From Visual to Sound Poetry: the technologizing of the word

Philadelpho Menezes

ABSTRACT

The text deals with the different kinds of merging visual and sound features of the word created by the experimental poets through a historical overview from the former avant-gardes to the most recent poetics.

The main intention is to establish a typological approach towards experimental poetry based in the semiotical analysis, taking the introducing of the image and sound into the text of the contemporary poetry as an axis. Finally, the text show the idea of an intersign poetics as a trend of the experimental poetry which tries to recycle experimental poems by filling them with the richness of the semantic levels.

Contemporary poetics has been transforming its system of communication, likewise all systems of communication have been indirectly transformed by contemporary experiments in poetry. It is a kind of statement easily found since the historical avant-gardes. Nevertheless, as every ready-made statement, it carries some truth, but it must be questioned if we are to accept it as a norm or if there are many other problems to analyse, mainly in this period which is characterised by the difusion of new technologies of communication and the interface between it and poetry.

I know that some points that I will make here don't fit with the settled point of view spread around the world. But a common point I must underline: the belief in the possibilities of creating new trends of poetics based on new technologies of communication.

The first important question that I want to emphasize is the fact that contemporary production of technological poetry (and here I want to put together the poems and the various texts on this poetics) has two contradictory kinds of behavior in relation to the old conception of "new", inherited from the historical avant-gardes: on the one side, there is a negation of the utopical intention of transforming society by the new inventions - many of poets have even been declaring the post-utopian feature of today, accompanying the postmodern wave. But on the other side, every statement about poetics in new technologies carries an indisputable resemblance to the old declarations of historical avant-gardes in relation to the belief in the "new". And more than the "new", the meaning of this "new": it represents an attempt to claim the speciality of poets and artists in contact with these new technologies in accessing new realms of future and even a more developed sphere of sensibility that overcomes the "old" forms of art and life.

Nevertheless, the great problem for all avant garde statements was to prove what exactly were the "new". It is very well known that, sliced in so many trends, historical avant-gardes met themselves in the frenetic search for the "newness", but the unique form to define the "newness" was its shocking impact on the public.

To analyse the shock of the "new", it is interesting to consider a thesis defended by the philosoper Arnold Gehlen in his Die Saekularisierung des Fortschritts (The secularization of progress), which introduced the notion of posthistory in the end of the 60's. Gehlen afirms that the crisis of the notion of progress derived from the fact that the technical innovations became a routine in the early twentieth century. When the technical newness lost its capacity to provoke social impact by the banalization of new inventions, losing also its revolutionary contents, it changed to a condition of only producing only transformation. So the only possibility of social impact of newness is thrown upon (discharged over) the domain of arts and literature. Modernism is exactly the period where this changing takes place. It explains why the impact of newness in that time was so strongly felt in the field of avant-gardes' arts and literature and, at the same time, why the public reaction was so normal in relation to the amount of technical innovation in daily life.

The Italian contemporary thinker, Gianni Vattimo, affirms in his book La fine della modernità (The end of modernity) that Arnold Gehlen's point of view coincides with the heideggerian thesis of "non-historicity of the technical world": the regular consumption of new products emptied out the pathos of newness from the daily life. And when this pathos is discharged over the aesthetic field, where is impossible to verify the real contents of the newness, the crisis of the notion of progress and evolution appears.

According to this inquiry, post-modern age would be the period where, even in the field of arts, newness is uncapable of provoking shock in social reception. Nevertheless, newness keeps itself in the center of discourse of today's technological poetics with expressions such as: "new technologies", "new language", "new perception", "new writing", "new domain of poetry", "new kind of poetry". I have no interest in discussing here the concept of postmodern, but the permanence of the "newness" in the vocabulary of poetics in the contemporary technologies of communication, which may sound always old-fashioned and many times empty of sense.

Going back to the conceptions of Heidegger/Gehlen/Vattimo, very rich in their possibilities of developing many debates on postmodernism, I should only note that to me one idea seems to me inadequate to analyse art: the idea that is impossible to verify the value of newness, the truth of newness in art, because, as Vattimo writes, "art escapes from the preoccupation of responding to the exigencies of validity, truth and verificability". Art may be free of it, but the "newness in art" not. I would challenge the idea that "newness" can be verified in its validity and truth and, moreover, in its efective existence.

I would even dare to say that semiotics is the correct instrument for doing it. Today it is almost rowing against the stream to present something based on a semiotic approach when you read a paper in Congress not linked to semiotic associations. Semiotics has been suffering constant attacks from the academic debates due to the fact that it imposes a rigid classification of things, be it a semiotic of linguistic origin, or a peircean semiotics. But semiotic categories are actually rich when its rigidity give place to a contact with a real object, when it leaves itself to be penetrated by reality and becomes flexible, opened to discussion. Semiotic frames are useful when they help the understanding of objects, not when they consider objects as things for confirming the truth of their frames.

I hope the classification I give below serves to make my objet (poetry in new technologies) more understandable. I don't intend to fix a truth on the values of poems as a professor or critic - I don't intend to analyse the poems in themselves but the newness (or the oldness) of their semiotic structures. From now on, I'd like my explanation to be seen as the opinion of a poet vividly interested in the tendencies opened by technologies and how to use them in a profitable way. And the semiotic classifying mettle is useful for doing it.

Semiotics explains there are three basic matrixes in all kinds of languages: the verbal, the visual and the sound matrixes. The verbal sign matrix is the place where literature grows, in general, and poetry, specially. The matrix of visual is the domain where painting and visual arts flourishes, likewise the music develops itself in the matrix of sound. What had been an established system since the renaissance to the end of the last century, begins being dismantled by the birth of modern art in the late nineteenth century.

In the field of poetry, verbal sign is put in connection with visual ones, giving place to all varieties of visual poetry (like the futurists' tavole parolibere, the dada's optophonetic poems, the surrealists' object poems, concretism, Italian visive poetry and so on). On the other side, verbal sign gets in contact with sound matrix, exploring the possibilities of sound poetics, beginning with phonetic poetry of avant-gardes, going through the eletronic poetry of the 50's and the contemporary sound poetry, definitely mixed with performatic poetry.

We must observe, first of all, that the origin of technological poetry remounts to the eletronic poetry of Henri Chopin in the early 50's, when the first laboratory of eletroacustic sound appeared in France. Nevertheless a first equivocation of the recent texts on technological poetry is the exclusion of sound poetry from its history in new systems of communication. But it can be easily understood: the autodenominated "technological poetry" is directly linked to visual poetry. Above all: I sustain that technological poetry, or what has been known as such until today, is only a form of visual poetry. It uses some new possibilities of the media to deepen the visual nature of the verbal sign, giving it movement (for instance, in computer poems), tridimensional feature (for instance, in holography poems) and even tactility (for instance, in virtual poetry). These characteristics, of course, add some interesting elements of the media to visual poems printed in paper resolution, but these elements are due to the intrinsec nature of the technological medium. None of them manage to escape from the well-known way and today even traditional forms of relation between verbal and visual sign matrixes.

To make my point of view clear, I want to briefly present triadical categories, with semiotical bases, that can frame all forms to combine verbal and visual signs in poetry. An analysis attempting to capture the dominant features shared by the visual poetry results in the emergence of three large categories into which every kind of visual poem can be classified: i. the visuality of verbal sign; ii. the visuality extraneous to the verbal mode; iii. the visual-verbal interplay.

The first category (the visuality of verbal sign) includes those poems in which the visual component coincides with the graphic aspect of the verbal sign (phrase, word or letter). This tendency is the most varied of all trends and one can say that it results from the efforts towards blurring the boundaries between the linguistic sign and its meanings and references.

We can observe it in poems such as the caligrames of Guillaume Apollinaire (figure 1). Here, a house of divinities, a tree which flows, a lover smoking a cigarette, an assembly of lyrical elements are presented by figurative texts representing its subjects.

Also the concrete poetry of the 50's and 60's fixed its visual poetics through the visuality of spatial words (figure 2). In this poem of Eugen Gomringer, the words grow, flow, blow geometrically in the space of the page, and yet the visuality of poem is only given by (or through) the verbal sign.

We may describe many other forms of this first category, but in all of them the visual aspect of the poem is the visual form of word and its placement in space. I will return to the first category afterwards, as most of the production of technological poetry is found there.

The second category (ii. the visuality extraneous to the verbal mode) embodies poetic constructions in which visuality, besides from being presented by the graphic aspects of letters and words, appears in visual signs which are formally independent of verbal sign. It is represented by the poems where photos, drawings and graphic signs are characterized by a formal independence of the verbal signs. But this trend is characterized specially by a divorce between words and images, like in the collage-poems, originated in the dada aesthetics. Nevertheless, an apparently poor or easy way to cross verbal and visual sign in the poem many times presents a very rich space for humor and subversion of the verbal signifieds by the visual sign and vice-versa.

In this poem of the Italian Lamberto Pignotti (figure 3), one of the founders of the "poesia visiva" movement of the sixties, we can observe the text cut out from newspaper and reviews formally detached from the images. The elements of the poem are loosened in the space of the page, but, at the same time, the approach between the verbal sign and the images provokes a kind of humoristic unveiling of signifieds of both codes. Many times the exaggeration given to the visual form lacks the semantic intention of the poem, making it closer to fine arts.

The third category (the visual-verbal interplay) is represented by those poems in which the "visuality" of images and that of the verbal signs are formally combined so as to create a given and unique "intersign semantics". It substitutes the principle of montage for collage: a few elements in a formal integration which require the observer's interpretation. That formulation can be better understood in comparison with Italian visive poetry, which is also important because this poetic style spreads all over the world as a sign of the experimental poetry of these last three decades.

Intersign poetry lies and relies upon the weaving together of a few (verbal and visual) signs, aiming at a recovering of the semantic values. The formal fusion, the integration of visual and verbal signs mark this "intersign poetry". The outcome of this process is the creation of a semantic field which can be apprehended by the attentive and intellectual reading action without dispensing the sensorial appreciation of the verbal/visual interplay.

Or in this poem of the Brazilian poet Villari Herrmann (figure 4), of 1971, based on a visual and sound wordplay: a visual koitus between the letter k (KA in Portuguese), with open legs, and the number eight (OITO, in Portuguese). Merging KA and OITO, we have KOITO (coitus). It has its value not only as a charade, or a joke, but it also carries the idea of formally combining different kinds of signs in order to suggest semantic interfaces or interpenetration among them.

In my poem, an inverted number becomes the word "poesia" = "poetry" in English, suggesting that poetry flows from the interior of machine and calculation, but, at the same time, the poetry works as the opposite or the reverse side of tecnology (figure 5). The number out of the machine doesn't have the same meaning. The visual sign (machine) gives its own meaning to the association of signs.

I am not discussing here the quality of the poems as an artistic product. I am only discussing the nature of the poems, the language of its poetics, which, of course, carries a conception of poetry. Considering that poetry is yet a special form of organisation of signs, I tried to establish a frame of organisation of visual poems. Technological poems are, in its intersemiotics conformation, a variation of the first group of visual poetry, where visuality derives from the form of words. If we still observe that these three groups above can be seen in a historical development, technological poems are also in the first stage of visual poetry of this century.

The texts about technological poetry have been trying to find definitions in order to fix the newness of it, but without success. They seize upon the idea that a new medum expresses a new kind of engagement of sensitivity and suggests a new behavior of reception. Let's analyse the three main aspects detected by the theory of technological poetry: interactivity, variability, sintaxes and imateriality.

Interactivity is understood as a new process of communication of the poem where "the realization of this process becomes a shared responsability of poet and reader", as Eric Vos writes (1996), for normally a technological poem needs an active intervention of the reader, physically moving himself to see the poem (as in holografic works) or making his choices (as in hypertext or virtual poetry, until now solely developed by the Argentine Ladislao Pablo Györi). In the case of holografic works, the behavior of the reader is the same as in front of an object poem, due to its tridimensional feature - a hologram reproduces the efect of a solid object. In the case of hypertext poem, the interactivity may be really new, since the reader must choose the sequence of the poems. But, even there, we must consider that the trends to be chosen by the reader are given by the poet in a closed number of combination. So it is only a partial interactivity and variability. Until now, interactivity and a shared responsability of poet and reader is only a promise of new technologies. And the machine appears as a passive channel of this feasible new relationship. Again it is important to take again an idea of Nicholas Negroponte, who insists that the real new domain of technology implies a participation of the machine in the decisions and creations, not only as a passive support for a dialogue between poet and reader. We don't see it in any kind of technological poems.

Syntaxes are also claimed to be new in technopoems. Furthermore syntaxes must be evaluated under two aspects: on the one hand, the linkage between words; on the other hand, the linkage between words and other matrixes (that is, visual and verbal ones). In the field of linkage between words, most of technological poems reproduce the parataxis of verbal signs, a sistematic play-upon-words developed as a contemporary poetics in concret poetry of the 50's and 60's. Other syntatical aspects are represented by the spatial organization of visual signs, that also remakes the different forms of spatialization from the chaos of futurism to free spatialism of Pierre Garnier of the 50's up to geometrical construction of words in space of concrete poetry. The time, which is only suggested by that poetics carried out in the fixed form on paper, becomes explicit in technopoems. I am not sure if the suggested time is not more open and aesthetically variegated than the time mechanically determined by the technological space of digital movements, holography, virtual reality and so on.

On the aspects of relation between verbal mode and other matrixes (which may be another axis of syntatic conformation), technological poems, as we saw, are reduced to a first group of visual poetry and is absolutely poor in its connection with sound matrixes, showing a barren conception of intersemioses.

Immateriality and the movement sustain the only visible newness of technopoems, but even immateriality, which could facilitate the difusion and transmission of poems, is until now a remote perspective, because it is a more difficult base to be accessed than the traditional codex form of book. Besides, if these elements (immateriality and movement) are not converted into new forms of syntaxes, not converted into a new language based on new alliances between signs of different matrixes, they become only a referendum of the essential features of the medium and consequently poems are conditioned by technologies and imprisoned inside their attributes, not enriched by them. A new medium needs to create a new kind of organization of sign, new species of combination of signs to transform itself into a proper language, otherwise they remain a new medium to express, reproduce and transmit old languages.

It is feasible to classify the relation between poetry and new technologies of communication in three species: i. poems that only address themselves through the media; ii. poems that incorporate the technical features of media, adapting the old experimental poetry which anticipated the features of new technologies in their languages (like futurism, lettrism and concretism); iii. poems which propose a subvertion of the rules of technical features, escaping of being conditioned by and wondered at the technical media. The present technopoems surpassed the first stage but stopped at the second one.

Technological language may be found latent or potentialy realized out of the technological media. Intersign poetry, in this way, even if carried out on paper, can be considered nearer a possible new technological language than products of technological media. It aims to an expansion of the concept of poetry, including many forms of visual signs. Intersign poetry may be seen as technological because new technologies announce new forms of thinking, not only feeling or behavior. And to renew the forms of thought, to recreate the elaboration and communication of meanings, is to construct expressive language under the alliance between different matrixes of signs, with and through verbal signs connectecd with visual and/or sound ones, not exclusively as features of verbal sign. What I designate Intersign Poetry may be observed, in the field of technological sound poetry, in my poems that are being played in the space of ImageNations exhibition.

If the "newness" has imposed itself as an obligation for the contemporary poets engaged with new technologies, they must think that "newness" can be layed any more ingenuously on the hope of shocking effect provoked by new media on the receptor. Today reception receives any technological newness as a toy ephemerally amusing. Maybe poetry liberated itself definitely of the burden of perpetuity and eternity, but must refuse the trends of facility, because it can hinder the ways of inventivity.

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