PO.EX

The p2p exhibition brings to public different digital literary works produced by Polish and Portuguese authors in the past four decades. Polish and Portuguese literary, artistic, social, political, and even religious contexts are quite similar, even if geographically distant, and still quite divergent. It has been a fascinating surprise to find evidence of several common threads in works of experimental and generative literature, Spectrum-based animated poetry/Demoscene, and ActionScript-based digital poetry and fiction.

The exhibition will therefore be constructed around three nuclei: experimentalism, activism and animation. For this purpose, the p2p exhibition proposes to present, face-to-face, works by authors such as Pedro Barbosa, Silvestre Pestana, E. M. de Melo e Castro, Rui Torres, André Sier, Manuel Portela, Luís Lucas Pereira, Józef Żuk Piwkowski, Marek Pampuch, Michał Rudolf, Kaz, Piotr Puldzian Płucienniczak, Leszek Onak and Andrzej Głowacki.

A part of the ELO 2015 exhibition “Decentering: Global Electronic Literature” at 3,14 gallery in Bergen, Norway (August 4-23, 2015).

(Source: Álvaro Seiça and Piotr Marecki)

The Portuguese Electronic Literature Collection (PELC) at the ELMCIP KB aims to address and collect the most relevant creative and critical works produced by Portuguese authors in the field of electronic literature during the past forty-five years. The collection also brings together authors, events, organizations, publishers, journals, publications, conferences, performances and exhibitions related to the Portuguese context.
This paper critically examines PELC by focusing on literary, political, historical, aesthetic and technological elements through a common thread represented by a “luminous beam.” It intends to highlight not only the thematic and medial transition and continuity, but also the transgression and rupture, that runs from the Portuguese avant-garde movement of Experimental Poetry from the 1960s to current electronic literature environments. Throughout the paper there is an analysis of several works by Pedro Barbosa, E. M. de Melo e Castro, Silvestre Pestana, Manuel Portela and Rui Torres.

(Source: Author's Abstract)

Herberto Helder died. Helder is one of the most consistent and innovative Portuguese poets of the second half of the 20th century. Even if his later œuvre has been marked by a traditional experimentalist reworking of crafted language, whose poiesis engages with a very idiosyncratic vocabulary, one should not forget Helder’s eclectic trajectory. Having been influenced by, among other movements, Surrealism and international avant-garde experimentalism, Herberto Helder was, firstly together with António Aragão (1964), and secondly with Aragão and E. M. de Melo e Castro (1966), the editor of two important anthologies or cadernos (chapbooks), Poesia Experimental 1 [Experimental Poetry 1] and Poesia Experimental 2 [Experimental Poetry 2]. Both these anthologies opened up most of the major pathways of literary and artistic experimentalism in the 1960s, from which the PO.EX (Experimental POetry) movement emerged. Several genres, formal and thematic threads were originally tried out in these two anthologies and further work of the movement, namely concrete and visual poetry, ‘film poetry,’ sound poetry, ‘object-poetry,’ ‘poetic action’ and happening.

(Source: Author's introduction)

Herberto Helder died. Helder is one of the most consistent and innovative Portuguese poets of the second half of the 20th century. Even if his later œuvre has been marked by a traditional experimentalist reworking of crafted language, whose poiesis engages with a very idiosyncratic vocabulary, one should not forget Helder’s eclectic trajectory. Having been influenced by, among other movements, Surrealism and international avant-garde experimentalism, Herberto Helder was, firstly together with António Aragão (1964), and secondly with Aragão and E. M. de Melo e Castro (1966), the editor of two important anthologies or cadernos (chapbooks), Poesia Experimental 1 [Experimental Poetry 1] and Poesia Experimental 2 [Experimental Poetry 2]. Both these anthologies opened up most of the major pathways of literary and artistic experimentalism in the 1960s, from which the PO.EX (Experimental POetry) movement emerged. Several genres, formal and thematic threads were originally tried out in these two anthologies and further work of the movement, namely concrete and visual poetry, ‘film poetry,’ sound poetry, ‘object-poetry,’ ‘poetic action’ and happening.

(Source: Author's introduction)

The Portuguese Electronic Literature Collection (PELC) at the ELMCIP KB aims to address and collect the most relevant creative and critical works produced by Portuguese authors in the field of electronic literature during the past forty-five years. The collection also brings together authors, events, organizations, publishers, journals, publications, conferences, performances and exhibitions related to the Portuguese context.

Álvaro Seiça gave a lecture on June 25, 2014, at 3 pm, at the Room Ferreira Lima (6th floor, Faculty of Letters, University of Coimbra), entitled "A Luminous Beam: Reading the Portuguese Electronic Literature Collection." In this lecture Seiça presented the Portuguese Electronic Literature Collection that integrates the ELMCIP database (Electronic Literature as a Model of Creativity and Innovation in Practice, project coordinated by Scott Rettberg). This initiative was organized by the PhD program in Materialities of Literature (FCT Doctoral Program), in collaboration with the Digital Culture Program at the University of Bergen.

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)

This essay reflects on the shift of user interaction operated by online literary archives and databases. One can easily recognize a change of scenery happening in the current networked world, given the way authors and general public produce, catalog, tag, access, research, analyze, preserve and share knowledge.
In the field of electronic literature, the creation of several collaborative and open access databases attests this trend. For this purpose, I review two of them: the PO.EX Digital Archive of Portuguese Experimental Literature and the ELMCIP Electronic Literature Knowledge Base. My aim is to contribute to an informed view on how these online literary databases are shaped and are shaping the field: What is their scope? How do they operate? What kind of navigation and user input exists? Why should they really matter?
Finally, I use these insights to develop some considerations concerning the relations between memory and archive, and different perspectives on electronic literature preservation.

(Source: Author's Abstract)