Associação Cultural Videobrasil

I was in a graduate class at Universidade Presbiteriana Mackenzie, in November of the year 1997, commenting on the importance of author Valêncio Xavier and his wonderful literary work: O Mêz da Grippe [The Month of the Cold].

At a certain point, a student told me about the opening, that same evening, of an Art and Technology event and asked me if I would be interested in coming. I did not answer straight away, however, at the end of the lecture, I realized I was persuaded to go and see.

When I got to the place, there were artists, poets, professors, and a quite large crowd to see the performances.

That evening, at Instituto Cultural Itaú, I saw for the first time after two years, Philadelpho Meneses. He was in a room filled with headphones, in which the visitors could access sound poetry produced all over the world, which had been gathered by him withhis typical curatorial rigor.

At that time, I talked about experiments I was conducting in my studio with authorship software and about palpable potential in those experiments in order to accomplish a new form of poetry-making.

The following week, Philadelpho came to my studio and then I showed him what I was doing with images, sounds and texts using authorship software. All that movement available in one unique medium seduced him; he got excited to do a work in collaboration.

At that moment, Interpoesia was born. In my small studio in Pinheiros (São Paulo – Brazil), we started to work continuously on an idea that was still nameless. Philadelpho decided to give me visual poems he had already finished and published in printing; I, on the other hand, started to imagine a way of translating those poems to the digital medium.

Many meetings followed, aiming at extracting from that language exercise a hypermedia product.

After many months of work, we started to see the emergence of a product that would be a benchmark in hypermedia poetry production in Brazil – and then I remembered we had to give a name to our production.

A week before, I had handed him the text Hiperdesign: Uma Cultura do Acesso [Hyperdesign: Culture of Access], and, based on that text, we thought about the name Hiperpoesia [Hyperpoetry]. Then, Philadelpho asked me what about Interpoesia [Interpoetry], and Ianswered: perfect.

Philadelpho intended to bring to hypermedia production his concept, which he called intersigno [intersign], and I was interested in developing virtual environments that would point to a new access flow, hiperdesign [hyperdesign].

Our creature had a first name; we still had to find a last name for it. Then we called it Poesia Hipermídia Interativa [Interactive Hypermedia Poetry].

Despite Interpoesia’s historic relevance, my work with digital poetry did not begin with this CD-ROM; I had done an exhibition in 1987, at Clube de Criação, in São Paulo, where I introduced for the first time Poesia Alegórica [Allegory Poetry]. Later, in February 1988, at São Paulo’s Museu da Imagem e do Som, I presented my work Signação [Signization], in which I considered software as a script of fixed images. It is important to note that these two works were part in Mostra Internacional da Poesia Visual [International Show of Visual Poetry], in 1988, and that I was able to publicly present them toEugen Gomringer.

Therefore, the continuation of this research and its praxis in hypermedia productionare established as crucial points within Brazilian poetry production using digital support.

Nothing in a digital environment manifests itself in its isolated form, there is no reintroduction of caogenous or redundant terms, and everything derives from programmed scripture, from expanded scripture.

As absurd as it may seem, digital poetry recuperates language ritualization because it is a preprogrammed process of making, predicted by its scripture, and this credit emancipates it as something new, without any noise or awkwardness, as everything is contained in some programming and it is preconceived, it is a process.

Because of this, a poem may be stripped of words, its enunciation is not in its discourse, its narrative does not tell tales, its poetry is in the expansion of symbols; tomake digital poetry is to constantly build mutating environments – ambientations – an experience that is not concerned with creating formulas. It was my concern whether my works have or don’t have an end or a formal end in the world of the letters, in the senseof a conclusive challenge, but that they were a line in expansion seeking experimentation.

In each different stage, digital poetry makes it more and more evident that a redundancy in its sign articulations exists in the form of poetry; however, it is not some redundancy promoted by pop culture that creates extensions of its signs; this is actuallydone by exhaustion, by excess as a process of strangeness, without the need of words.