The official site of Augusto de Campos gathers key cycles of his concrete and digital poetry (from Poetamenos, Tensão and Greve to Popcretos, Poemóbiles, Caixa Preta and Expoemas) tracing the migration of his work from page to screen and across media. It is both an archive and a living map of one of the central figures of Brazilian and international concrete poetry. A masterclass in subverting the page and the poetics of intersemiotic translations.
Section
Connections mediatic shifts
Mediatic shifts built from different reading supports. These are artistic works of very different natures that expand and redirect the objectual meaning of the book and its forms of reading. Blackboards wired to monitors, bicycles turning cities into text, books that become interfaces and online archives bound to films: these works show how reading migrates across objects, devices and spaces, connecting the book to a wider mediatic ecology.
devices / installations / interfaces · the book connected to screens, bicycles, blackboards & cables
A four-meter blackboard holds the trace of erased sentences on memory/text/representation. A monitor mounted on rails slides over the surface. When it stops on a former inscription, the phrase reappears, reorganised by the computer: a moving reading device for what has already been erased. Formerly at http://www.karg.de/data/fietzek/tafel.htm
In Shaw’s work, the city becomes legible through its skyline and the speeches of its planners. The reading support is a strange device that connects bicycles, screens and virtual reality programs. They are the vehicle for a trip through the city’s discourse and its space, performing an urbanism of the city as text and interactive cinema. Formerly at: http://www2.awa.com/artnet/artnetweb/guggenheim/mediascape/shaw.html
Translation appears here as an emblem of difference. A single phrase is translated through 22 languages in a spiral: each version translated from the previous one. The process reiterates the original question: “Communication systems provide the possibility of developing a better understanding between people: in which language?”
City of Bits
One of the first books to be published simultaneously in print and online. The online version, constantly updated and with interactive areas, contains an exclusive chapter, “Text Unbound”, which became a classic of hypertextuality. Formerly at http://mitpress.mit.edu/e-books/City_of_Bits/
For Fujihata, the pleasure of reading is fulfilled in the book — and in the gesture of turning the page. In this multimedia installation, all interaction between reader and environment is based on that gesture. The book itself appears, with full pomp, as interface.
alien space
Novak, an architect, could have transformed the book into a built object. Instead, he turns the text itself into the substance for a navigation system in three-dimensional virtual space. Formerly at http://www.centrifuge.org/marcos/transtalk/vrml/index.wrl
The Tulse Luper Suitcase
A site that stores stories related to Greenaway’s film project. One of the keys to the movie runs through this online archive, where fragments and clues are dispersed across suitcases and interfaces. http://www.tulseluper.net/
Writer’s Block
On 10 May 1933, about 40,000 people took part in a massive book burning in Berlin’s Bebelplatz. “Depraved” works by Brecht, Nelly Sachs and many others were burned in a monument to terror. In 1999, Oring installed a cage full of 1920s–30s typewriters in the same square, and others in different parts of the city — a quiet and poetic libel against censorship. Online, visitors can send records of book burnings and access information on books and authors banned in Nazi Germany. http://www.writers-block.org/
Phone:me is an audiobook commissioned by Gallery 9 at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, also released on CD. Sewing together comments from characters of the digital world (a web designer, a marketing manager of an online video software, etc.), Amerika produces communication gaps that paradoxically restore the link between voice and body, corrupted by telecommunications systems.
Any search for “phone:me” on the Internet tends to point to long lists of “live” sex services (chats, spy-cams, etc.) and dating ads — a side effect that becomes part of the work’s context. Formerly at http://phoneme.walkerart.org