[-empyre-] mez.ang.elle

[anna balint <epistolaris@freemail.hu>]

dear mez,
knowing now since a while your mails on different lists,
i am glad now to have opportunity  to ask you some questions,
thanks to empyre.


- i would be interested  in the first place to find out about your background, 
a studied a bit visual and sound poetry of the last century, and i know practically
nothing about any visual poetry  in Australia. Though Nicholas Zurbrugg was living 
for quite a while there, and he was part of the visual poetry European scene, i did not see him 
introducing Australians on the European stage.

in Europe there is both academic research work and contemporary practice of visual poetry
where an artist like you could belong, and one can get inspiration from the fields of  
-  the so called epistemological and etymological writing - the linguistic methods and practices
of discovering and emphasising on cognitive patterns in linguistic frames. 
shortening words, and emphasizing polysemantics of the morphems with 
punctuation is often resulting in your texts as well not just in polysemantic units of language,
but also in archaism. sometimes words propose a time travel going back
to the indoeuropean orgin of the English language 
- the research of the 'object language', the increased investigation of the smallest 
and largest parts of langauge: sound, word, paragraph, text. these researches and practice
also come usually to similar consclusions: the words in poetic use take the characters of multi-word, 
broken into its inner body, restitched at its exterior. 
- avantgarde visual poetry, computer and video poetry, animation if text, concrete poetry performance
[i beleive the early vns matrix  was close to visual poetry with their hypertextual presentation 
of minimal enonciations]
- sociolinguistic research - a lot of effort went into determenining the influence of the machinic descriptions
and languge operating with technical notions in the 1930's, 1940's in Europe, notably the nazi reign,
a school now busy with the use of the gsm and chatroom language, or the feminin rhetorics of male, and often
macho writers


reading almost daily your, and netochka nezvanova's texts leading sometimes to a productive confusion i puzzle 
with a large quantity of questions -

- first of all i see your work pionneering in the web space discovery -  your poetry is mostly textual,
but it is also conveying spatial information about the immaterial web environment -
the introduction of the net.poetry is an enourmous event with still incalculable consequences, since
the web, regarded as an autonomous space-time sequence offers an alternative to
all existent literary genres. if subjects communicate in the space, then space is an element
of this communication, and it modifies, imposes its own law on this communication.
the objective manifestation of language can be experiences in an isolated moment and space,
as a mail, or in a squence of spaces and moments on a site or in an archive, but also as a text-stream
in the information flow. 
already visual poets of the 60's, 70's stated that as a medium of communication old literature 
will remain old literature, and there will be no new literature, there will be new ways of communication 
instead that will include language or will use language as a basis. 
everyday language is intentional, and so it is old literature's language as well
to a degree, but new art's language seems to neglects intentions and utility, it investigates itself, 
looking for forms that couple with or unfold into a space-time seqeunces on the web. 
instead of transmitting information, net.poetry's words are there to form, together with other signs 
a space-time sequence that we can identify with the web. 
every word is part of a structure,  a phrase, a paragraph, a text. the web, and web-interfaces 
consist also of structure, one of which might be the text. the text which is part of the web 
isn't necessarly the most important part of the web.
the writer, contrary to the popular opinion does not write books, but writes texts, 
which might appear in a book, or on the web. the web is a sequence of spaces and  
each of these spaces are perceived at a different moment, so that the web is also a s
equence of moments too. normally a literary text simply put on a webpage ignores the fact that 
the web is an autonomous space-time sequence. it uses the web space, but it does 
not incorporate it. written language is  also a sequence of signs expanding within the 
space; the reading of which occurs  in the time.
the web, seen as autonomous reality, can contain any (written, spoken, visual) language. 
the new web-specific literature begins when the web is not an accidental container of a 
texts, but is a self-sufficient form, including text that emphasises that form, a text that is 
an organic part of that form. in older mediums the writer were usually not responsible
 for the publishing, he wrote the text, and the rest was done by artisans. in net.art 
writing is only the first link in the chain going from the writer to the reader, the writer is 
responsible for the whole process. in the old medium writer was a writer. in the new medium 
the writer creates the net.environment alone. net.art means to actualize the ideal space-time seqence 
of the web by means of the creation of a parallel seqeunce of signs, be it linguistic, or other.
in a book all the pages are the same, on the web each link, each sequence is different. if in 
the old text we know the tools to avoid the superfluous repetitions, on the web we don't even 
know yet what will be superfluous and tiresome. that is coming with expereince - such are 
the problems of the net.poetry, whilst of course many people don't even suspect its existence.
when about the cross-posting that raised questions on the syndicate list, i don't think that is really a problem.
all organic metaphore, analogy of the virus, or social analo of the lurking  concerning  the 
publication of the texts seems to me relevant to the net, albeit still in the stage of discovery.

- in the history of civilization the shift from visual culture to writing resulted a graoundbreaking change in thinking, 
the center of thoughts moved from the right side of the brain to the left side.  
brain researchers, such as Detlef B. Linke confirms in that with the return of the visual culture,
and specially in the age of screen culture the historical location of different functions in the brain shift again,
the brain is becoming multimedial and scenic, following the movement of the cursor for instance.
reading your texts, and also seeing other cases of ascii animation, 3D poetry, sometimes i speculate that together with
the shift of our brain functions we might come agin to use a kind of the ideographic  and ideogrammatic writing, 
instead of the present logically deconstructed representation transmitting mental images

-it might seem paradoxal, but your mails revealing a structure, and formal patterns in the text,
the reduced language - compared to the verbosity of non-mezangelled poetry - is not reducing languaege, 
but acheives a greater flexibility of the communication, form becomes an aesthetic-communicative
character. the logical and graphic experiments result in units which could become as easy to understand 
as the pictograms of the airport, or the traffic signs.

- sometimes i am just staring seeing what an enormous influence archaic language, the words which are familiar and 
unknown at the same time can have on a malinglist environment [attitudes equally]. the most intriguing for me both in your 
and netochka nezvanova's language and mails is dualism, but at the same time it is the most valauble experience for me 
as well. it's so easy to promote positive aspects of communication, and very few people dear to counteract
the mainstream and to point to malfunctions, failures, side-effects occuring inherently in communication.
 i would find dangerously naive to have such a strong attitude and promote a highly individual and influential languge, 
and underappreciate the possible impact, and without carefully considerate and take in account what  these language, 
and in the case of nn, a software like nato, could do in the hands of a repressive authority.

- these are the thoughts i am confronted with,  i would apprecite if you would reflect on them,
and i would be happy if you would share a secret of your creation with us:
do you perform sometimes your poetry, or do you plan to do so? do you read loud sometimes, do you hear
your text during writing?

greetings,
anna balint