Friedrich W. Block

A Hyperlink: »p0es1s - international digital poetry«

Friedrich W. Block

A Hyperlink: »p0es1s - international digital poetry«

»p0es1s« presents advanced possibilities to expand poetry to the field of multimedia and the internet: hybrid texts between word, image, and sound, which can only be electronically produced, stored, distributed, and received. Symbolic worlds dissolve to electrons, converted into an impenetrable texture of numbers, connected with currents between input and output. Appearing as letters, numbers, lines, areas, forms, sounds, the usual perceivable surfaces always appear as something else: They are potentially different, temporary, liquid, and flowing. Here, digital poetry means creative, experimental, playful, or critical verbal and non-verbal art produced by means of programming, multimedia, animation, interactivity, and net communication.

The variants of digital poetry are quite diverse and they are quickly developing. The affirmation of the technical possibility is not of primary importance because digital poetry works with rather than in its technical and symbolic media; it presents and reflects rather than represents. For the users this means poetry, 'poesis' in its very literal sense: to make experiences, experiments as aesthetic self-observation and self-creation. Thus, the selected projects stage the use of language in a context of medial conditions that have changed, and in this way they follow the evolution of experimental writing.

»p0es1s« is a dynamic and virtual site of digital poetry. It consists of exhibitions, discursive offers and recently of a website (www.p0es1s.net/). The website was launched in Munich during the »Schrift und Bild in Bewegung« festival, spring 2000. In 1992 we (mainly responsible was André Vallias) already showed one of the first exhibitions of digital poetry. The presentation took place in Annaberg-Buchholz, the residence of Carlfriedrich Claus, and it was attended by artists like Augusto de Campos, Eduardo Kac, Richard Kostelanetz, Jim Rosenberg and others – some of them who are again taking part.

Meanwhile, a large field of digital literature has developed:

• hyperfiction which expands narrative technique by means of hypertext,
• netliterature which is mainly interested in the telematically mediated communication between writers, readers or critics and thereby dissolving the boundary between these roles,
• collaborative projects where electronic text networks are collectively and often rhizomatically woven,
• browser based hybrid projects that work with the specific and diverse possibilities of the symbol and communication systems used on the internet,
• multimedia works on floppy or cd-rom,dvd, video,or holographic film as well as extended interactive instal-lations, partly with very lavish technology.

In this field, »p0es1s« specifically connects itself in the tradition of experimental and intermedial poetry of the 20th century. Here, the digital turn is not as distincitive as in other spheres because for a long time Intermedia has already served as an area where word and image come to a »conceptual fusion« (Dick Higgins), where multi-lineality, the active participation of the audience in the artistic process and the actual newest media have been tested.

In the German language region, mainly the mentioned netliterature is lively developing, while the so called Neue Poesie, as it sometimes condenses in Bielefeld (Colloquium Neue Poesie), Linz (Linzer Notate) or Vienna (Alte Schmiede, Literarisches Quartier), has hardly shown any interest in the digital media so far. More westward, things are different, e.g. in France where the L.A.I.R.E. group around Philippe Bootz is publishing its »poésie generée par l’ordinateur« on floppies and cd-roms, and respectively in the journal »Alire«. The network also finds one of its nodes in the Argentinian group »Posttypographia« around Fabio Doctorovich and Ladislao Pablo Györi. An intersection was built by a circle which is also represented at »p0es1sez« and which has articulated itself in several publications under the keyword of »New Media Poetry«, a term coined by Eduardo Kac. Certainly, there exists a lot of different phenomena, confused but linked and sometimes associated.

Thus »p0es1s« functions as a kind of anchor »on the high 'sees’ in the Turing galaxy«. Where the journey will take us remains fortunately open.