Já está à venda em todo Brasil o livro Nomadismos Tecnológicos, organizado por mim e Jorge La Ferla.

Fruto de um seminário realizado em Buenos Aires, pela Fundación Telefonica da Argentina em parceria com o Instituto Sergio Motta, reuniu especialistas de vários centros de pesquisa internacionais para discutir o impacto da mobilidade na cultura contemporânea.

O livro promove uma abordagem multidisciplinar sobre o assunto, discutindo novas práticas culturais, estéticas emergentes, impactos sociológicos, hábitos de consumo, mudanças econômicas e geopolíticas.

Esta diversidade de abordagens é levada adiante por um time de experts oriundos de importantes centros de pesquisa e universidades, como a Brown University, o Ontario College, a Universidad de San Andrés, a PUC-SP, a USP e a 
Universidade de Buenos Aires, entre outras.

A publicação traz uma Introdução dos organizadores, mais 14 textos de cada um dos 
especialistas: Alejandro Artopoulos, André Lemos, Andrea di Castro, David McIntosh, Giselle Beiguelman,  Lucas Bambozzi, Lucia Santaella, Marcus Bastos, Mariela Yeregui, Martha Ladly, Nelson Brissac Peixoto, Tim Creswell, Wendy Chun e Wolfgang Schäffner.

Raymond Queneau, Cent mille milliards de poèmes, Gallimard, 1961. Maquette de Massin

Desde agosto, mais precisamente desde o desastre do Timthumb, que este site anda bem capenga.

Não consegui ainda me reorganizar, tive que reformatar o servidor (um saco!), não me entendi mais com o MySQL (e o que é a vida em WordPress sem ele?), mas decidi, pelo menos, atualizar um pouco este meu web-cadáver com alguns artigos e ensaios recentes.

Seguem aqui:

Minha entrevista com o Kenneth Goldsmith, fundador e editor do já mítico UbuWeb, sobre o livro novo dele — Uncreative Writing: Managing Language in a Digital Age (Columbia University Press, New York, 2011) – com direito a um extrato do livro traduzido para o português. Baixe: Copiar é preciso, inventar não é preciso

O artigo sobre a micropolítica econômica do dinheiro open source — A arte de fabricar dinheiro — em que comento inciativas como as do Circuito Fora do Eixo, Time Notes do artista argentino Gustavo Romano e P2P Gift Credit Card, do Paolo Cirio, entre vários outros projetos e iniciativas;

(esses dois textos foram publicados na revista seLecT, num. 1, agosto/setembro, 2011)

O meu capítulo “Territorialización y agenciamento en las redes (en busca de la Anna Karenina de la era de la mobilidad)“, publicado no livro Nomadismos Tecnológicos (Barcelona: Ariel, 2011), que organizei com Jorge La Ferla. O livro saiu primeiro em castelhano e no fim do outubro chega a edição brasileira pela editora Senac;

Outro: “Media Voices: Beyond Talking Heads“, publicado pela MIT Press em V01ce: Vocal Aesthetics in Digital Arts and Media (Norie Neumark, Ross Gibson and Theo Van Leeuwen, eds. 2010)

E mais: “Public Art in Nomadic Contexts”, IN: Urban Screens Reader (Scott McQuire, Meredith Martin and Sabine Niederer, eds.), Amsterdan: Institute of Network Cultures, 2009

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SeLecT é uma publicação de jornalismo cultural comprometida com o século 21.

Aposta na convergência entre as artes visuais, a tecnologia, o design e o comportamento, ativando um olhar abrangente sobre a contemporaneidade.

É bimestral e já está nas bancas e disponível para iPad.

Na edição de lançamento, o número 0, discutiu a emergência de uma extranatureza, pautada pela interconexão entre o real e o virtual.

O primeiro número fala de novos modelos de criação e autoria, a era das clonebridades, cultura livre, falsificação, pirataria e remix.

Traz entrevista com Kenneth Goldsmith, criador e curador da UbuWeb, Mark Amerika, que lança o livro “Remix the Book”, Nelson Leirner, moda-camelô, Felipe Cama, Lady Gagaúcha, Rosana Hermann, Rodrigo Savazoni, Ronaldo Fraga e mais.

Conheça a revista. Tá nas bancas: Abaixo a Originalidade!

Baixe a edição inaugural para seu computador ou iPad.

O segundo número  revista Tecnologias Cognitivas é dedicado ao tema Design Digital e Redes. A edição deste número é de Lucia Leão que me entrevistou para conversarmos sobre meu percurso profissional, conceitos e sugestões para pesquisas na área. A pergunta mais divertida e difícil de responder foi a última:

Se você pudesse dar 7 conselhos para um jovem designer digital quais seriam?

A resposta segue abaixo. A íntegra da entrevista você encontra aqui:

1. Abra o código e compartilhe.
2. Respeite e promova a inteligência distribuída: Vivemos a era dos “produsadores”.
3. Pense a arquitetura da informação ANTES de qualquer outra etapa.
4. Design é exercício de generosidade: Preste atenção na coerência entre a linguagem de programação, a mensagem do produto e o público-alvo do projeto.
5. Esqueça a originalidade. Remixe e Multiplique.
6. Ouse. Desafie as regras de usabilidade para criar novas sensibilidades.
7. Seja obsessivo. Nunca desista. Insista.

A revista é uma publicação do programa de pós-graduação em Tecnologias da Inteligência e Design Digital da PUC-SP, idealizado e coordenado por Lucia Santaella.

A edição completa está disponível aqui

The Urban Screens Reader é o quinto livro publicado pelo Institute of Network Cultures de Amsterdam, dirigido pelo mestre Geert Lovink. Os livros podem ser pedidos pelo correio e baixados em PDF.

Neste volume, em que participo com um ensaio sobre arte pública em contextos nômades, há ensaios imperdíveis de Saskia Sassen, Sean Cubitt, Scott McQuire e Andreas Broeckman, entre outros.

Mais sobre o livro, abaixo. Para fazer o download, aqui.

about the book: The Urban Screens Reader is the first book to focus entirely on the topic of urban screens. In assembling contributions from a range of leading theorists, in conjunction with a series of case studies dealing with artists’ projects and screen operators’ and curators’ experiences, the reader offers a rich resource for those interested in the intersections between digital media, cultural practices and urban space.

contributors: Simone Arcagni, Alice Arnold, Giselle Beiguelman, Liliana Bounegru, Kate Brennan, Andreas Broeckmann, Uta Caspary, Sean Cubitt, Annet Dekker, Jason Eppink, Ava Fatah gen. Schieck, Mike Gibbons, M. Hank Haeusler, Bart Hoeve, Erkki Huhtamo, Karen Lancel, Hermen Maat, Meredith Martin, Scott McQuire, Julia Nevárez, Sabine Niederer, Shirley Niemans, Nikos Papastergiadis, Soh Yeong Roh, Saskia Sassen, Leon van Schaik, Jan Schuijren, Audrey Yue.

The Sergio Motta Institute held three festivals in 2008 using three significant Web 2.0 platforms: YouTube, Delcious and MySpace. This initiative responded to the need to develop the Institute’s internet work and broaden the spectrum of the community we dialog with, while generating temporary spaces for creative work also functioning as critical arenas for emerging production. Ths e-book documents the HTTPs festivals and brings crtical texts by Paula Alzugaray, Juliana Monachesi, Marcos Boffa and myself, with many pictures, videos and links. Graphic Design by Marcus Bastos.

HTTPVideo, HTTPtags, HTTPSound. (Giselle Beiguelman and Renata Motta eds.) São Paulo, nstituto Sergio Motta, 2009.

Versão em Português

This ebook covers the main contents of the symposium “Appropriation of the (un) common: public and private space in times of mobility”. It is a  a result of a partnership between Vivo arte.mov festival and  Sergio Motta Institute. The discussions focused the following themes: strategies for network broadcastingand access to information using mobile media, and expected and actual convergence between networks and physical space, and the development of social technologies in their various aspects. As a contribution to ongoing debates on the culture of mobility, the publication is freely available as a downloadable file.

Appropriations of (Un)Common- Public and Private Space in Mobility Times
(G. Beiguelman, Lucas Bambozzi, Marcus Bastos e Rodrigo Minelli, eds.)

Contributors:
Trebor Scholz
Jonah Brucker-Cohen
Fernando Velázquez
Marcus Bastos
Fábio Duarte
André Lemos
Fernando Llanos
Matrha Gabriel
Laura Beloff
Lucas Bambozzi
and Rodrigo Minelli
Mirjam Struppek
Raquel Kogan
Giselle Beiguelman
Guilherme Kujawski
Brett Staulbaum
and Cícero Silva

Versão em português:
Apropriações do (In) Comum – Espaço Público e Privado em Tempos de Mobildade

Poucas palavras tornaram-se tão corriqueiras como “memória”. Aquilo que havíamos nos acostumado a pensar como questão historiográfica e psicanalítica, converteu-se num aspecto elementar do cotidiano. Uma espécie de dado quantificável, mensurável e até indicativo do status social de alguém. Há todo um fetiche da “memória” como “coisa” hoje em dia. É inegável._ Quanto de memória seu computador tem? _E sua câmera? _E o seu celular? _Tudo isso?! _Só isso?… Compram-se memórias, transferem-se memórias, apagam-se e perdem-se memórias. Curiosamente, à inflação discursiva corresponde um vazio metodológico no trato dos produtos culturais criados com os meios a que correspondem essas memórias: os meios digitais. Como preservar a memória de bens culturais que resistem à objetificação, que muitas vezes só existem contextualmente, como é o caso da net art, e que trazem no seu processamento a rotina do seu apagamento?

(Texto crítico, em desenvolvimento, para o catálogo de Brian Mackern – MEIAC, 2009)

Concrete Poetry Heritage Revisited*

Augusto de Campos “rosa para gertrude”, 1988

Digital arts are specific practices that emerged in the 1990s and don’t point to a homogeneous context. Net art, interactive video, virtual performances, e-poetry, mobile and locative media processes are some of its formats. It is true that several artistic modalities, such as music and photography, are produced today with digital media however, it is important to underline that we are considering as digital art the works which are not only produced and presented in digital format, but those that make use of its particular attributes like interactive and participatory features, code poetics and programming languages resources, among others, which will be discussed in this essay.

Those remarks are essential to conceptualize what is understood here as digital literature, and specially cyberliterature, considering that the interpenetration between writing and computers became irreversible. However, it imposes three fundamental challenges which demand a rigorous historiographical approach, in order to locate cyberculture, recognizing its links and splits with the concrete poetry tradition; to understand the particularities of the reading context of on-line literature, without swaying to techno-deterministic euphoria, and the comprehension of the poetic unfoldings of new text-production techniques, new writing supports and new writing practices.

Locating cyberculture in relation to Concrete poetry is particularly relevant in the Brazilian case, because of the influence some of its main artificers had, and still have, on the first generation of multimedia poets (as Lenora de Barros, Arnaldo Antunes and Andre Vallias, among others), due their pioneering in incorporating “beyond the page” media, such as videotext, video itself and electronic boards into their writing in a poetically consistent way (Beiguelman 379).

To say that the flirtation with the new reading interfaces and new forms of text production and distribution, like video in the 1980s, keeping and refreshing multimedia manifestations, is part of the history of Brazilian contemporary literature wouldn’t be an exaggeration; this statement, however, deserves some pondering. The risk of relapsing in a linear story, which would explain digital literature from a logic of parenthood and affiliation, is enormous.

It’s true that Concrete poetry discuss, as platform or as mission, the overflowing of the scripture related to the margin of the page before than literature, globally speaking, was definitely “attached” to the monitor. Nevertheless, this need to be carefully analyzed. On one hand, the specificities of the ways through which different poems, conceived for printed media relate to the different interfaces used are erased. On the other hand, we forget that this overflowing of the limits of the text, and its imbrications with other media and formats, is a question central to contemporary literature since the historical vanguards. And that is not restricted by any means to poetry. Cinema had fascinated Modernists in such a way that one can say that some of the most remarkable aspects of works of that period, like Mario de Andrade’s Amar, Verbo Intransitivo [To Love, Intransitive Verb] (1927), and John dos Passos’ USA (trilogy published between 1930 and 1936), are results of the incorporation of the film structures to their respective narrative fabrics.

These brief examples do not intended to show the originality or the pioneering of certain experiments that merged, in the literary sphere, new technologies in the structure of the text. And they are certainly not intended to endorse the belief in a false continuity of the relationship between art and technology that erases innovation in the opacity of the “since always”. Its goal is entirely other: to explain that Concrete Poetry experiences became references because they gave visibility and consistence to the re-framing of the creation and reading processes of our time reprocessing an reinventing trends as well as pointing to new directions in the literature field.

Concretism opened space for new genres of visual poetry like the boxes and posters produced in the 70’s by Edgard Braga (1897-1985) , who not only expanded literary supports but worked, like no other Brazilian poet, poetry beyond phonetics playing with the “rise of language” in order to subvert its borders (Santaella 24-31).

This kind of subversion explains why can we credit Edgard Braga with being a paradigmatic creator for those working today with new dimensions of language and its intersections with non-verbal arts. Intersections that mean implosion, visual guerrilla action and electronic intervention in the work of Waldemar Cordeiro (1927-1971), who, in the 70’s, coined the concept of arteônica (arte + eletrônica; art + electronics) and made pioneering efforts with computers and the arts in 1968, working with Giorgio Moscati, from the Physics Department of the University of São Paulo at that time.
“A Mulher que Não é B.B.” (1971) [“The Woman who is not B.B.] is an expressive example of his challenging approach. It follows his series “Derivadas” (“Derivates”, 1968), a series focused on processes of translation and recreation of photographic materials through digitalization. In that piece, a portrait of a Vietnamese girl was processed in perforated cards resulting in a disturbing image of that period. It relates to politics, anthropology, art, science and mass media, stressing all those tensions by submitting them to a new language system: computer binary code.

Cordeiro advanced notions of appropriation and reinscription processes in creative practices mediated by electronic media. He eroded the borders between visual art, technology and information. If contemporary literature is the art of the spacialization of language temporality, no matter if is verbal or not, his work is representative of this mobilization. It pushed poetics towards a hybrid practice that makes itself through the interpenetration of media and by its interstices.

Nevertheless, the first attempts directly committed to the exploration of new media for literary purposes were made only in the 1980’s in pieces that used videotext and holography. By this time, Eduardo Kac, in Rio de Janeiro, was trying to conceptualize what he called “immaterial textual volumes” and “the perceptual syntax” of “holopoetry”, working simultaneously with the anagram “Olho/Holo” (1983) , his first holographic poem, and its theoretical implications. “Olho/Holo” was presented at the Museum of Modern Art, in Rio de Janeiro, in 1985. The same year, Julio Plaza, with Augusto de Campos, Décio Pignatari, Moisés Baumstein and José Wagner Garcia presented the first results of a collective research project called “Triluz” [“Trilight”], realized and coordinated by Plaza, that aimed to “marry words and images to light”. Presented at the Museum of Image and Sound, in São Paulo, the exhibition showed poetic projects made with holography. One year later, it was expanded and presented at the same place in another exhibition “Idehologia” [“Idehologie”]. Important holographic works were there launched, including “Spacetime/Espazotempo” by Décio Pignatari, a poem that reproduced the DNA model, “Arco-Íris no Ar Curvo” [“Rainbow in Curved Air”] by Plaza, a work in the form of the Moebius Ring, and the internationally known “Poema-bomba” (1983-1997) [“Bomb-poem”] by Augusto de Campos. (Kac, “Holopoetry and Perceptual Syntax”; Beiguelman, 133-134)

In spite of the coincidence of dates and forms, the aims of those projects are totally different. Kac was interested in the hybridism of verbal and mathematics languages and the investigation of the ruptures of this approach with the linear and ideographic literature (1989, 397-402). In what concerns the Concrete poets goals, the incorporation of new media to their production meant the realization of a “wishful thinking”. As Augusto de Campos wrote, in a commentary on the production of the poems in computer graphics that composed Ricardo Araújo’s project Poesia Visual – Vídeo Poesia [Visual Poetry – Videopoetry], “practice has shown that the anticipations of concrete poetry find in the computer a naturally adequate vehicle for its new verbal propositions” (Kac, “Holopoetry and fractal holopoetry: Digital holography as an art medium”; Campos 169).

Philadelpho Menezes opposed vividly that kind of statement, inquiring: “A concrete poem, a form developed in the 50s, even if it has a communion with cybernetic thinking, may still be seen as something new just for the fact that it’s communicated in a new technological medium?” (117).
Through the dangerous choice of thinking the novelty along the lines of the since-always, in Campos’ case, or as something that can only be done by inaugural acts, in Menezes’ approach, one could easily loose focus in the analysis of the executed projects and its historical relevance in the digital literature production. Moreover, this kind of debate hides the particularities of other creative trends that flourished in the same period like Arnaldo Antunes’ Nome (1993) [Name], produced in video, book, and CD. Working with the same ideas in different media he did not only promoted a reflection upon the specificities of each one of these languages as also stimulated us to think about the passages that ran through them and between them.

The poems of Nome pointed to the necessity of thinking not only the changes that the exchange of material artifacts implies in the way we interact with the words, but also in the way they modify the meanings of the words in this mediatic ecology system in which contents are made available to reading in different situations (at the museum, at home or in the street), affecting the poetic perception in a network of meanings that connects and individualizes them.

The richness of the intersemiotic translations effected by Julio Plaza in videotext and in electronic panels, the countless re-compositions of the poems Bomba and Parafísica, by the Augusto and Haroldo de Campos, Eduardo Kac’s videoinstallations and holopoems, Arnaldo Antunes’ videopoems, among others, can not be discussed in merely chronological terms, obeying to a pioneering criterion as an intrinsic value, not even in a self-referent way, circumscribing the work to immanent potentials of their poetics.

The interesting thing about this Brazilian production of the 1980s and the 90s it that it is contemporary, for example, of the video works of the visual poet Richard Kostelanetz, of the countless re-compositions of Jenny Holzer’s truisms with different media (as electronic panels and laser projections made in USA and in many European cities from 1977 to 1997) and of the spatial and tonal interconecctions between word and image that Laurie Anderson’s performances made famous in pieces like Language Is a Virus (first presented in the electronic opera United States I-IV, in 1983, in the Brooklyn Academy of Music in Nova York).

This phenomenon of the spread and multiplication of new literary platforms in the mid 1980s and 90s is far from being typically an Anglo-saxon one. We all know very well today the works of Waldemar Cordeiro, discussed above. Also, it is good to remember that in 1988, Portuguese poet and critic E. M. de Melo e Castro already showed and discussed experiments that explored the relationship between poetry and computer language since the 1970s, like the works of Silvestre Pestana, Pedro Barbosa, and Melo e Castro himself. (233-235)

Very significant of this questioning of the mutations in the text and in the literature mediated and intercepted by new technologies in this period is the videopoem Un Coup de Dés (1992), by Constanze Ruhm, In this video the artist, who was obviously referring to Mallarmé, was not featuring a videographic translation, but as an exploration of the flexibility of interpretations that the different semantic, graphic, syntactic, and words arrangement had caused, taking one of the verses of the poem – “Rien n’aura lieu / que le lieu” – as principle and guiding concept of a writing that is recognizable by the production of reading places, not necessarily new, but different.

Several other projects developed in the 1980s and in the 1990s could be mentioned, and the variety of solutions and problems raised by them is not casual. The period could de defined as a moment when the nexuses between texts, supporting media and interfaces were reconfigured, revalidating the relationship between literature and other art forms, as it is clear in Peter Greenaway’s films, who, in masterpieces like Prospero’s Book (1991) referenced the reality of an aesthetics of transition, aggregation, and migration as paradigms to the contemporary creation.

If the poetry of the Campos brothers, Décio Pignatari and Julio Plaza is directly related to the production of many poets intensely dedicated to multimedia literature since the mid-1980s and 90s, like Andre Vallias, Arnaldo Antunes, Walter Silveira and Lenora de Barros, it is not related to the visual poetry of Philadelpho Menezes, the poetic work of Eduardo Kac and a whole generation dedicated to the explorations of code poetry, such as the young artist José Carlos Silvestre. These poets’ productions, as well as the Concrete group work since the mid 1980s, must be read in a broader international context and not only according to their interpretation of their own works. However, their methods and strategies especially that of translation between different media, allied to their poetic relevance and rigor in the treatment of different interfaces for literary creation are still a reference. That balance between tradition and innovation is, therefore, one of the first challenges in the study of cyberliterature (Beiguelman 129-140).

A comment made by Haroldo de Campos stresses those considerations. Talking about the Concrete movement goals in its beginnings, he said:

In poetry it was imperative to recuperate the revolution started by Mallarmé (“Un Coup des Dés”) and amplified by Pound, Joyce, Stein, Cummings, Apollinaire and other vanguard movements of the first decades. It concerned to continue the knocking down the verbal structures of the contractual discourse, insufficient to embrace the universe of imagination and sensibility. (Campos

As a matter of fact, this is what digital literature, especially in works conceived for the Web, could have as its mission statement: knocking down the verbal structures of contractual discourse and melting different poetics into a hybrid tradition.

*(This article in a work in progress and part of an essay on cyberliterature studies to be published this year. Suggestions are welcome. Please use the comments area below.) Top

References

Antunes. A. Nome (CD, book, and video) BMG/Ariola, Rio de Janeiro, 1993
Arteônica. Catalog of the exhibition presented at the 6th Sibigrapi (Brazilian Symposium on Computer Graphics and Image Processing) Recife, September 1993, available online at http://www.visgraf.impa.br/Gallery/waldemar/catalogo/catalogo.pdf
Beiguelman, Giselle. “Litvideos”: Video and Literature in the 80’s and 90’s.” Made In Brasil: Três Décadas do Vídeo Brasileiro (Three Decades of Brazilian Video). Expanded ed. Ed. Arlindo Machado. São Paulo: Iluminuras, 2007.
_______________. “Liquid_Poetry.Br.” Cybertext Year Book (2002-2003). Publications of the Research Centre for the Contemporary Culture 77 (2002): 129-140.
Campos, Augusto. “Do Tipo ao Videograma”. Ricardo Araújo. Poesia Visual Vídeo Poesia. São Paulo: Perspectiva, 1999. 167-170.
Campos, Augusto; Campos Haroldo and Decio Pignatari. Interview. Folha de São Paulo 08 December 1996: Mais! National Edition 4-9.
Kac, Eduardo. “Holopoetry and Perceptual Syntax“. Oiginally published Holosphere, Museum of Holography, New York, Summer 1986, Vol. 14, Nº 3, p. 25. available at http://www.ekac.org/holopholosphere.html
___________.“Holopoetry and fractal holopoetry: Digital holography as an art medium“. Originally published in Leonardo, Vol. 22, Nos. 3/4, 1989, pp. 397-402. Available at http://www.ekac.org/holo.leonardo.eng.html
Menezes, Philadelpho. Poesia Concreta e Visual. [Concrete and Visual Poetry].São Paulo: Ática, 1988.
Melo e Castro, E. M. de. O Fim Visual do Século XX e Outros Ensaios Críticos. [The Visual End of 20th Century and Other Critical Essays]. Ed. Nádia Gottlib. São Paulo: EDUSP, 1983
Santaella, Lucia. “Um Poeta em Busca do Amanhecer da Linguagem” [“A Poet Searching for the Rise of Language”]. Revista Dialética, ano 7, No. 5, Mar. 2001, pp. 24-31.

web site + book + e-book, 1999

The Book after the Book is a hypertextual and visual essay about cyberliterature and the net_reading/writing_condition. Its main focus is non-linear narratives, which reconfigure the literature/book relationship starting from the very notion of volume. Works that provide programming language a textual appraisal, creations that resort to videographic procedures in literary construction and play on the passivity and participation of the reader.

The Book after the Book was made possible by a Fundação Vitae grant and was launched at NET_Condition (ZKM, 1999). It was exhibited and awarded many times all over the world and it is considered a net 1.0 classic.