[-empyre-] empyre Digest, Vol 14, Issue 13

["Jorge Luiz Antonio" <jlantonio@uol.com.br>]

Dear Clemente Padin

    It is quite a pleasure to welcome you in Empyre, especially receiving a
good text like the one you sent.
    Wellcome to our comments. I've included an url referring to your good
work "La Poesía Experimental in Latinoamerica".

    Best regards from Brazil

Jorge Luiz Antonio


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Sent: Friday, March 12, 2004 10:01 PM
Subject: empyre Digest, Vol 14, Issue 13


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Today's Topics:

   1. forward: Latinoamerican Digital Poetry by Clemente Padin
      (Jim Andrews)


----------------------------------------------------------------------

Message: 1
Date: Fri, 12 Mar 2004 15:54:03 -0800
From: "Jim Andrews" <jim@vispo.com>
Subject: [-empyre-] forward: Latinoamerican Digital Poetry by Clemente
Padin
To: "Soft_Skinned_Space" <empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au>
Message-ID: <DCEIJDHNAAEEKPKFBEALEEIADGAA.jim@vispo.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1"

Friends,

Newly in my home after a long tour making up performances and carrying out
conferences on experimental poetry in Cardiff, London and Barcelona, I read
the late emails of Empyre and I meet my Brazilian poets and friends Regina,
Alexandre and Jorge Luiz with the pleasant surprise of that the topic
concerned us.



Totally in accordance with their expressions I want to support their words
with this small text that I wrote on the same topic very recently.



Thank you for your bother, fraternal greeting, Clemente Padín.




DIGITAL POETRY IN LATINOAMERICAN


One of the infallible methods of transgressing the codes of any language,
that is to say, its mechanisms of emission, transmission and reception of
messages (writing/support/reading) and, therefore, to generate a greater
number of bits of information -because of the unpredictability of the
contents they involve- is to use new supports or channels. Generally, the
action of the new medium contributes immensely to the form of the
expression, the genuine producer of the poetic as long as there are
"readjustments of content" (Umberto Eco, 1977). On the contrary, the mere
transposition of one language into another, without great changes nor
informative increases, occurs when the new medium takes place only in the
form of content.

As we know, aesthetic information was and will be bound to the physical
properties of the support, and the supports, in themselves, are
(in)significant. However, something happens when a significant unites itself
to a support. Something causes the original meaning of the sign to be
transformed by that conjunction; thus their semantic expression would be
impossible to obtain with any other media or channels.

It is also asserted that it is not the same "to write" poems that adapt the
new medium to the forms already effective or foreseen by the official
literary system in a mere transposition, to create new forms starting from
the languages which characterize the new channels or supports. The same
approach governs the new electronic media: it is not only necessary to make
use of their  communicational possibilities, those that will be discovered
way experimentation, as long as modifiers or enrichers of the form of the
expression but, also, like possible transmitters of concepts for which
verbal language has been overcome, for instance, the concept of "light" or
"infinite," among others.

VIRTUAL POETRY

Unfortunately, there is no way to appreciate what a virtual poem is other
than in a virtual space. The picture, or rather the "electronic image"
registered with virtual cameras, is a pale reflection of the poem,
excessively insufficient. Virtual poetry is possible due to two intrinsic
characteristics of computing: 1) it could engender three-dimensional signs
inside a virtual space and 2) it could program their behaviors. That is to
say, a design in three dimensions is needed in order to facilitate what we
normally carry out with an object when we want to know it: to manipulate it
in all directions and under all possible viewpoints.

Therefore, it is mentioned as "(virtual) reality" since the "virtual
object", likewise the "real object" will ever respond in the same way,
because it itself contains the whole necessary information about itself.
However, we are not discussing here the "real object" but a group of data
loaded in a memory to which it is able to apply the "physics" that we want.
Even algorithms of behavior that work oppositely to the classical physics of
Newton or to the most versatile of Einstein.

So, the virtual poem could not only move and transform itself according to
precise programs but, also, respond to certain situations occasioned by the
observer who, could even touch them and operate with them as if they were
real objects. With the appropriate equipment it is possible to insert
himself/herself into that virtual space and interact with texts and signs.
In short: the three-dimensional representation simulated on a computer, able
to create their sense of reality and to perform competently the sensations
characteristic of the objects, applied to cause a correct although not real
perception in the observer, aside from the possibility of its virtual
manipulation due to previously developed programs.

In spite of everything, unbelief and postmodernism, creation is still going
on in Latin America. It also continues the research and experimentation, not
only of new materials and communication media (fax, Internet, etc.) but,
also, of new ways for the poetic expression. Not simply accompanying the
advances of electronic technology (computers, laser, etc.) but still more
impelling (as Walter Benjamin has pointed out) the media by highlighting,
through the artistic experimentation, their "productive" possibilities,
either aesthetic or scientific or technical.

The poetic movements are necessarily experimentals with respect to their
language, i. e., they would not be avant-garde if they did not establish
radical projects of writing and/or reading, being impelled by the search and
production of new information. It is not about manipulating the signs of the
own repertoire of each language or doing a redundant fruition of already
known and accepted solutions by the  establishment, an insubstantial
exercise of epigonal virtuosity. It handles about generating an information
that makes some problem to the language in use (and the rest of the
languages as a consequence)  questioning and obliging them to rebuild their
structures under the light of the  processes that are given by the new
knowledge. These re-conditionings, in the varied and different repertoires,
not only artistic but also social ones, will generate, in turn, new
statements and question matters that will revert and modify that
information, provoking new advances in knowledge.

In Latin America, in front of the challenge that the economic re-orderings
provoke, the poets have not remained alien and they join to the effort that
means for our countries to radically modify their "ways of doing and
thinking", uniting efforts in the productive and social areas of our
countries, trying from (and not with) their creative activity to make emerge
the new symbolic forms and the new values that rigorously express our epoch,
founded on the forms and values that were generated since the beginning of
our history and that have characterized and sealed our identity for ever.

Networking generated in the nets and circuits organized in open horizontal
structures assures its multidirectional decentralized nature.It
is,therefore,intrinsically democratic and it has arisen in the arts of our
epoche, not only because impels the scientific advances in the field of
communication, but because it also expresses the tolerance and cultural
multiplicity without forgeting the peculiarities each one, of each networker
in the net, id est, the respect to the others within a climate of generous
interaction that does leave aside the legitimate demands for a plentiful
life,full of creative significance.

"Do not expect but poison of stagnant water», William Blake warned us and,
closer, Karl Popper declares that major advances in any field of the human
activity are achieved upon questioning that already known and effective for
each system; not only what the "word" or the "verb" has consecrated, by
means of power or what the system has legitimated, way ideology, but even
everything connoted as "unalterable," "necessary" or "essential" by the
establishment. Only, the irrepressible empiria, the experimentation aided by
creative negation will bring us fresh and luminous airs like these.





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End of empyre Digest, Vol 14, Issue 13
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