Portugal

There is still a big gap between electronic literature for children and Portuguese schools. Actually, this situation is in contrast with the increasing interest the educational community and publishers show in print literature for children and young adults in Portugal.In this paper we aim to develop the steps that the team from the project Inanimate Alice: Translating Electronic Literature for an Educational Context (Centre of Portuguese Literature at the University of Coimbra) took in order to give Portuguese students the opportunity to experience e-lit.As our ultimate goal is to introduce e-lit in Portuguese schools, the team has translated the first five episodes of Inanimate Alice and is now working on the translation of the Pedagogical Guidance, created by Bill Boyd.To accomplish that, we needed to find financial support to publish the Portuguese version of the series. So we contacted the two biggest education-oriented Publishing Companies in Portugal, but they rely a lot on the ministerial documents and they barely dare to innovate, as it is safer to publish what the Ministry of Education (ME) recommends schools, teachers and students to buy.Yet documents such as the Profile for Students issued by the ME in 2017 expose the need to teach them how to read digital texts, but neither publishers nor ministerial documents do recognise the educational potential of hypertextual and multimodal literature.Being aware that educational changes in Portugal often happen from top to bottom, meaning that we need the approval from the ME to have some impact in classrooms, we contacted the National Reading Plan (PNL) whose Commission asked the universities for books suggestion. It took some months, but finally we were recommended to present Inanimate Alice in a teachers training context on an annual basis as part of the PNL 2017 strategic plan, prepared by the Ministry of Science, Technology of University Teaching.Meanwhile we contacted some public schools located in the Centre of Portugal in order to conduct, in February 2018, a study based on an experiment in which a large group of sixth and eighth graders interact with Inanimate Alice. With the aim of reducing the gap we mentioned previously, we prepared two questionnaires where we evaluate the students’ aesthetic perception, their attention and immersion, and the comprehension skills required by this kind of work. As to the teachers, we are interested to know what they think about the interest of Inanimate Alice experiment, how it enhances the students’ knowledge, what inherent difficulties it implicates and what activities they would like to suggest.

This is the book of abstracts and catalogs of ELO 2017: Affiliations, Communities, Translations.  It includes abstracts to all workshops, roundtable discussions, lightning talks, research papers and panels, readings, performances and screenings, and exhibitions that are part of ELO 2017 conference and festival at UFP and other venues in Porto, Portugal.

For more information, see the individual elements of the programme.

Barbosa’s theoretical-practical trilogy closes with Máquinas Pensantes: Aforismos Gerados por Computador [Thinking Machines: Computer-Generated Aphorisms] (1988), as it can be understood as the third volume of A Literatura Cibernética. Here, the author presents a long series of literary aphorisms, in which the generation of texts is said to be “computer-assisted” (Computer-Assisted Literature) in BASIC language. The “A” series (Re-text program) deals with combinatorial “re-textualizações” [re-textualizations] (1988: 59) of a fragment (“matrix-text”) by Nietzsche and the “B” series (Acaso program), which had been partially published in the Jornal de Notícias (1984), draws upon the conceptual model created by Melo e Castro’s poem “Tudo Pode Ser Dito Num Poema” [Everything Can Be Said in a Poem], included in Álea e Vazio [Chance and Void] (1971). Melo e Castro himself would write an early review on the aphorisms, in the Colóquio Letras (1986) literary magazine, revealing Barbosa’s outputs as undeniable literary productions. Finally, the “C” series (Afor-A and Afor-B programs) comprises reformulations of traditional Portuguese aphorisms, which result in new interpretations, sometimes ironic, sometimes surreal.

(Source: Author's text)

In the 1980s, the world saw the introduction of personal computers (PCs). While the first creative stage of electronic literature took advantage of mainframe computers, only accessible in institutional environments, the context in which Silvestre Pestana created his first computer poems was totally different – a new wave Pedro Barbosa sarcastically calls “poesia doméstica” [domestic poetry] (1996: 147). With personal computers, Silvestre Pestana programmed in BASIC, first for a Sinclair ZX81, and then, already with chromatic lighting, for a Sinclair ZX Spectrum, three poems respectively dedicated to Henri Chopin, E. M. de Melo e Castro and Julian Beck, which resulted in the Computer Poetry (1981-83) series. Pestana, a visual artist, writer and performer – who had returned from the exile in Sweden after Portugal’s Carnation Revolution of April 25, 1974 – brought diverse influences put forward with photography, video, performance, and computer media. From his creative production, it should be emphasized the iconic conceptual piece Povo Novo [New People] (1975), which was remediated by the author himself in the referred series of kinetic visual poems, “video-computer-poems” (Pestana 1985: 205) or “infopoems” (Melo e Castro 1988: 57). By operating almost like TV scripts, the series oscillates between recognizable shapes – such as the oval and the larger animated Lettrist shapes, formed by the small-sized words “ovo” (egg), “povo” (people), “novo” (new), “dor” (pain) and “cor” (color) – and the reading interpretation of the words themselves: “ovo,” the unity, but also the potential; “povo,” the collective, the indistinct, the mass; “novo” and “cor/dor.” This play of relations translates the new consciousness, although painful, of a “new people” in a new historic, social and artistic period, one of freedom and action. In an interview, Pestana (2011) claimed having researched more than thirty languages, only to find in Portuguese the possibility of traversing the singular and the plural, the individual and the collective, the past, present and future, by just dislocating a letter: ovo/(p)ovo/(n)ovo.

(Source: Author's text)

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)

In A Literatura Cibernética 2: Um Sintetizador de Narrativas [Cybernetic Literature 2: A Narrative Synthesizer] (1980), Pedro Barbosa advocates the same analytical perspective of literary machines, which he had begun in the first volume. Influenced by Max Bense and Abraham Moles, the author develops the idea of “artificial text,” which would be later challenged by E. M. de Melo e Castro (1987), in the sense that Castro’s transmedia stance considers that all texts, produced over time with the aid of various technological tools, are always artificial. (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)

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)