Re: [-empyre-] forward: Latinoamerican Digital Poetry by Clemente Padin

["arteonline" <arteonline@arteonline.arq.br>]

My dear poet Padín,

First of all I would like to say congrats about your conferences out of
South America (I am looking forward to receive material about them) and for
the  text below. You have been one of my  gurus and web.partner work since
2001 and you know how you have helped me in my activities on line.  By the
way people, you can find excellent material about Clemente Padín in Escáner
Cultural: www.escaner.cl , a virtual magazine from Chile produced by Isabel
Aranda and Clemente Padín. There you will find material about poetry,
performances and web.art /net.art.

You can find more about Padín in the Museum of the Essential and Beyond That
too, browser at: http://arteonline.arq.br , there search the building / map:

1- Click first floor / click essays, letter P.
2- Click books, letter P. You will find there three books of Padín,
including the last one: La poesia es la  poesia (Poetry is Poetry).
3- Click too digital poetry.
4- Click too artist and identity.
5- Click the second floor of the map building and them click Spams. This
last one was a portion of the CD ROM Clemente Padín Spams Trashes, a series
of poetical and political spams created by Padín. The CD ROM was produced by
the Museum of the Essencial and Beyond That
(http://arteonline.arq.br/museu/projetos.htm).   Padín, Jorge Luiz Antonio
and me worked together in this project .

"This CD-ROM has more than sixty web pages: twenty spams trashes in Spanish,
Portuguese and English, author's biographical notes, introductory note and
credits.
Spams Trashes characterizes by the circunstantial, by the changing of
referential and conative function of language into poetic function, by using
the resource of the art of the word and image in order to provoke
strangeness. And by this way we can notice what is the most interesting: the
comic side that is revelead in an unespected way. Padin uses alternativelly
either the word, or the image, or even both of them, for saying that our
Internet world is also composed by repetition, but we equally can make it a
happy moment, a moment of joke, of thinking, and so on." (fragment of the
introduction by Jorge Luiz Antonio)

My most gracious thanks to Jim Andrews who gave us the chance to know and to
show more about Poetry and Padín and to Empyre staff that have opened this
space for us.

Padín,  I would like to bold this part of your text below:

"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."

That is it!

Warmest regards,

Regina

----- Original Message -----
From: "Jim Andrews" <jim@vispo.com>
To: "Soft_Skinned_Space" <empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au>
Sent: Friday, March 12, 2004 8:54 PM
Subject: [-empyre-] forward: Latinoamerican Digital Poetry by Clemente Padin


> 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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