Portuguese

Questioning the notion of cybertext from Espen Aarseth (1997), beginEnd presents itself as a reflection on the mechanisms and materialities inherent in the book as an object. Beginning with the retelling of Finnegans Wake and the notion of intercircularity that characterizes this singular work of James Joyce, beginEnd is a combinatorial and continuous poem online, which reconverts in a digital transcoding the possibility of containing at one time two distinct moments.

“The Stone can only be found when the search lies heavily on the searcher. – Thou seekest hard and findest not. Seek not and thou whilst find.”

Arthur Koestler, The Act of Creation

[(DES)CONEXÃO (2018), by artist collectivewreading digits, in collaboration with media artist Pedro Ferreira, is a cyberpoetic artifact developed under the artistic residency “Realtime Runtime People”, promoted by the INVITROgerador (Universidade Aberta). Having its first instantiation [realtime], in July 2018, at Atelier Concorde Lisbon, as a #cyberpoetic installation complemented with #livecoding #liveremixing#performance, (DES)CONEXÃO was also presented at ARTeFACTo 2018, without its digital component. The intention at stake here was to reinforce itsinitial questioning – a reflection on the ways technologies alter our perception of time –, by giving visibility and expressiveness to textual and poetic layers behind the surface of the artifact. In dissecting the machine and its fragmented layers of different data, certain experimental writing techniques used, that allow us to extend the word, and therefore the text,  – such as combinatorics, literary cut-ups, or fold-ins – are cut wide open. Beyond the circular walls of its anatomical theatre, the remains of these mediated and transmutated philosophical stone(s), once modified, filtered, sublimated, multiplied, and sometimes even self-generated were revealed. In runtime.

"Consumição" ("Consumption") presents itself as a digital wordlyphagic variation of a sequence that has as its starting point the paradox between noise and silence that permeates language and communication. In a collision of centripetal and centrifugal forces between the excess of speech and the reduction of words to the (almost) silence, which at one time is exhausted and renewed, in the form of a spiral, in the curves that revolve around a certain point, moving away or approaching according to a certain law, space is opened up to the consumption of words, which are devoured, chewed, digested, and returned, to be swallowed up again.

aimisola.net/hymiwo.po: a poemtrack for a yet-to-be-written dance piece departs from material produced by AIMISOLA, in respect to the project “voices of immigrant women,” and further research developed by Álvaro Seiça & Sindre Sørensen on immigration, Spanish immigration policies, cultural, social and political issues in Spain. The first-person poem addresses immigrant women in long-term unemployment living in Spain, and the social, professional, linguistic, and educational obstacles that they face. The poem intends to be a possible account and denouncement of immigration, migration, and dislocation aspects, in a broader global scope, though more specifically, in the European context: rootlessness, social and personal hopes, women’s rights, social, gender and sexual inequality and aggression.The poem starts with an onscreen display of keywords used to write the poem, some of which are hash-tagged. As the poem unfolds onscreen, displaying a fixed line at a set temporal interval, these recurrent keywords scrape real-time tweets. The resulting display is a poetic mash-up of collective text, composed of background and foreground. The combined text can act as textual and visual texture, or active multimodal reading. However, it functions as a timely snapshot of a certain collective consciousness or, perhaps better, it provides an update debate on topics related to the poem that are happening as collective discourse in social media.The coding mechanics create tensions by juxtaposing a fixed (non-)poetic text with an ever-changing social(-poetic) text, which might be further complicated by the way certain tweets contradict or amplify the lines, or even when the audience participates by inputting tweets as the poem is live performed. Furthermore, interactivity is keyboard-driven. Arrow keys control line display and the avatar (“silence”) progression, as well as a visual representation of duration. The reading progression through the language game questions modes and functions of reading, and roles and boundaries between viewer, reader, user, and player. The “intermezzo” game acts as a scene, or “poemscreen,” using the BSoD as glitch source. An error display screen, the side-scroll game thus critically dialogues with game mechanics, OS errors and factual ocean traversals in the Mediterranean Sea. The very act of reading/living continues only if the reader/player traverses the poemscreen.aimisola.net/hymiwo.po was originally written in Portuguese and translated into Spanish and English. The soundtrack is “Lighthouse” (2011), by the Swedish jazz band Tonbruket.Start work at http://aimisola.net/hymiwo.po 

(Source: Author's Website)

"Voices of Immigrant Women" is a digital project in which AIMISOLA project's members have developed digital poems written for the Web, based on the experiences of immigrant women in long-­term unemployment living in Spain. Their testimonies have been recorded as sound files, images, and videos. The work has been done in Portuguese, Spanish and English language.

This work was shortlisted for the New Media Writing Prize in 2016: http://newmediawritingprize.co.uk/past-winners/2016-shortlist/

(Source: Nina Kovolic)