experimentalism

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 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)

In this interview Serge Bouchardon resumes his many activities in the realm of digital media. Besides a professional background in e-learning and the activity as researcher and professor he has also authored a book about electronic literature and several literary works. He explains why in his book he chose the theories of structuralism to analyse a topic that reaches out to post-structuralism or post-modern theories. Furthermore he describes the way the aesthetics of the literary text changes in the digital context. He then ponders about the status of electronic literature in the field of academia and talks about his current projects.

Fabrizio Venerandi is author of two novels published in form of hypertextual ebooks and also co-founder of the publishing house Quintadicopertina. In this interview he talks about the book series Polistorie (Polystories) and about the basic ideas that inspired this project. Recalling the experience he made with the groundbreaking work on the first MUD in Italy in 1990, Venerandi describes the relations between literature and video games. Starting from a comparison between print literature tradition and new media, at last, he faces the problems of creation and preservation of digital works.

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.

In this interview, Carlo Cinato, author of the hypertext novel L’uomo senza cappello e la donna con le scarpe grigie (The man without a hat and the woman with grey shoes) and curator of the blog Parolata, explains how he started getting interested in electronic literature and how he conceived his novel. Through the study of hypertextual and non sequencial books in printed form he discovered a new way of writing which was adaptable to the technical possibilities of the web and the ebooks. According to Cinato there are analogies between literary works of the print tradition and the digital tradition, but in particular the latter are characterised by the possibility of making a leap inside the text. The hypertextual structure alters the role of the reader, the materiality of the text, the way of reading and the way to write for an author. Moreover Cinato sees the writing of the novel as an experiment. It was an occasion to write by using one of the seven hypertext links he has pinpointed. In the end he explains in which way the hypertextual structure changes the way of reading and how it can be installed also in ebooks.

(Source: Interviewer's abstract)