PO.EX '70-­80: The Electronic Multimodal Repository

Portuguese experimental poetry of the 1970s and 1980s includes visual poetry, sound poetry, videopoetry, performance poetry, and computer poetry. Experimental literary objects, practices, and events often consist of an interaction between notational forms on paper and site-specific live performances. Thus the eventuality of literary meaning is dramatically foregrounded by turning the text into a script for an act whose performance co-constitutes the work. The aim of ‘PO.EX ‘70-’80: A Digital Archive of Portuguese Experimental Literature’ (http://po-ex.net/) is to represent this intermedia and performative textuality in an electronic database. The aggregation and marking up of this large multimodal corpus has material and interpretative implications which challenge our representations of experimental works and practices. Whether taking the form of facsimiles of books and paper collages, photographs of installations, videos of performances or emulations of early digital poems, digital remediation re-performs the works for the current techno-social context. This paper briefly sketches the infrastructure, objectives and questions raised by ‘PO.EX '70-80’ (Research project reference: PTDC/CLE-LLI/098270/2008).