meanderings

In the last decades of the 20th century many writers have been interested in the expressional possibilities offered by the democratization of the moving image, especially by the video media. One result from this is the video poetry developed, among others, by E.M. Melo e Castro, Richard Kostelanetz and Arnaldo Antunes from the 60’s onwards. If one were to trace a thorough history of the virtual textual motion, the tradition of video and multimedia poetry should be taken into consideration. On the other hand, it could also be fruitful to examine how video artists have experimented with the so-called natural language and linguistic articulation. Here I’m thinking especially of Gary Hill

“The Web was built upon principles of universality,” says Berners-Lee. “So any person on any device should be able to make use of any kind of data and access any kind of information. Our stated goal is to lead the Web to its full potential – that’s not a place but a direction, and our work is focused on trying to find the right direction.”

Gnarls Barkley, “Whos Gonna Save My Soul”

Précis: The Alphabet Synthesis Machine is an interactive online artwork which allows one to create and evolve the possible writing systems of one’s own imaginary civilizations. The abstract alphabets produced by the Machine can be downloaded as PC-format TrueType fonts, and are entered into a comprehensive archive of user creations. The products of the Machine probe the liminal territories between familiarity and chaos, language and gesture.

Poetry interests me above all as a kind of resistence. In the first place because its economy is absolutely aberrant to contemporary logic: an enormous investment (in terms of time and energy), quasi-nil effect and zero profitability. So it’s an act that could only be directed by internal necessity…

That grisly thing, a “poetry reading”, is what it is because there will always be some among the audience who are bored or all but frankly hostile and who can’t remove themselves by the simple act of turning a knob. And it is at bottom the same difficulty—the fact that a theatre audience is not a selected one—that makes it impossible to get a decent performance of Shakespeare in England. On the air these conditions do not exist. The poet FEELS that he is addressing people to whom poetry means something, and it is a fact that poets who are used to broadcasting can read into the microphone with a virtuosity they would not equal if they had a visible audience in front of them. The element of make-believe that enters here does not greatly matter. The point is that in the only way now possible the poet has been brought into a situation in which reading verse aloud seems a natural unembarrassing thing, a normal exchange between man and man: also he has been led to think of his work as SOUND rather than as a pattern on paper. By that much the reconciliation between poetry and the common man is nearer. It already exists at the poet’s end of the aether-waves, whatever may be happening at the other end.

This is a haiku
It is about erasers
I didn’t bring one

“micro-facial leakage”

Broken Jaw (2006)
Concrete, enamel paint,vinyl lettering. Sculpture: 70 x 60 x 50cm. Text dimensions variable.

There may even come a moment that our connection with an industrially manufactured coke bottle may be
richer and more mythical than our relation with a genetically analyzed and manipulated rabbit in the woods.

If you are the type of creative mind that starts without a plan, and has to experiment and learn by doing, you need someone to see you through the long and difficult time it takes for your art to reach its true level.

virtuosity. Not as in “pyrotechnics” but as in
“transcendence”. The ultimate, and for me desirable, absence of technical
reference.