light

This intervention presents an analysis of the Portuguese Electronic Literature Collection (PELC) I have been curating since August 2013 in the ELMCIP Electronic Literature Knowledge Base. By aggregating and expanding existing records in the database and creating new ones, I have been developing a research collection that addresses the Portuguese creative and theoretical production since the 1960s in the broader field of electronic literature. The PELC uses resources from ELMCIP and PO.EX, the Digital Archive of Portuguese Experimental Literature, led by Rui Torres at the Fernando Pessoa University.
The standard format of a research collection within the ELMCIP KB enabled me not only to gather creative works and critical writing, but also other content types such as people, organizations, publishers (publishing houses and journals), databases and archives, and events (e.g. conferences, festivals, performances and exhibitions). As an extra media contribution, the collection contains a video interview to Manuel Portela and Rui Torres recorded during the ELO 2013 conference in Paris, bringing into question some of the important characteristics, influences and future directions of Portuguese E-Lit.
The Portuguese avant-garde from the past fifty years was marked by the PO.EX movement, a movement of experimental writers gathered around two main anthologies – Poesia Experimental 1 [Experimental Poetry] (1964) and 2 (1966) – exposing concrete poetry, conceptual literature, sound poetry, “object-poetry,” performances and happenings. From the 1960s until the late 80s, this heterogeneous movement increased and expanded the notion of media experimentation, from videopoetry to computer-generated literature, computer poetry and infopoetry. In this sense, E.M. de Melo e Castro’s videopoem Roda Lume (1968) is a pioneer example of combined text, sound and moving image, forerunning the WWW’s hypermedia poems. In the 1980s, besides his theoretical production, Melo e Castro developed a series of electronic videopoems called Signagens (1985-89) and gave rise to infopoetry (1979-onwards). In the same period, Silvestre Pestana developed his Computer Poetry series (1981-83), programming three visual animated poems in a Spectrum. However, it was Pedro Barbosa who introduced computer-generated literature in Portugal with two theoretical volumes of cybernetic literature, A Literatura Cibernética 1 (1977) and 2 (1980), which also contained a selection of the output texts (poetry and fiction) generated in a mainframe computer with FORTRAN and BASIC languages. Moreover, Barbosa created the text generator “Sintext” (1992-99), published various monographs such as A Ciberliteratura: Criação Literária e Computador (1996) and launched the electronic opera AlletSator (2001). Since the WWW, the panorama of Portuguese e-lit has been growing, mainly through the activity of Antero de Alda, Manuel Portela and Rui Torres. Torres has been creating several digital poems remixing appropriated literary databases and directing the journal Cibertextualidades.
My analysis of the PELC is therefore based on previous critical writing and reads Portuguese creative works using light not only as a poetic unifier element in the dematerialization of word and image in electronic media, but also as the symbolic beam of a corpus that ought to expand our horizon.

(Source: Author's Abstract)

The initial argument of this essay is absurdly simple, obvious, literal: language must be embodied and thus its particular medium is—literally, ontologically—the matter, the flesh, the materiality of any message that it articulates. Marshall McLuhan urged us to recognize that media signify, that the matter in which the message is embodied also traces differences that were already what we have come to call ‘writing’ in a poststructuralist, Derridean sense: grammatological practices. However, McLuhan’s copula was not ontological. It expressed a concern that these other, parallel messages were more significant than any linguistic message they embodied. This same anxiety has reached a kind of apotheosis in recent criticism of digital literature—from Christopher Funkhouser and Roberto Simanowski—revenant as no less than our ancient fear of cannibalism. The message of the medium literally consumes the materiality of language: its own body, flesh of its flesh. But this cannibalism would only be literal—and thus taboo, thus truly terrifying—if McLuhan’s copula were ontological. The consequences of recognizing that messages are only ever media, that they cannot otherwise be—cannot matter or be matter—has not been sufficiently addressed. There are, perhaps, two coherent approaches to the categorization of media as ‘new’: new media may be programmable (this is a novel property of media as general principle) and/or new media may be materially distinct, in literal substance or by embodying some novel form of interaction with space and time. This essay pursues the materiality of language into new media—thus categorized—critiquing certain aspects of theory, and suggesting certain potentials for the practice of literal art when the Message is (New) Media.