Non linguistic concrete poem.
Concrete Poetry: product of a critical evolution of forms. Assuming that the historical cycle of verse (as formal-rhythmical unit) is closed, concrete poetry begins by being aware of graphic space as structural agent. Qualified space: space-time structure instead of mere linear-temporistical development. Hence the importance of ideogram concept, either in its general sense of spatial or visual syntax, or in its special sense (Fenollosa/ Pound) of method of composition based on direct-analogical, not logical-discursive juxtaposition of elements. "ll faut que notre intelligence s’habitue à comprendre synthético-idéographiquement au lieu de analytico -discursivement" (Apollinaire). Elsenstein: ideogram and montage.
(English translation by the authors)
Forerunners: Mallarmé (Un coup de dés, 1897): the first qualitative jump: "subdivisions prismatiques de l’idée"; space ("blancs") and typographical devices as substantive elements of composition. Pound (The Cantos); ideogramic method. Joyce (Ulysses and Finnegans Wake): word-ideogram; organic interpenetration of time and space. Cummings: atomization of words, physiognomical typography; expressionistic emphasis on space. Apollinaire (Calligrammes): the vision, rather than the praxis. Futurism, Dadaism: contributions to the life of the problem. In Brazil: Oswald de Andrade (1890-1954): "in pills, minutes of poetry. João Cabral de Melo Neto (born 1920—The Engineer and The Psychology of Composition plus Anti-Ode): direct speech, economy and functional architecture of verse.
Concrete Poetry: tension of things-words in space-time. Dynamic structure: multiplicity of concomitant movements. So in music-by, definition, a time art-space intervenes (Webern and his followers: Boulez and Stockhausen; concrete and electronic music); in visual arts-spatial, by definition-time intervenes (Mondrian and his Boogie-Woogie series; Max Bill; Albers and perceptive ambivalence; concrete art in general).
Ideogram: appeal to nonverbal communication. Concrete poem communicates its own structure: structure-content. Concrete poem is an object in and by itself, not an interpreter of exterior objects and/ or more or less subjective feelings. Its material word (sound, visual form, semantical charge). Its problem: a problem of functions-relations of this material. Factors of proximity and similitude, gestalt psychology. Rhythm: relational force. Concrete poem, by using the phonetical system (digits) and analogical syntax, creates a specific linguistical area-"verbivocovisual" -which shares the advantages of nonverbal communication, without giving up word's virtualities. With the concrete poem occurs the phenomenon of metacommunication: coincidence and simultaneity of verbal and nonverbal communication; only-it must be noted-it deals with a communication of forms, of a structure-content, not with the usual message communication.
Based on personal memory and research, this writing focuses Brazilian Concrete Poetry’s
magazines NOIGANDRES and INVENÇÃO, evaluating their importance as media for a new poetic practice.
(source: author)
Com base na memória pessoal e pesquisa, este escrito enfoca as revistas da Poesia
Concreta brasileira NOIGANDRES e INVENÇÃO, avaliando sua importância como veículos de uma nova prática poética.
(Fonte: autor)
Versão do poema do mesmo título de Augusto de Campos (1963) utilizando cartões perfurados de computador.
This paper aims at analyzing the historical evolution of poetry experiments in Italian and Portuguese languages. Poetry has always been interested in experimenting with new ways of writing; however the computer and internet media make the experiments with the language a basic question. The first part of this paper will refer to a historical approach tracing the most important breakpoints in the poetry development in Italian and Portuguese languages during the last century. We will focus above all on Italian Futurism and visual poetry and we will connect Italian visual poetry tradition to Brazilian concrete poetry to identify the main characteristics and to define the links between these movements and the contemporaneous epoetry environment. In the second part some Italian Portuguese e-poetries will be presented and analyzed. A close-reading of some famous works will be proposed trying to identify the strategic elements which constitute the poetics of digital text - the infographic images, the poeticity of the elements, theirs [il]legibility, the pluri-signification of the relation image. The third part will allow us to observe if there are some distinctiveness in Italian and Portuguese works due to historical reasons and traditions.
(Source: Author's abstract for ELO_AI).
Poemas de Wlademir Dias-Pino e Regina Pouchain apresentados em exposição no Oi Futuro-RJ em 2008.
Musical-poetic composition based on two verse segments from archaic Greek poetry. (Source: Poiesis)
“Fórmula do mar” parte de dois segmentos de versos da poesia grega arcaica (épica e lírica) que envolvem a expressão formular polyphlóisboio thalásses, sendo a palavra polyphlóisboio referida como representação onomatopaica do mar ruidoso: pará thina polyphlóisboio thalásses e katá kyma poliphlóisboio thalásses. Em ambos, a sucessão de vogais abertas e fechadas, associada à seqüência de consoantes, gera um efeito especialmente melódico, que inclui a sonoridade das palavras anteriores (pará thina, num caso, e katá kyma, no outro). A composição que apresentamos, motivada pela semelhança fônica entre tais segmentos, realiza um entrelaçamento entre eles, usando dois timbres e duas vozes (diferidas por uma oitava), sobrepondo-se as palavras iniciais e a final; exibe ambos os segmentos no idioma de origem e, em seguida, numa recriação (não-literal) em português: em relação ao primeiro adotou-se a forma “junto às ondas polissonantes do oceano”, e, relativamente ao segundo, "fundo às ondas polissonantes do oceano". Uma vez definido o projeto da composição (por meio de uma notação peculiar, também apresentada aqui), ele foi transcrito e realizado num computador doméstico, utilizando-se diferentes programas para a notação musical, para a execução dos timbres instrumentais e para a gravação da voz e a finalização. (Autor)
Sound installation with 37 palindrommic verses printed onto steps of the exhibit space. (Source: Poiesis)
Instalação sonorizada com 37 versos paindrômicos sobre degraus do museu. (Fonte: Poiesis)
audio recording: João Ribeiro Sound Engineering: Leco Possollo Design and Production: Andre Vallias
In Arteônica, Cordeiro's seminal text on electronic art, he stated that Brazilian Concrete art employed digital creative methods and offered algorithms largely employed in communications. It must be clarified that he did not use the words "digital" and "algorithms" literally here. He was not referring to actual computer programs; rather, he was suggesting that the visual forms created by Concrete art were applicable to mass communications and graphic and industrial design. It was not until 1969 that Cordeiro, working in collaboration with physicist Giorgio Moscati, created his first visual computer artwork. In this and in subsequent computer artworks (the last produced before his premature death of a heart attack in 1973), Cordeiro synthesized his lifelong concern with radically innovative forms and the social and political dimension of art. Cordeiro started his career exploring purely visual geometric abstract forms, only to incorporate semantically charged shapes and objects at a later stage. Ultimately, in his computer art, mathematical abstraction (as digitized and processed imagery) and political and emotional concerns (as content-oriented art) came together in a truly original and challenging way for the first time in his career. In forging this unique synthesis, the product of a natural evolution of his ideas, Cordeiro produced some of the most important works of the first phase of computer art. Abraham Moles, Pierre Restany, and Jonathan Benthall are among the international critics who recognized Cordeiro's early contribution to the incipient new art. In the context of Brazilian art, his work ranks as one of the most innovative and stimulating, side by side with Flávio de Carvalho, Lygia Clark, Hélio Oiticica and Abraham Palatnik. If we are to write the history of electronic art from a truly global perspective, we must acknowledge Waldemar Cordeiro's pioneering contribution.
At the same time that Cordeiro's work as an artist was shifting focus around the mid- and late 1960s, his interest in architecture, landscaping, interior design and urban planning increased. It seems that the artist, responding to the impact of mass media and the economic and philosophical issues it raised, identified new aesthetic challenges in the creation of public spaces to be experienced by the masses, rather than in the crafting of objects to be viewed by isolated individuals as is the case in galleries and museums. In 1967 he obtained an advanced degree in landscaping. From 1950 to 1973 he worked on more than 150 landscaping projects.
As a consequence of his interest in artificial languages, which he saw as directly related to the syntax of forms promoted by Concrete art, Cordeiro ended up embracing the latest technological tool---the computer. On the one hand, he saw the need to integrate the Constructivist lesson with the new qualitative and quantitative demands posed by mass society in order to address new communicative problems raised by electronic means of communication in an ever-shrinking world. On the other hand, the artist found that the unique object created manually for the consumption of a few was obsolete. For him, the global culture of the future would require an electronic art that could reach millions simultaneously without any loss of its informational content. When he started to create computer art in 1968, Cordeiro was motivated to do so for political and aesthetic reasons. He was committed to the creation of a new art, but he was also interested in the social implications of this new art, which for the first time could overcome, in electronic form, insurmountable geographic barriers and participate in a worldwide culture. Some of the ideas expressed by Cordeiro in his Arteônica ("Arteonic"---a contraction of arte [art] and eletronica [electronic]) manifesto (included here in its first English translation) anticipate cultural, aesthetic and economic issues raised today by the World Wide Web, for example. In her article also included here, Annateresa Fabris further analyses his works and writings, particularly those related to his computer art.