Portuguese experimental literature

The inherent complexity of multimodal databases constitutes a challenge in terms of structuring and interoperability. However, it also stimulates the translation of organized data into enhanced and adaptable interfaces. Using the Digital Archive of Portuguese Experimental Literature (www.po-ex.net) as a framework, I will describe possible strategies for curating digital archives, through appropriation and remixing of database assets, allowing artistic and creative re-interpretations of experimental and electronic literature.

(source: abstract repository)

The aim of PO.EX: A Digital Archive of Portuguese Experimental Literature (http://po-ex.net/) is to represent the intermedia and performative textuality of a large corpus of experimental works and practices in an electronic database, including some early instances of digital literature. This article describes the multimodal editing of experimental works in terms of a hypertext rationale, and then demonstrates the performative nature of the remediation, emulation, and recreation involved in digital transcoding and archiving. Preservation, classification, and networked distribution of artifacts are discussed as representational problems within the current algorithmic and database aesthetics in knowledge production.

(source: abstract DHQ)

Funkhouser describes the PO.EX’70-80 project and highlights several elements of the database, praising the taxonomy and preservation/representation of works.

A letter of support of the PO.EX’70-80 project research proposal

A brief introduction to the 1960-80s Portuguese experimental group of authors and Po-ex.net, the digital archive of Portuguese experimental literature.

The replacement of mechanical-electronic interfaces for tactile haptic contact with the screen, using hands, fingers and, in some cases, biological bodies, brings to the fore a series of literal gestures with obvious influence on the way we read and write in digital multimodal environments. Making use of a rhetoric based on perceptual qualities such as “transparency” and “softness”, this prosthetic reduction seems to give continuity to an ancestral desire of immediate and non mediated access to knowledge. On the other hand, it ends up by paradoxically reinforcing the domain of visuality propelled by Gutenberg’s paradigm as well as an understanding of reading as a visual process. Based on approaches and departures that paradoxes like these are able to trigger, I propose to examine notions of touch and gesture, in relation to writing and reading processes. Namely, taking into account the way it was understood by artistic vanguards such as the Portuguese Experimentalists – whose intermedial, cybertextual and intersensory concerns are still able to give birth to renewed readings when it comes to transactions between literature and digital. Furthermore, a special emphasis will be given to confluences of both analog and digital gestures, as one of the central characteristics of haptic reading processes produced by actual and virtual manipulations of the text in digital literary artworks

The p2p exhibition brings to public different digital literary works produced by Polish and Portuguese authors in the past four decades. Polish and Portuguese literary, artistic, social, political, and even religious contexts are quite similar, even if geographically distant, and still quite divergent. It has been a fascinating surprise to find evidence of several common threads in works of experimental and generative literature, Spectrum-based animated poetry/Demoscene, and ActionScript-based digital poetry and fiction.

The exhibition will therefore be constructed around three nuclei: experimentalism, activism and animation. For this purpose, the p2p exhibition proposes to present, face-to-face, works by authors such as Pedro Barbosa, Silvestre Pestana, E. M. de Melo e Castro, Rui Torres, André Sier, Manuel Portela, Luís Lucas Pereira, Józef Żuk Piwkowski, Marek Pampuch, Michał Rudolf, Kaz, Piotr Puldzian Płucienniczak, Leszek Onak and Andrzej Głowacki.

A part of the ELO 2015 exhibition “Decentering: Global Electronic Literature” at 3,14 gallery in Bergen, Norway (August 4-23, 2015).

(Source: Álvaro Seiça and Piotr Marecki)

The Portuguese Electronic Literature Collection (PELC) at the ELMCIP KB aims to address and collect the most relevant creative and critical works produced by Portuguese authors in the field of electronic literature during the past forty-five years. The collection also brings together authors, events, organizations, publishers, journals, publications, conferences, performances and exhibitions related to the Portuguese context.
This paper critically examines PELC by focusing on literary, political, historical, aesthetic and technological elements through a common thread represented by a “luminous beam.” It intends to highlight not only the thematic and medial transition and continuity, but also the transgression and rupture, that runs from the Portuguese avant-garde movement of Experimental Poetry from the 1960s to current electronic literature environments. Throughout the paper there is an analysis of several works by Pedro Barbosa, E. M. de Melo e Castro, Silvestre Pestana, Manuel Portela and Rui Torres.

(Source: Author's Abstract)