legibility

By Audun Andreassen, 14 March, 2013
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Abstract (in English)

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).

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Description (in English)

Interactive text with letters lying down about a she that is lying down and picked up by a you who carries her off and lays her down somewhere else, and she rises, walks back and lies down etc.The words will only be readable if the custom hand cursor rights the letters and so the reader/viewer must assume a role similar to the one of the you in the text.

 

Description (in original language)

Interactieve tekst met liggende letters over een zij die ligt en wordt opgetild door een jij die haar wegdraagt en ergens anders neerlegt waarop zij opstaat, terugloopt en weer gaat liggen enz. De woorden worden alleen leesbaar als een speciaal cursorhandje de letters overeind duwt, op die manier krijgt de lezer/kijker een zelfde soort rol als de jij uit de tekst.

Description in original language
Technical notes

Requires a browser, preferably but not necessarily IE, with a Flash Player installed.

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Description (in English)

In this piece the user can type whatever they wish into the application. The application takes this information and displays it in a more or less conventional manner. However, it does this in a number of different languages, including English, Greek symbols, the decimal ASCII codes that map keyboard keys to typography, the binary codes that equate to these, Morse Code and Braille. In all cases, except that of the Braille, the material is all remembered and displayed back to the user. All material written is also saved to the user's hard-drive, as it is typed in, so that they may keep a permanent record of that which has been written. The saved file is called "LossText" and you should be able to find it in the prefs or plug-ins folder of the browser you are using to run the application. You could find it using the FIND command of your computer.

As in other pieces, such as 'This is not a Hypertext' and 'Book of Books', this work also auto-resizes the text as required. If you choose to keep writing for long enough the text you are writing will eventually become reduced to 1 point fontsize, rendering all the different codes visually equivalent and equally unreadable (except for the Braille). Nobody has yet developed a Braille computer display so for those who would prefer to read their Braille with their sense of touch I regret I am unable to facilitate this option currently.

(Source: Artist's description from the project site)

I ♥ E-Poetry entry
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