Associação Cultural Videobrasil

an expanded-plug-e-poetry

In the early 20th century, between the years of 1910 and 1920, in a Russia that was preparing for the 1917 revolution, the main issue encircling new ideas about poetry went through Vielimir Khlébnikov, Vladimir Maiakóvski and Boris Pasternak. Those three menwere some kind of avant-garde conjunction, it can be said, seeking a certain language existing between sound and sense, which they called the phenomenon of the zaum: “the famous transmental language of the Russian Futurists,” remembers Boris Schnaiderman. Zaum is a sound language that makes us understand how each linguistic sign is also an ideological, political and transforming sign.

Cubo-Futurism perspectives were to follow up on the transformation of Russian men who were taking the streets; from factories to modern cities. Poetry follows the steps of oral language and then, overtaken by visuality, it also pervades, for instance, in poster art: it is poetry with direct immediate communication. Not surprisingly, this poetry would interest Brazilian concrete poets in the 1950s and 1960s: Augusto and Haroldo de Campos and Décio Pignatari. These poets worked with expectations turned to what they called verbivocovisual [covisualverbal], an expression trying to convey something we may call expanded poetry, meaning the occasion when poetry expands the sense of the word between written, oral and visual characters. Thus, concrete poetry sought to face, in that time, with broad theoretical reach, post-war technological industrialization, the first and real bloat in large cities, the emerging advertisement industry, consumption, new ways of life and, mainly, dialogues between literature and music, painting, new technologies and a kind of machine-like awareness.

One of the unfoldings of the transmental language of Russian Cubo-Futurism and of Brazilian concrete poetry’s verbivocovisualidade stimulates countless researches regarding the idea of hypermedia poetry [from videotext to videography], of interpoetry, of digital poetry, etc., pointing to various other relevant issues comprising different nomenclatures and procedures. And when we talk about that unfolding, two artists make very important contributions through their works and critical texts to Brazilian art and poetry: Philadelpho Menezes [1960-2000] and Wilton Azevedo [1958-]. Together, in 1998, theylaunched an interactive CD-ROM entitled Interpoesia: poesia hipermídia interativa [Interpoetry: Interactive Hypermedia Poetry; Fapesp/Mackenzie]. At the time, that CD-ROM emerged as a new interface between poetry and a reconfigured virtual space through the Internet and electronic and technological media; it was a pioneer movement towards anotherexpansion of poetry, a poetry from new media and technology times in the 21st Century. Wilton Azevedo is the designer and editor for this CD-ROM; his work as a poet, with constant interest in the development of such interfaces, and as a researcher-lecturer in the graduate section of Universidade Presbiteriana Mackenzie, regards directly his interests in opening up new possibilities for the usages and operations of poetry so that itwill entangle itself in real-time, in virtual technologies, in design structures, in a dilated space, in possibilities generated by language, known today as technologic poetry – among many other variations.

Wilton Azevedo’s work is interested in expanding or rearranging the concept of poetry, that thing we verify as text, as context, as crisis in the idea we have of text and verse, in order to establish some communicative exchange, a communicative event, an interaction between poem and receptor; and to remake and reassess dilemmas between the subject of the enunciated and the subject of the enunciation. Poems come, thus, within an impact process on man, through and dynamited by the use of a computer and its various resources, of computer technology, in order to refute the idea of some closed sign system and present itself as action and performance in constant flow.

Wilton Azevedo works with some unpredictable rapport between sound, senses, image, word and plugs, many plugs, aiming at reverting language’s arbitrary logic and juxtaposing the poetry experiments of 20th Century avant-gardes (such as is the case of Russian Cubo-Futurism and Brazilian concrete poetry) in order to generate some kind of “interactive infography,” or a resource that goes from “stone to pixel,” as Julio Plaza expresses it. Wilton Azevedo’s work aims at inventing some anti-device that will create noise in language. We must note that Wilton Azevedo’s Master’s degree thesis, presented in 1984 and supervised by Concretist poet Décio Pignatari, at PUC/São Paulo, in Communications and Semiotic, is entitled “O Ruído como Linguagem” [Noise as Language]. Years later,in 1995, Wilton presented his Doctor’s degree dissertation, supervised by Arlindo Machado, also at PUC/São Paulo, entitled “Criografia: a pintura tradicional e seu potencial programático” [Creography: Traditional Painting and its Programmatic Potential]. Later still, after his Post-Doctorate in France, at Paris VIII, Laboratoire de Paragraphe, hedeveloped research in two lines directly related to his work as designer-artist: Hiperdesign: uma cultura do acesso Interprosa [Hyperdesign: Culture of Access Interprose] andInterpoesia: o início da Escritura Expandida [Interpoetry: The Beginning of Expanded Scripture].

We can observe a wide variety of interests, from noises that cut and assemble the synthesis of a place to be explored by language, to that of a hypermedia poet, to the simplest gesture of a painter leaning on natural pigmentations and resins and handmade paper. This painter’s work receives a different treatment when, in 1987, Wilton Azevedo exhibits his computer-made paintings at Clube de Criação, in São Paulo, and then at Museuda Imagem e do Som, MIS, in 1988. Arlindo Machado, on the occasion of a solo exhibitionof Wilton Azevedo at Kramer Galeria de Arte, in São Paulo, 1992, wrote in the catalogue’s introduction: “On the other hand, regarding visualized motifs, Mr. Azevedo’s painting is absolutely modern. It seeks inspiration in the electrification of current iconography, in stylish and elliptic shapes of pop culture, in prototype-like and diaphanous television images and in the intricacies of neo-baroque in post-modern design. Not by chance, this exhibition, which starts with a research on natural pigmentation, ends with acomputerized animation, on an electronic screen, in order to materialize an idea of artistic invention as a non-linear path, extending to every direction.”

We can say Wilton Azevedo’s work is related to some kind of poetry that invents and creates synthetic images within a poem context in order to produce another language phenomenon, that of hypermedia. Hypermedia is non-linearity and should always be considered as departing from an idea of expansion of hypertext, an extension, that is, a language with its own character, just like Russian poets established with their transmental language of the zaum and Brazilian concrete poets, on the other hand, created a poetic-critic set of ideas around verbivocovisualidade.

Wilton also wrote books such as O Que é Design [What Is Design], edited by Brasiliense in 1994, and Os Signos do Design [Design Signs], by Global Editora, in 1988, six years before. He also created the FILE-Poetry section within Festival Internacional de Linguagens Eletrônicas [Internatonal Festival of Electronic Languages]. In this way, finally, it is possible to consider that Wilton Azevedo, before presenting himself as a drawing artist or an illustrator, a designer, is mostly an artist constantly rethinking andreworking formal sign codification processes in art history, such as in rapports between image and word, word and image, so that he will later connect himself as a performer-artist, a performer-poet, in a path carved around images stripped of any reference of our apparent world, a poet with syntactic and synthetic inventions, poetic inventions that move through simulations of nature. Julio Plaza calls this synthetic poetry, that is, something we can consider the poetics of new rapports with our imaginary and, mainly,of new relations of that thing we consider to be reality. With Wilton Azevedo’s work, we are before some kind of poetry made to a now-future, an expanded- plug-e-poetry.