperature scale corresponds to one of the letters of Mallarmé’s name, the result is that the letters are spatially arranged and form configurations that are vaguely reminiscent of Mallarmé’s “tomb.” By heating the fluid at different temperatures, he achieved different graphic schemes and thus different configurations of Mallarmé’s name, where the graphic sequence composes the poem.

(Source: Itaú Cultural. English translation: Luciana Gattass)

Runtime looped animation in which language continuously emerges and disappears. As a speech fragment is repeated and letters disappear from it, new meanings emerge.

(source: author)

An interactive hypertext piece based on the sefirotic tree of the Kabbalah. "Storms" is organized in vocalic and consonantal bifurcations. To navigate through the poem one is invited to click on a letter at any given time. In some instances, navigation can also take place by clicking outside the word. If the reader does not make a choice, that is, if he or she does not click on a vowel or consonant, or in some instances also on empty space, the reader will remain stationary. The poem does not have an ending. This means that one can continue to explore different textual navigation possibilities or quit at anytime. Originally a Hypercard stack, it is available below in an identical Flash translation. (source: author)

Minitel animated poem shown online in the group exhibition Brazil High-Tech (1986), a minitel art gallery organized by Eduardo Kac and Flavio Ferraz and presented by Companhia Telefônica de São Paulo. Upon close scrutiny, the apparently random letters and numbers that form the bardcode reveal hidden meanings (in Portuguese). When viewers logged on they first saw a black screen. Then, a small white rectangle appeared in the middle of the screen. Slowly, vertical bars descended inside the horizontal rectangle. At the bottom, viewers saw apparently random letters and numbers, reminding one of conventional bar codes. Upon close scrutiny the reader noticed that the letters formed the word "Deus" (God, in Portuguese). The spacing of the letters revealed "eu" (I, in Portuguese) inside "Deus". The numbers were not random either. They indicated the date when the work was produced and uploaded to the Brazilian videotex network.

(Source: Author)

Minitel animated poem shown online in the group exhibition Brazil High-Tech (1986), a minitel art gallery organized by Eduardo Kac and Flavio Ferraz and presented by Companhia Telefônica de São Paulo. Letters forming the word "caos" (chaos, in Portuguese) ricochet off the edge of the screen to simultaneously form the open-ended hourglass outline and the infinity symbol. As they zigzag, the letters overlap suggesting new meanings.

Minitel animated poem shown online in 1985 in the group exhibition "Arte On-Line", a minitel art gallery presented by Companhia Telefônica de São Paulo. An incantatory word of Kaballistic resonance is rendered as a cosmic monolith following the atomic model (the vowel as nucleus and the consonants as orbiting particles).