The view that I intend to explore in this paper is that the possibilities
opened to poetry by the new technologies of communication may be considered
on two levels: (i) the possibilities of interaction with the reader,
the most obvious and basic element of NTC, but the one where most theoretical
discussion of the novelty of the technologies is concentrated; (ii)
the interfaces that NTC imposes inside the communication system, that
is, the internal interface between visual, verbal and sound signs of
the poem. Despite the fact that my comments are based on poems that
I call “intersign poetry”, these questions can be extended
over the other communicational fields and products with similar analyses
(newspaper, advertisement, encyclopœdic CD-ROMs, dictionaries,
etc.). My view is that hypermedia, developed from hypertext, whether
in CD-ROMs or in websites, does not come to be used only as an exercise
in mechanical interaction with the user, but also to suggest rich ways
of mixing different kind of signs, obliging the user to adopt an intellective
approach to the exercise of reading. This activity brings the user out
of the traditional system of languages, separated into their specific
fields, into to an intersemiotic system of communication. If this interface
between signs of different languages does not work in a hypermedia construct,
NTC is merely reducing the activity of the user to a functional and
programmed use of technology and communication. Some might argue that
a functional work immediately produces new behaviour patterns and paths
to new sensations. This is a predominant trend in contemporary theory
of communication since Marshall McLuhan established the concept of medium
as a message in itself. Nevertheless, recent theorists of technology
have criticised this concept, arguing that without a level of intellective
consciousness, it is impossible to establish new ways of relating to
machines; without a certain level of reflection, is difficult to know
exactly how to exploit the perspectives that the new technogies open
up for us.
My analyses dialogue with two importants studies on digital communication
published in United States in the 1990s. The first is Hypertext - Th
Cconvergence of Contemporary Critical Theory, by George P. Landow, of
Brown University (The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997 edition).
Landow defines hypertext drawing on different theses such as Vannevar
Bush’s conception of memex, Jacques Derrida’s deconstructivism,
and Roland Barthes’s analysis of the new relationship between text
and reader. Technically, for Landow, hypertext can be defined as a technology
of texts put into a web that can make clear the intertextuality inherent
in literary works. But, by making rapid and explicit the consultation
of subtexts, and by increasing the potentiality of nonlinear and decentered
contemporary literature, hypertext changes the conception of text and
writing, thus transforming the role of the author and the possibilities
of literary education. This new ethic of technological texts must be
considered even when we go out of textuality and enter hypermedia programmes,
a further development of hypertext, where non-verbal (visual and sound)
signs are joined. Hypermedia facilitates working with experimental poetry
as hypertext does literary works.
The second approach towards technological writing that I intend to consider
is that of Richard A. Lanham in his book The Electronic Word (University
of Chicago Press, 1994). Lanham analyses the transformation of the internal
feature of the sign, its variable and changeable forms, its ways of
organising itself according to the principle of collage. Computer graphics
provoke “judgments about scale, a new icon/alphabet ratio in textual
communication, nonlinear collage and juxtapositional reasoning (...)
- all these constitute a new theory of management”. So Lanham deals
with the concept of rhetoric, viewed as a dialetical play established
in looking AT a surface pattern of communication and THROUGH it.
By the other side, the experimental poetry appears as an already traditional
place for mixing different codes in the modern and contemporary poetics.
It is useful to understand clearly what is the concept of “experimental
poetry” adopted here: it is a kind of poetry, manifested in some
styles and movements in the twentieth, whose form is not displayed in
verses. So the concept is rooted in two grounds: I. in the visual field,
experimental poetry embraces since the spatialization of verbal texts
(like the foremost Mallarmé’s Un Coup de Dés) until
poems with printed images (like the italian visive poetry of the 60’s),
passing through very well known visual poetics as the chaotic arragments
of futurism, the figurative poems of Apollinaire’s calligrammes
or the geometric constructivity of the concretism; ii. in the sound
field, experimental poetry contains since phonetic ruptures of dada’s
poems until the polipoetry concept of Enzo Minarelli’s creation
in the 80’s, crossing the inventions of the electroacustic poems
of Henri Chopin, the French lettrism of the 50’s, some beatnik
kind of discourses, among others.
A privileged place for the discussion of these issues, central to the
contemporary poetics and aesthetics, is the digital technology because
of its opened use possibilities, either the perspectives that they can
still offer to the mix the two trends of experimental poetry in only
one space of the communicational. Regarding a new spatial configuration
that is no longer the codex form of the book, the poetry inevitably
trespasses the limits of the verbal sign itself. Overcoming the unchanging
and bidimensional space of the page as a support for the printed word,
necessarily the possibilities to work with the isolated verbal sign
in an instigating way is, we could say, also overcomed inside these
news configuration of space. If the hypertext becomes naturally hypermedia
by the inclination to the integration of the languages within the digital
technologies, the digital poem also becomes a traffic between signs
of different languages that, when well done, could be called “intermedia”
- I prefer “intermedia” term to indicate the communication
of a poem where a semantic and functional integration between different
kind of signs is predominant, requiring a exercise of “composition”
by the reader/observer. The “multimedia” term is preferable
to designate poetic communications where free accumulation and superposition
of many signs install a simple illustrated and didascalic ways of relation
between signs. However, poetry, before entering the technological space
of communication, had already reached, according to the intersign poetics,
the object poems and the sound poems where, respectively, elements sucs
as interactivity and immateriality, two totems of the emerging (and
yet so fragile) theories of poetics in new media, are achieved. What
matters also in the use of these new technologies is the easiness and
the encouragement towards integrative realizations between languages
where non-verbal signs (sound or images) are not reduced to the role
of mere elements of reinforcing the verbal feature.
On the basis of these considerations, I have been trying to develop
a concept of “interpoetry”, related to exercises in the field
of experimental poetry, first with visual poems, later with sound poems.
Interpoetry has two meanings: that of interactivity and that of intersign
poetry. The fusion of these two meanings in one poem is the concern
of my work in the area of interpoetry. I will start with the older meaning:
‘intersign poetry’ is the name I used fifteen years ago (1)
to express the idea of a poetry created by the fusion of verbal and
non-verbal signs. At that time, I was concerned with exploring the characteristics
of a visual poetry that, produced in the years after the concretist
movement, distinguished itself from the tradition of experimental poetry
up to the time of concretism: the tradition of making the visual element
derive from the verbal element. From the figurative poems of Greek Antiquity
to the concrete poetry of the 1950s and 1960s, every type of visual
poetry in one form or another exploits the graphic form of the text,
the word or the letter, that is, the various visual forms taken by the
verbal sign. In some rare cases, when drawings or engravings enter the
space of the poem, the visual element acts as an illustration of the
text. The idea of intersign poetry was to use visual images (drawings,
photos, numbers, or other graphic elements) as compositional components
of the poem through formal interrelationship and semantic interpenetration
with the verbal sign; from this, the coming to fruition of intersign
poem is the function of an exercise in decoding, interpretation, and
decifering that the reader/observer must undertake in the light of the
montage of visual and verbal signs present in the poem. Thus intersign
poetry emerges as a kind of visual poetry which negates past forms of
visual poetry.
These questions led me to an idea that has guided my work since: poetry
is a specific form of organising signs in a poem (formal fusion plus
semantic montage); it is a language. It is neither a problem specific
to the verbal code nor a problem of the techniques through which this
language is exhibited or transmitted. Hence, when in the first half
of the 1990s I began experimenting with the possibilities of sound poetry,
I sought to try to introduce these concepts into the field of sounds
by producing poems in which non-verbal sounds played, in the sound poem,
the role of images in the visual intersign poem: to create formal fusions
that produced not only acoustic effects but more especially meanings
deciferable through intellectual interpretation (2).
In the second half of 1997, I began producing poems in which sounds,
images and words coalesce, in a complex intersemiotic process, in a
technological environment which precisely facilitated the simultaneous
presence of verbal, visual and acoustic signs: hypermedia programmes.
The idea here was to avoid doing what the visual poem up till concretism
had always done: make the visual follow on from the verbal. Or what
recited poetry always did: illustrate the reading of the text with music
or incidental sounds.
But it was also necessary to avoid the equivocal discourse produced
by artists who worked with the new technologies: these latter assume
that the mere use of new technologies produces new languages, that is,
new ways of combining codes. In practice, this does not happen. Technologies
like videotext, computer graphics and holography, present new environments
in which the signs of the poem are placed; that is, they suggest new
ways of organising these images into spacial and temporal structures,
different from those of the printed page. But this does not mean to
say that the poem automatically takes advantage of these new structures.
Technology suggests; it does not impose. And what we see today is a
traditional visual poetry (principally following concretist and futurist
forms) reproduced in terms of the new technologies.
Intersign poems are not “experiments of poetic written texts”,
but intersigned processes of word, image, sound, movement, varied ways
of reading, where the image, the sound and the movement are not simply
features of the word. Interpoetry sets out consciously to occupy the
structures provided by the new medias, modifying the relationships between
image, sound and word within the specific environments which only hypermedia
makes possible. There are two levels of structure which may be considered
typical of interpoetry:
1. the mode of relating image, sound and word, which gives continuity
to the processes operative within visual and sound intersemiotic poetry,
establishing the basis of intersign poetry in hypermedia, obeying a
certain specific development of the poem within the time and space of
hypermedia.
2. Forms of relationship with the reader and the question of interactivity.
The intervention of the reader/user amplifies the forms of participation
that the avant-gardes had introduced into art, breaking with the classic
contemplative role of the reader/observer. The option of multiple paths
for the reading of the interpoem gives rise to two circuits of association:
a network of connections based on the technological links made available
by hypermedia; a network of associations set up between the data of
the poem, which refer to eachother, subterranean to the virtual links,
and which could be called post-virtual. The suggested links (interpretative
associations) thus supplant and subvert the links that are offered (virtual
paths). The interpoem thus establishes the primacy of ‘suggestion’
over ‘explanation’, one that characterizes technological art
in general. And it underlines the rethorical question put by Lanham:
the superficies of technical links, this opened way to be read, keeps
our attention AT the communicative features of the poem as a kind of
game; the web of suggestions made by virtual (or mental) links requires
our reading THROUGH the communicative features up to semantic conections.
It could be said that the rethorical structure of reading an interpoem
lies and relies upon the oscillation between “explanation”
and “suggestion”, “technical links” and “semantic
links”.
The intersigned fusion conducts, after all, the creative exercise towards
the fusion between the text genres, where the poetry penetrates the
field of theory, tale and encyclopedic information. Everything proceeds
to the creation of big systems of communicating chambers where the narrative
fiction, the game, the poetry, the scientific research, the daily information
and the interpersonal contact can be moments of the same productive
exercise.The fusion of genres is, furthermore, natural to interpoetry:
visual poetry, sound poetry, theoretical text, encyclopœdic information,
fiction, lies, games, all are possible paths within the interpoem. It
Questions are further raised by the perspective of incorporating narrative
forms, by the production of works which could be called ‘interprose’
and which could appear as a follow-up to interpoetic work.
Philadelpho Menezes,
poet and professor of Communication and Semiotics of the Catholic University
of Sao Paulo, born in 1960 in São Paulo, Brasil.
Author of Poetics and Visuality (San Diego State University Press, 1995),
Poesia Concreta e Visual (Ática, São Paulo, 1998) and
organized Poesia Sonora - poéticas experimentais da voz no século
XX (EDUC, São Paulo, 1992), among other books of theory on literature,
post-modernity and global culture. As a poet, his latest book is Demolições
- ou poemas aritméticos (Arte Pau-Brasil, São Paulo, 1988),
and is organizer and author of two CDs of Sound Poetry: Poesia Sonora
- Do fonetismo às poéticas contemporâneas da voz
(LLS/Fapesp, São Paulo, 1996) and Sound Poetry Today: anminternational
anthology (EPE/Fapesp, São Paulo, 1998). In collaboration with
brasilian designers is issuing in 1999 the CD-ROM Interpoetry - Interactive
Hypermedia Poetry, with experimental poems in hypermedia environments.
Organized expositions like the I International Exhibition of Visual
Poetry of São Paulo (Centro Cultural São Paulo, 1988)
and Poesia Intersignos - do visual ao sonoro e ao digital (Paço
das Artes, São Paulo, 1998). He has been participating in international
meetings, congress, performances and exhibitions in Europe, America,
Russia and Australia, where he has been developing his idea of "Intersign
Poetry", a term to define a special way of combining visual, verbal
and sound signs in poetry in different enviroments (technologics and
alive). |
