Spanish (Castilian)

YELLOWFLOWERPOWER (2017) is the fifth film by Norwegian concrete poet Ottar Ormstad. Here again viewers encounter letter-carpets and a yellow y he identifies with. The work is based on slogans and song-titles from different countries at the end of the Sixties, presented in their original language, intentionally without translation.The texts are combined with photographs of sculptures from the Vigeland Park in Oslo/Norway, where Ormstad lives and shot the naked people exposed in stone and iron by sculptor Gustav Vigeland (1869–1943). This park is the largest in the world based on one artist and contains more than 200 works.The film also includes live video-footage of Charles Lloyd playing saxophone in front of a huge painting by Norwegian expressionist painter Edvard Munch (friend/enemy of Vigeland), as well as an unpublished photo of the young Mick Jagger, both shot in Oslo by Ormstad.Like in earlier works, Ormstad uses a strong sound in the very start for creating a period of silence at the beginning of the film.The animation is created in close collaboration between artist Margarida Paiva and Ormstad.YELLOWFLOWERPOWER invites viewers for an individual experience dependant upon the viewer's language background and tolerance towards non-translation.

Video HD 16:9, duration: 07:17Animation: Margarida PaivaSound: Hallvard W Hagen & Jens P NilsenConcrete poetry, cameras, piano and production by director Ottar Ormstad© Ottar Ormstad 2017

Lagunas is a semi-algorithmically generated novel that users can download for free from the author's website and that doesn't have two identical versions. Published in 2015, it was originally Milton Läufer's Creative Writing in Spanish MFA thesis at New York University. The story happens in a pre-apocalyptical world where, with the increasing massification of 3D printers, the public has access to the production of different kind of weapons which results in an alarming number of terrorists attacks over the planet. Lagunas is been regarded also a novel about how memory works and its ever changing form is related with the way the past is always rewriting itself.  

Góngora Word Toys is a collection of digital poems that explicitly engage with the work of Spanish Baroque poet, Luis de Góngora. The collection includes five interactive poems, each engaging with a different aspect of Góngora's poem Soledades: "Dedicatoria espiral" (Spiral Dedication), "En breve espacio mucha primavera" (A Lot of Spring in a Little Space), "El llanto del peregrino" (The Pilgrim's Cry)," Delicias del Parnaso" (Delicacies of the Parnassus) and "El arte de cetrería" (The Art of Falconry). 

Composed in 1613, Góngora's Soledades is a long silva poem about the wonderings of an anonymous castaway after his ship wrecks in an island. Soledades is paradigmatic for its difficult grammatical structures and the over-abundance of erudite and mythological allusions and references. The poem stresses rhythm, and rejoices in the opacity of Baroque language. Similarly, Gache's digital take on Góngora's work underscores the plasticity of language and its ability to create complex structures. 

The first poem, "Dedicatoria espiral" relocates the rhythm and rhetorical intricacy in Soledades’ dedication to the Duque de Béjar by transforming the verses into a moving spiral that turns clockwise or counterclockwise depending on where the reader places the cursor. The display of the text is altered by reader movements. 

"En breve espacio poca primavera" takes on a hypertextual form where text blossoms like flowers. Every time the reader activates a link, new windows pop up filling up the space on the screen, masking meaning like baroque "culteranismo." 

"Delicias del Parnaso" is a multi-option game poem, where the reader needs to choose between possible verses to complete Góngora's poem. Selection becomes reading technique. 

"El llanto del peregrino" is also a game poem. Along with the avatar, the reader moves around the new environment and walks in between words using the keyboard arrow keys. The poem works like a platform game based on spatial navigation. 

Finally, "El arte de la cetrería" presents eight birds (those appearing in Góngora's poem) all talking through mechanical voice processors. The final cacophony makes listening of the individual voices impossible, again underscoring the overall form of the piece and the mechanics of language and writing.

Author statement: 

En el período barroco, el equilibrado mundo clásico deja lugar a un mundo inestable, descentrado, escondido tras el abigarramiento de los signos. El Góngora de las Soledades ha sido comparado incluso con el astrónomo Kepler y la órbita elíptica de la Tierra con las elipsis gongorinas del lenguaje. Siguiendo su trabajo con los Wordtoys, Belén Gache nos presenta los Gongora Wordtoys (Soledades) basados en la obra del poeta español. Se tratade 5 poemas digitales interactivos (Dedicatoria espiral, En breve espacio mucha primavera, El llanto del peregrino, Delicias del Parnaso y El arte de cetrería), que remiten a un universo barroco de espirales, pliegues y laberintos del lenguaje. 

From the Electronic Literature Directory 

Artistic reenactment of the speech “Against Poets” from Buenois Aires from 1947 with using digital media 

Witold Gombrowicz (one of the most important Polish writers and an icon of XX century European literature) spent almost 25 years in Buenos Aires. In 1947 he gave a talk "Against Poets" at Fray Mocho’s bookshop, then in 1951 he publish the text in "Kultura" in Paris, which provoked a lot of poets and scholars to respond, e.g. Czeslaw Milosz (Nobel Prize winner). In this well known statement Gombrowicz attacked the very institution of Poetry (Form), as a kind of religion. The institution of Poetry attacked him back. Such controversies give a kind of new energy and awareness to the field and get artists out of their routine positions. The point of departure for this project is to reenact his statement in the new digital context. 

Nowadays there are a lot of attacks, controversies in the public sphere, and also in literary, artworld circles (on the Internet). We are going to research and mix some „attacking-” and „against-” poetics. Using words, phrases, sentences which we find in a selected cultural contexts (European, Argentinian, American) we will produce a generated speech reenactment in a new context in which artists, writers, and also anonymous Internet haters attacked eachother. To produce such an output we will create an archive which will provide input for the generation of speeches. This project has one goal: to unify the community through controversy. We hope to give rise to a variety of emotions among the e-poets (support, rejection, disgust, lack of interest). 

"In 2015, E-Poetry, which is headquartered in Buffalo, New York, organized its festival in Buenos Aires, Argentina. The Spanish and Portuguese languages seemed to take a leading role during research presentations as well as artistic events. During the festival segment titled NEW PATHS, NEW VOICES/NUEVAS RUTAS, NUEVAS VOCES, a coalition was forged against the domination of the English language in the field. During a performance (an intentionally antagonistic one, dedicated to trolling) presented in Spanish and Polish and abiding by the spirit of major Internet trolling strategies, it was established that the name of the coalition would not be announced in English, and the performance also was expressly forbidden from being translated to English. This was a gesture aimed at opposing the most significant type of domination in the field—namely, language domination and all the hegemonic practices that stem from it. It was a move modeled after that of the Coalition Against Gringpo5 and assumed this sort of trolling approach as a reply to having languages and practices identified as being at the ‘end(s)’. "

Piotr Marecki, Nick Montfort, Renderings: Translating literary works in the digital age  https://academic.oup.com/dsh/article/32/suppl_1/i84/3077164

“En una sala a oscuras, de espaldas al público, un hombre de estatura media, pelo canoso y un cuerpo de apariencia frágil recita algo en una lengua que no existe pero en la que se distinguen rasgos de todas partes: sonidos nasales franceses o polacos, morfemas en español, aglutinaciones de consonantes de ecos indoamericanos, entonaciones tangueras, vocales cerradas anglófilas"

http://reseniasbds.blogspot.no/2015/07/cronica-del-e-poetry-festival-lu…

2×6 consists of short “stanzories”—stanzas that are also stories, each one relating an encounter between two people. Appearing in English, French, Spanish, Russian, Japanese, and Polish, the stanzories are generated by a similar underlying process, even as they do not correspond to one another the way a translation typically does to a source text. These sixfold verses are generated by six short computer programs, the code of which is also presented in full. These simple programs can endlessly churn out combinatorial lines that challenge to reader to determine to whom “she” and “he,” and “him” and “her,” refer, as well as which is the more powerful one, which the underdog. Generating 2×6 is a simple process, and readers are invited to study the programs and even modify them to make new sorts of text generators. Reading the output can be much more difficult, as the text that is produced crosses syntax with power relations and gender stereotypes, multiplying those complexities across six languages.

World of Warcraft (WoW) is a massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) released in 2004 by Blizzard Entertainment. It is the fourth released game set in the fantasy Warcraft universe. World of Warcraft takes place within the Warcraft world of Azeroth, approximately four years after the events at the conclusion of Blizzard's previous Warcraft release, Warcraft III: The Frozen Throne.(Source: Wikipedia)