infopoetry

Since 1986, besides videopoetry, E. M. de Melo e Castro worked on a series of experiments with other computer media (suportes informáticos), coined by the author as “infopoesia” [infopoetry], in which he used image editor software. Once more – and this is a fact the analysis by Jorge Luiz Antonio (2001) does not highlight – the prevailing choice of image editors at the expense of word processors reveals the visual affiliation of Castrian poetics. The infopoems’ visual animations acknowledge pixel as the primary unit of meaning, in the perspective of an infopoetic language.

(Source: Author's text)

"Infopoesia ou Poesia Informacional" [Infopoetry or Informational Poetry] was published on October 29, 1987, in the Diário de Lisboa, in the supplement “Ler Escrever.”

This benchmark article helped defining the state-of-the-art of “computational poetry,” by exposing the 1960s creative threads in the works by Nanni Balestrini, Herberto Helder, Margaret Masterman and Marc Adrian, and by additionally introducing new Portuguese and Brazilian authors, such as Pedro Barbosa, Silvestre Pestana, Antero de Alda, Erthos Albino de Souza and João Coelho. Furthermore, it disseminated for a general audience the relevance of computational programming in literary creation, by stressing that, for some authors, “a própria programação [é] o acto de criação poética por excelência, sendo o programa um poema” [the very programming (is) the act of poetic creation par excellence, being the program a poem], which facilitates different outputs.

[Source: Álvaro Seiça, "A Luminous Beam: Reading the Portuguese Electronic Literature Collection" (2015)]

This essay serves to promote a broader awareness of the pioneering efforts in videographic poetry produced in Portuguese in the decades leading up to the formation of the WWW. At present, documentation of such works in books and journal articles in English is particularly weak; the only title that even partially introduces such works is a now out-of-print issue of Visible Language that focused on New Media Poetry (Vol. 30.2). Thus, these historical predecessors to contemporary animated poetry are barely known in the United States. Prior to the 1990s only a few poets used video; much of what occurred transpired outside the realm of English (and some even outside the realm of language, as illustrated in the essay).

(Source: Author's Abstract)

This book is a collection of essays on semiotics of media, infoart, infopoetry, videopoetry, holopoetry, fractal aesthetics, poetics of zero gravity, dematerialization, teleart and robotics. (Source: http://www.cibercultura.org.br/tikiwiki/tiki-index.php?page=Po%C3%A9tic…)