holopoetry

Kac's work, entitled Inner Telescope, was specifically conceived for zero gravity and was not brought from Earth: it was made in space by Thomas Pesquet (French astronaut) following the artist's instructions.

The artwork was made from materials already available in the space station. It consists of a form that has neither top nor bottom, neither front nor back. Viewed from a certain angle, it reveals the French word “MOI“ [meaning “me”, or "myself"]; from another point of view one sees a human figure with its umbilical cord cut. This “MOI“ stands for the collective self, evoking humanity, and the umbilical cord cut represents our liberation from gravitational limits.

Inner Telescope is an instrument of observation and poetic reflection, which leads us to rethink our relationship with the world and our position in the Universe.

First written and published in 1996, the unrevised form of this essay now comes across, in
certain respects, as ancient history – a function of the notorious acceleration of cultural and
media development since the explosive growth of the Web after 1994. And yet, it chiefly
describes a productive engagement with writing in programmable and, latterly, networked
media which dates back, in my own case, to the late 1970s, an all-too-human, rather than
silicon-enhanced, historical context.

(Source: Author's Introduction)

This essay serves to promote a broader awareness of the pioneering efforts in videographic poetry produced in Portuguese in the decades leading up to the formation of the WWW. At present, documentation of such works in books and journal articles in English is particularly weak; the only title that even partially introduces such works is a now out-of-print issue of Visible Language that focused on New Media Poetry (Vol. 30.2). Thus, these historical predecessors to contemporary animated poetry are barely known in the United States. Prior to the 1990s only a few poets used video; much of what occurred transpired outside the realm of English (and some even outside the realm of language, as illustrated in the essay).

(Source: Author's Abstract)

This book is a collection of essays on semiotics of media, infoart, infopoetry, videopoetry, holopoetry, fractal aesthetics, poetics of zero gravity, dematerialization, teleart and robotics. (Source: http://www.cibercultura.org.br/tikiwiki/tiki-index.php?page=Po%C3%A9tic…)

States that new media poetry integrates characteristics of the new media in the theoretical basis of its poetics. Outlines its basis and shows how it affects poetic and verbal conventions, particularly with respect to the constitution of texts and the roles of author and reader, and with regard to its implications for views on language. (Source: Eric database)

Holographic poetry is better understood in the context of the multiple directions that visual poetry took in the twentieth century, and in order to make clear some theoretical issues of holopoetry which will be discussed ahead I shall proceed to summarize some of the highlights in the development of this literary genre.

A holographic poem, or holopoem, is a poem conceived, made and displayed holographically. This means, first of all, that such a poem is organized non-linearly in an immaterial three-dimensional space and that even as the reader or viewer observes it, it changes and gives rise to new meanings. Thus as the viewer reads the poem in space — that is, moves around the hologram—he or she constantly modifies the structure of the text. A holopoem is not a poem composed in lines of verse and made into a hologram, nor is it a concrete or visual poem adapted to holography. The sequential structure of a line of verse corresponds to linear thinking, whereas the simultaneous structure of a concrete or visual poem corresponds to ideographic thinking. The poem written in lines, printed on paper, reinforces the linearity of poetic discourse, whereas the visual poem sets words free on the page. Like poetry in lines, visual poetry has a long ancestry, which runs from Simias of Rhodes, through the Baroque poets, to the Modernists Marinetti, Tzara, Cummings and Apollinaire, and most recently to the experimental poets of the 1960s and 1970s.