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David CASTILLO CIBERPOETRY |
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"Image is a genuine creation of spirit. Image can not rise from a comparison but from the approach of to realities more or less far away from each other. The more far and exact the concomitances are, approaching object of both of these realities, the stronger the image will be, the more emotive force and the more poetic reality it will have." This asseveration by Pierre Reverdy of 1.918, could be useful to us in order to explain in brief all the work of the most experimental schools of the century in search of this gestation of image. Very often vanguard is being confound with rotten ideas filed away in academic drawers that have lost the naphtalene since years. Vanguard, after being filtered by university loses all its content, remains assimilated, defeated. Andre Breton already told us that surrealism would die as soon as it entered the school's books. Following his words we can state, thus, that surrealism is dead since long time ago. What is the part that remains alive? If the tendencies and the isms have been, luckily, filed away the same way we could explain if there is something left to do to help breaking down reality, to subvert it, to alter it, to make things change? Cyberdimensions can be a practically virgin place where you can guess the infinite spaces between word and image, on the roots of mind, of unconsciousness, of that that some have called poetry. But we have to know what we have had behind in order to go forward. Like Salvador Hernaez wrote in his article Ciberdimensiones (El Viejo Topo number 72) for every user of cyberspace reality has acquired a new dimension and has adopted an innovative paradigm, at the limit of the fantastic, where unknown dimensions (east-west, north-south, up and down, a part from the dimension in which we move without knowing exactly why : time) "Now our mind can flee to regions where it uses patterns that can be called mystic. Cyberspace expands conscience as it happens with psychedelic drugs; extended meditation, self-suggestive practice and all the different techniques of learning backwards of the mental scheme we are programmed since we are children. (...), everybody at his own way, were cybernauts, the only hardware they had was their software : conscience". Writing and art are also products of this conscience and the tools seem to be simply the vehicle to achieve what we have desired or what we would not wish after coming into port. If cyberspace has been useful to connect millions of persons with other realities that are not the everyday ones, they make millions of persons travel every day to places they could not have access before. Expressive liberties of the new media is able to transform artist's mentality if they are capable of forgetting about so much prejudice and to accept this challenge. The vehicle can also be useful, in this case, to project imagination like computer culture has been useful to investigate in the field of science, of economy, of a social organization, but is still completely unfair. Robert Anton Wilson uses a definition for cyberpunk that can be of great usefulness: Cyberspace is a space of multidimensional information that functions as support to sensual and consensual hallucinations of human beings". It's the door to hallucination, to the illumination of Rimbaud,to the spleen of Baudelaire, to the Buddhism that inspired the beats, to the opening rituals of the surrealist's suggestion poetry guided by Robert Desnos and to so many actions in which artist have been involved. They have used performances, happenings, action poetry, sound poetry, phonetic poetry, lettrism, the concrete poetry and the efforts of situationists of reconsidering society and the revolutionary fight. These hallucinations have inspired the sample of Catalonian Cyberpoetry under the auspices of Jordi Martorell and directed by Xavier Sabater among the pupils of the "Fak d'art", Media Art Institute and a selection of actual artists who move in territories bordering visual poetry and sound poetry like it's the case of Eduard Escofet, Rosa Grau, Jordi Teixidor, Joan Vinuesa, Xavier Sabater, Josep Manuel calleja, Xavier Canals y Merz Mail. We find since historical documentation of these poetical disciplines that have developed their work from the beginning of the 70's, until the authors of the new generations, or students who have gone deeply into the most recreational experimentation. The sample could summarize everything around the interests of Catalonian visual poets since the 50's, from "Dau al Set" until the first visual poet of Catalonia involving Joan Brossa, Guillem Viladot and Josep Iglesias del Marquet. Perfected playing cards, tipographic games, the fashion designer's centimetres, the characteristic repetitions of phonetic poetry defile in front of our senses, in a kind of anthological kaleidoscope of what has been the experimentation in our country since the Civil War. Cybernetic revolution could have hurt all these handmade disciplines and turned them into expired art. The adaptation of these artists to the new media can be a panacea to get out of immobilisation: of reiteration and of a mania to certain creators too much conditioned due to the weight of tradition. If by tracing back a route for the experimental poetry we have arrived till Egyptian art, passing through the Greek, the Chinese, through medieval poetry, through renaissance and though baroque, the actual situation found itself on a problematic dying point without possibilities of evolution. One could have the sensation that the Futurism of Marinetti, Boccioni, Carrá, Balla and Severiniappears more actual then certain actual mannerist samples. The same Marinetti affirmed at the beginning of the century that they wanted to free Italy from its innumerable museums that were covering it like innumerable cemeteries. The actual situation marked though the excesses of information has converted each computer terminal into a mobile museum. Everybody is creeping with tons of information and, by tradition, they make it get distracted until confusion, thus castrating his original creativity. Everything seems to be told, devoured and assimilated, that is to say, dead. At the Futurist manifesto "Matem el clar de lluna", Marinetti shows himself more radical than the most radicals of the punk movement of the 70's. Thus, in some points of the manifesto he incites to rebellion and spontaneity, a bit as a reaction to the abuse of the Symbolism he knew so well. Here there are some of these points: -Love to danger, to energy, to hastiness. If, without a doubt, the ideas of these manifestos have a bit of ingenuousness that they have inherited from some of the most transgressive movements like punk, the essence of renovation could still be kept untouched. Both Futurism and Dada, the Surrealism, the Lettrism or the Situacionism maybe have not had the continuity because the great figures and ideas of characters like Marinetti, Apollinaire, Duchamp, Schwitters, Tzara were missing. Issou o Debord and all the other artistic manifestations have been assimilated without counting on the least support of public, maybe it is journalism's business, maybe of information that works at a more frenetic pace that the own gestation of the news, in this case, of art. The force of language, exposed to the art of manipulation has got no limits and manipulation means that the reduction and the subversion of values have even reached the most transggressive experiences of vanguardist art. We could take as an example the tendencies of pop music and its relationship with the multinationals of musical industry. Poets like Carles Hac Mor, Jordi Pope, Enric Casassas, Josep Ramon Roig o Xavier Sabater, among many others like those mentioned before, have given way to a new generation of artists that will be able to apply the new technologies subverted to art. Hypertext, audio-digital and multimedia can be useful to provide new perspectives to the diversity of art and, thus, stop the alien process of these technologies it self. Four thousand years of culture have been a
guide to the occidental world, but they still have hierarchic codes
that have reconsidered the Greek, the Latin and the Jewish tradition
towards monotheism that now seems to be focused on machines. Secular
humanism has become a virtual manifestation of the fiercest individualism.
If they fought in order to get rid of everything involved by technologies
neoliberalism now appears to be tempted to exert its power throughout
high-tech. Everything loses its meaning and the velocity and the precision
of machines overflow the capacity of men to dominate them from their
tiny dwellings closed in the civilisation of cocooning and the farce
of the family's idea. We find ourselves at a crossroad in which values
are transformed with a perversity designed by technicians. Maybe to
be victims of art, militants of love and beauty has not got much sense,
but the inclination to ingenuousness, to words, to the pure creation
of spirit gives evidence that we are still alive. Alive and annoying,
because, in the end, it was our first aim, doesn't matter what they
say. |
