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Paris
Connection is
co-produced and co-published by Arteonline.arq.br
(Rio), Coriolisweb.org
(Toronto), dichtung-digital.org
(Berlin), Turbulence.org
(New York). It contains introductions to,
interviews with, and reviews on: Jean-Jacques
Birgé, Nicolaus Clauss,
Frédéric Durieu, Jean-Luc Lamarque,
Antoine Schmitt, Servovalve. For French, Portuguese
and Spanish version see: http://vispo.com/thefrenchartists.
The version on dichtung-digitial is made possible
by ZKM. | Birgé | Clauss | Durieu | Lamarque | Schmitt | Servovalve |
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CONCRETE POETRY IN ANALOG AND DIGITAL MEDIA 1. Concrete and visual poetry in print The title of David
Small’s book installation is in itself suggestive
because it aptly and succinctly describes what is happening:
writing with light. This
includes both the projection from above as well as the
plastic pages illuminated from inside and initiated by
viewer contact signaling to the projector the number of the
current page. However, the title not only marks a
technologically innovative method of text presentation, it
also leads us back to the past. Illuminated
Manuscript is the technical term for handwritten books
from the Middle Ages, which are embellished with brilliant
inks and dyes. The technique of illumination –
elaborately conceived initial letters, ornamental borders
and gilded illustrations – sought to let the light
shine through the text, which did not mean so much to
illustrate the text as to reveal its inner qualities. The
light was intended to release the truth of a text from
within. Illumination and ornament served the purpose of the
message rather than just to illustrate the text. |
Iluminated
Manuscript suggests playing with the text. The
irony is that one nevertheless finally reads these
texts, for example on the Internet. On our home
computer, Small’s installation finds its
completion beyond design and surface
spectacle.
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David
Small: Illuminated Manuscript (2002)
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|
 William Blake: Illuminated Manuscript In the so called
labyrinth poems the text line winds its way over the
paper like the path through a maze, thereby adding the
labyrinth metaphor to the message of the text itself. Our
example from the Baroque represents a coherent labyrinth
with a clear way forward to the destination, an optimistic
labyrinth without the danger to get lost. In the figurative
poems the text shapes a certain figure, in religious context
often a cross, in Baroque secular figures as well as here a
goblet as a wedding poem for a couple from Bremen in 1637.
This poem is an early version of interactive writing, which
calls the reader either to turn around the paper or their
head in order to perceive the text. The deeper wit of this
playing with form lies in the fact that after this
performance one feels dizzy as if one had just drank a
goblet full of wine. The philosophy
behind this playing with form, behind this shift towards
typography, is to free the word from its pure
representational, designational function. While in
literature the physicality of language – such as its
graphical aspects – normally is neglected and even
considered to poison the authority of the text, the relation
between signifier and signified, here the visual form of the
word was used as an additional meaning. The word not only
represents an object it presents it on the visual
level. The goblet is to be seen before one even starts to
read. This attention towards
the visual materiality of language increased between 1910
and the 1920’s when Futurists such as Marinetti or
Dadaists such as Tristan Tzara or Kurt Schwitters undertook their typographic
experimentation.[2] The legacy for such
exploration was Malarmé who once condemned the
tedious patterns of verbal presentation in newspapers and
conventional books and experimented with typography. His
A Throw of a Dice was first published in 1914. The
occasion for such exploration was as well Saussure’s
deconstruction of the sign into two independent, only
incidentally linked elements: the signifier and the
signified. Dada attempted to render problematic a
linguistics in which an ‘absent’ signified might
be construed to exist independent of its relation to a
material signifier (see Drucker, 9-47). In the wake of this
development poet practitioners such as Velimir Khlebnikov
and Ilia Zdanevich gave theoretical treatment to the
materiality of typographic character. Such experiments on the
physical level of language were dismissed by Surrealism,
which experimented with language only on the level of mental
representation. The area of experimental typography was
reopened in the 1950’s and 60’s, now entitled
Concrete Poetry. [3]
This only “worldwide movement in the art of
poetry” (Williams, VII) after World War II is marked by
writers as Franz Mon, Eugen Gomringer, Reinhard Döhl,
Ernst Jandl, Gerhard Rühm, Konrad Balder
Schäuffelen, and Daniel Spoerri to name only a few from
German speaking countries. Representatives from other
nations include Augusto de Campos,[4]
Emmett Williams, and Jiŕí Koláŕ. The
unifying element of these author’s texts is that one
cannot read them aloud. In oral form they would lose their
design, they are to see or, as Franz Mon entitled one of his
essays on concrete poetry, they are “Poesie der
Fläche” (poetry of space).[5] A famous example of this more recent period
of concrete poetry, which is also to be found in Emmett
William’s Anthology of concrete poetry from
1967, is a piece by Reinhard Döhl where an apple is
shaped by the words »apple« plus the word
»worm«. Another example is Eugen Gomringer’s
piece Schweigen (Silence) from 1954, where
in horizontal and vertical lines the word
»schweigen« surrounds an empty, silent space. This
gap is the point in Gomringer’s piece for which all
other words are just a preparation because the gap conveys
the message that, strictly speaking, silence can only be
articulated by the absence of any words. The message
does not lie in a semantic sense between the lines but in a
graphic sense between the words. However, this piece does
not dismiss the representational function of the word in
favor of its visual value. Certainly, the message is to be
seen but it will only be revealed on the basis that
one did read the surrounding words before. This cooperation
portrays the concept of concrete poetry very well: it is
concrete in its vividness in contrast to the abstraction of
a term. Thus, concrete poetry deals with the relation
between the visible form and the intellectual substance of
words. It is visual not because it would apply images but
because it adds the optical gesture of the word to its
semantic meaning - as completion, expansion, or negation.
The intermedial aspect does not lie in the change of the
medium but in the change of perception, from the
semiotic system of reading typical for literature to
the semiotic system of viewing typical for art.
[6] Whereas concrete poetry stands for the
iconization of language, visual poetry indeed applies
images as can be seen in the image-text-collages by Klaus
Peter Dencker and Johannes Jansen which are much more
complex and difficult to understand than most pieces of
concrete poetry. Another
example of visual poetry is lettrism founded by
Isidore Isou in 1945, like Isou’s Les Nombres
from 1952 and Roland Sabati’s figurative poems from
1998 refering to webdings and windings alphabet in writing
programs as Microsoft Word. [7] A version of visual
poetry where text and image are combined but also can exist
independently from each other is the Luminous Poetry
by Günter Brus,[8]
where Brus uses his own and other writer’s prose and
poems and combines them with drawings. Till the end of the
70’s, Brus called his Luminous Poetry
"illuminierte Manuskripte" (illuminated manuscripts) in
reference to William Blake’s Illuminated Books. Thus, we are back to
our starting point whose historic context should have taken
shape in this short recapitulation. Now we may discuss the
deeper sense of David Small’s installation. Is his
Illuminated Manuscript intended to release the truth
of a text from within as its Middle Age predecessors? I want
to postpone this question to discuss it in a broader context
once I have introduced the further development of concrete
and visual poetry in the digital realm. As David Small’s
piece already renders, in the digital realm concrete poetry
gains two more levels of expression. While concrete poetry
in print combines linguistic and graphic qualities of words,
in digital media time and interaction are two additional
ways of expression.
Words can appear, move, disappear, and they can do this all
in reaction to the perceiver’s input. A good example for
using time as an aspect of concrete poetry is Augusto de
Campos’ poema-bomba
(1983-1997). While the original version in the static realm
of print captures the concretization of an exploding poem in
a specific, silent moment, the digital version goes beyond
the state of a still and realizes this explosion in time as
motion and sound. If a still can progress into a movie, the
worm of course can eat the apple as in Johannes Auer’s
digital adaptation worm applepie for doehl.
As much as Augusto de
Campos proceeded from concrete poetry in print to its
kinetic version in digital media, the Argentinian
Ana
María Uribe
proceeded from Typoems, as she calls her concrete
poetry pieces in print, to Anipoems, her name for
animated pieces of concrete poetry, which combines an
elegant minimalism with a refreshing humor.
A recent German
representation of kinetic poetry is ER/SIE (HE/SHE)
by Ursula Menzer and Sabine Orth. This contribution to the
German competition of digital literature in 2001
materializes and comments on the meaning of a word by the
way it appears on the screen. Thus, for example, the first
syllable of Erbauung
(Building or Edification) is thrown in the
ground like a concrete block, which cannot be removed,
followed by the other letters built up floor by floor. An example of kinetic
poetry, much more difficult to program, is A
Fine View by
David Knobel, a short text about the fall of a roofer. The
point here is that the text rises up like the smoke a
cigarette (the roofer’s cigarette), grows and finally
speeds up as if the text came towards the reader’s face
in the same manner as the roofer’s experience as he
fell rapidly towards the ground. An audiovisual example with
a strong reference to the predecessors of kinetic concrete
poetry is Grunewald’s animation
of a verse by William Blake. While this form of
kinetic concrete poetry is reminiscent of the text movies
and television poetry since the 60’s (like So is
this by Michael Snow from 1982), the interaction
between a piece and its perceiver leads beyond this
cinematic situation. An example is Das
Epos der Maschine
(The Epic of the Machine)
by Urs Schreiber, the award winner of the competition of
netliterature by the French-German TV channel Arte in
2000 (for a review see dichtung-digital.de
7/2000).
This piece addresses
technology as a doubtful god that controls us. At the same
time it lets us feel the pressure exercised by
technology because everything is programmed. We have to follow certain
hidden patterns before we get access to other parts of the
text and reading is not as free as it used to be with books
or hypertext. One remarkable effect is when the words, which
call technology into question are themselves formed
into a question mark. The visual realization separates all
words from the word »Wahrheit« (truth), which
remains immobile in contrast to the other. It is stiff and
rigid as assumed in the text. If we click on this word the
other words disappear behind it, ambiguously suggesting that
doubt has escaped into unshakeable truth or truth has
swallowed, what called it into question. However we read the
removal of these words, we soon realize that it only lasts a
short time. Once we move the mouse these words reappear.
They adhere to the word truth, they follow truth wherever it
goes, and they can be 'eaten' again, but never erased. Once
a question has arisen, the message would seem to be, one
can't get rid of it any more, one will encounter it again
and again, provided there is movement in the discourse. That
this movement lies in our hand is literally the message the
interaction conveys. Completely based on
users’ action is the audio-visual rollover poem
YATOO
by Ursula Hentschläger and Zelko Wiener (for a review
see dichtung-digital.de
1/2002). These
net-artists from Vienna, who call themselves
Zeitgenossen (contemporary), present a star that
utters text on mouse-over contact. The text does not appear
on the screen but as an audio file; one side of a star
corner activates the female speaker; the other side
activates the male speaker. Nevertheless, the text’s
materiality is realized in the graphics, which transform in
shape according to the way one navigates. If one always
touches the right or the left side of the corners of the
star, one gets a whole sentence and a new harmonious shape
of the visual parts of the star. The sentences are
admittedly simple –»You are the only one«, for example, which
also explains the title’s abbreviation– and
certainly do not represent the state of art in English
poetry. However, this is partly due to the poetics of
constraint on which the poem is based because each line can
only consist of five words - one for each corner within the
star. On the other hand, the
piece gets interesting only via the user’s reaction,
which adds to the poetics of constraint a perception in
constraint. In order to understand the given text one has to
navigate the star in a certain order. If one does not care
and contacts randomly both sides of the corners one will
only hear the chaos of words mirrored by the chaos of the
visual parts. This may be the comment
to the romantic statements in this poem: relationships need
to understand and take into account the underlying setting.
If one does not, conversation will not take place. Thus, the
poetics of constraint -respectively the perception in
constraint - is part of the message, a wordless part, which
cannot be overheard in our interaction with the piece. After these examples of digital forms of concrete
poetry I want to discuss the poetics of concrete poetry in print and
digital media. Experimental poetry
– which concrete poetry is part of – has been
accused of being an autistic language and therefore of being
incapable of having an impact on the reader’s
consciousness. Thus, concrete poetry seems to be useless in
terms of political interventions. The counter argument is
that focusing on the text’s materiality implies a
reflection on the use of language thereby impeling the
audience to identify and perhaps even reject all attempts of
language instrumentalization. (Einhorn). “By
the isolation of words from the usual setting of
language,” Gisela Dischner points out, “the
natural way of speaking suddenly appears in a different
light, questionable, incomprehensible. The intended patterns
of language are being undermined.” (38)[9]
The American scholar Johanna Drucker states the same
intention for the typographic experiments of Dadaism, which
“was concerned with opposing the established social
order through subverting the dominant conventions of the
rules of representation.” (65) In this perspective, the
deconstructive play with the symbolic order of language is
considered to question social patterns and to even have
revolutionary potential.[10] However revolutionary
concrete poetry may be considered by manifestos and
academics, it is “a kind of game,” as Emmett
Williams states (VI); the revolution happens as a playful
event. There is a sensual pleasure involved, a release from
reading words in favor of enjoying their visual appearance.
There is the likelihood that this sensual pleasure is not
combined with the pleasure of reflection, that the
linguistic play remains harmless as Gisela Dischner points
out (39). Other theorists have addressed the focus on form
for its own sake with regards to other periods of concrete
poetry. For example, Wolfgang Ernst considers the
“optical poetry” (“optische Dichtung”)
of the Baroque period, especially labyrinth poems and
artistic reading-parcours, to be rooted in the attitude of
mannerism (211f.). Is concrete poetry manneristic rather
than political? Mannerism established a
shift from the rhetoric of conviction and persuasion to a
specific emphasis on entertainment which used effects,
amazement, grotesquerie and the fascination of paralogism.
(Hocke, 133ff.).[11]
This applies to mannerist works in the 17th
century as well as other epochs of mannerism such as in
Hellenism, the late Middle Ages, Romanticism and Art
Nouveau. Mannerism always favors form over content and is in
love with decoration.[12]
Considering the revolutionary gesture of concrete poetry
suggested above, it seems to be absolutely inappropriate to
compare it with mannerism. However, within the international
movement of concrete poetry, the given examples may be a
representation of militant social reform, which Emmett
Williams sees side by side with “religious mystics,
lyricists of love, psychedelic visionaries, engaged
philosophers, disinterested philologists and
poetypographers.” (VII) Besides engaged examples, which
literally intend to set the reader out of line like Claus
Bremer’s immer schön in der reihe bleiben
(keep in line) from 1966,[13]
one finds equally philosophical pieces such as Max
Bense’s Cartesian concrete [14]
or playful visual renditions of words and people such as
Gomringer’s Wind, Koláŕ’s
Tinguely, and Döhl’s
Apfel.[15]
We see the same
diversity in the beginning of the 20th century
when Futurist, Dadaist, and Cubist artists in literature and
visual art emphasized materiality. Their emphasis either
embodied the intervention into the symbolic order as a kind
of political and social critique (Drucker considers this
“strain of modern art practice” typical for
Dadaism). Other artists realized this materiality to
facilitate revelation and the representation of truth
similar to the illuminated manuscripts in the Middle
Ages.[16]
A third group finally denied both religious and political
aspirations and was concerned with the autonomy of the sign
existing on its own right, presenting rather than
representing, relieved of designatory
functions.[17]
According to Drucker, even the last approach proves a
“persistent investigation of the process of
signification such that the relations between formal
manipulation and content could not be dissolved”, which
is why the relations between formal manipulation and content
never have been dissolved (67). However, the question
remains whether such formal manipulation really increases a
reflection of the patterns of representation and a desire of
subversion or whether it rather supports a playful approach
to text freed from meaning in order to focus on the surface
effect. With respect to kinetic
concrete poetry one should realize that concrete poetry in
print and concrete poetry in the digital paradigm are not
only separated by their media but by decades of history. The
revolutionary pathos of concrete poetry in the 50’s and
60’s will hardly be found in our contemporary times.
Since the arrival of postmodern philosophy, the reverence of
grand narrations of enlightenment and revolution has
dissolved. The postmodern condition caused disillusion and a
resignation from ideologies and social utopia towards
individual, sensual and playful settings.[18]
This tendency results from general skepticism towards any
kind of teleology or claims to know the truth – a
skepticism, which itself is the result of what Foucault
calls postmodern enlightenment.[19]
Despite the
conservative turn of politicians and intellectuals in the
wake of September 11th, this anti ideological
attitude is still to be found in younger generations, though
hardly with the reflexive background of postmodernism.
Florian Illies, feature writer of FAZ, described this
consciousness with anecdotes in his book Generation
Golf, sociologist Heinz Bude discusses it in his study
Generation Berlin, and media researcher Norbert Bolz
celebrates in his recently published Consumistic Manifest
the substitution of consumption for ideology as
“pragmatic cosmopolitism” and the global
society’s immune system against the virus of fanatic
religions (14 and 16). Whatever one may conclude from the
comments of these authors, one certainly has to agree with
their description. The aesthetic
consequence of such a cultural disposition is obvious: if
emphatic messages seem to be inappropriate, the focus of art
will shift to form. This was the case in mannerism, which
has been a result of crisis similar to postmodernism, which
is why Umberto Eco considers postmodernism the modern name
for mannerism (77). And indeed, as Andrew Darley notices in
his book on Visual Digital Culture there is “a
shift away from prior modes of spectator experience based on
symbolic concerns (and ‘interpretative models’)
towards recipients who are seeking intensities of direct
sensual stimulation.” (3) The “prevalence of
technique and image over content and meaning”,
manifested in computer designed movies such
as Star Wars (1977), Total Recall (1990) or
Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991), leads to a
“culture of the depthless image,” to an
“aesthetics of the sensual,” which puts the
audience “in pursuit of the ornamental and the
decorative […], the amazing and the
breathtaking.” (193 and 169) Darley speaks of movies,
MTV, and computer games. However, the turn of the
“‘reader’ or interpreter” into a
“sensualist” (169) can be discovered with regards
to print and screen design as well. Thus, David
Carson’s design of “post-alphabetic text”
“refashions information as an aesthetic event,”
(Kirschenbaum) and text in multimedia environments on the
screen embody a shift from protestant enlightenment to
catholic revelation, as the German linguist Ulrich Schmitz
puts it. Lev
Manovich even sees a shift in the official presentation of
net art from the self-reflexive conceptual art of the early
90’s (with a huge influence from Eastern Europe) to
Flash-art at the beginning of the new century (with stars
representing the world’s key IT regions San
Francisco, New York and Northern Europe).[20] To quote Robert Coover, advocate
of hyperfiction, who in 2000 declared the passing of
its Golden Age: there is “the constant threat of
hypermedia: to suck the substance out of a work of lettered
art, reduce it to surface spectacle.” This transfer of
attention from semantics to the surface spectacle is the
cultural context of digital concrete poetry. It is to no
surprise that the legacy of meaningful reflection cannot
always be discovered. Often enough the play with material is
only focused on impressive effects, flexing ‘technical
muscles.’ In these cases, language – as in mannerism –
celebrates itself. In the digital realm language of course
is more than the word seen on the screen. The language of
digital media is composed of letters, links, colors, shapes
and action, which is all based on the code beneath the
screen. The language of digital media is the program; which
is why Lev Manovich sees the “software artist” as
the new type of artist. According to Manovich,
the software-artist outdates the media-artist, who, in the
60’s outdated the romantic artist. While the romantic
or modern artist “creates from scratch, imposing the
phantoms of his imagination on the world”,
media-artists “not only use media technologies as
tools, but they also use the content of commercial
media,” re-photograph a newspaper photograph or isolate
and manipulate a segment from a movie or TV show. This
‘art of the second hand’[21]
is now overcome by the software-artist, “the new
romantic”, who “marks his/her mark on the world by
writing the original code”. This software-artist
“re-uses the language of modernist abstraction and
design – lines and geometric shapes, mathematically
generated curves and outlined color fields – to get
away from figuration in general, and cinematographic
language of commercial media in particular. Instead of
photographs and clips of films and TV, we get lines and
abstract compositions.” The announced retreat away from
the language of commercial media seems to contrast the
transformation of artists into designers, which occurred in
the 1920’s, helping to change “the formal
radicality of early modernism into the seamless instrument
of corporate capitalist enterprise,” as Johanna Drucker
states (238). That the Generation Flash “does
not waste its energy on media critique,” as Manovich
states, may weaken such an assumption. Another argument is that
the non-cinematographic Flashaesthetics[22]
actually is well equipped to serve as the new language of an
emerging, rapidly commercialized medium. Finally: most
software artists work as designers as well, creating
commercial products like online games, webtoys, and
multiuser environments. To visit
the websites Manovich cites as examples, illustrates the
departure from cinematographic
language and seems to prove that Generation
Flash indeed “does
not waste its energy on media critique.” Manny
Tan’s interactive spider
on uncontrol.com
is an example for all the versions of ‘mouse
magnetism,’ installing a closed circuit between the
user and a digital entity for the experience of playful
interaction.[23]
A good
example for non-figurative software-art, which at the
same time works with “post-alphabetic
texts,” is Untitled
by Squid Soup a group of designers, artists, and musicians,
who create commercial products like online games, webtoys,
and multiuser environments, as well as experiment with
spacial materialization of sound. Untitled is such an
audiovisual 3-D-environment, which presents written letters
and mumbled words just to create "a feeling of being somewhere."[24]
What we see and hear is the transformation of text into
sound and design, a fascinating, somehow hypnotic
experience, which has absolutely no intention to be
investigated from a semantic point of view. An example, which almost paradigmatically
embodies the development of concrete poetry, is
Enigma
n by the
Canadian programmer and net artist Jim Andrews. Enigma
n was first developed in 1998 in DHTML as anagrammatic
play with the word meaning. In print one could have
concretized the change of meaning by a specific order of
letters in horizontal and vertical lines reading one
direction as »meaning«, the other direction as
»enigma n«. This setting would have revealed the
anagrammatic surplus of the letter »n«. In
Andrews’s digital version from 1998, the letters, which
at first form the word »meaning« in contrast to
the title »enigma n«, change position and meaning
constantly – until stopped by the user– thereby
giving meaning even to the letter »n« as the sign
for a variable number. Andrews calls Enigma n “a
philosophical poetry toy for poets and philosophers from the
age of 4 up”. This description stresses the playful
character, which goes far beyond the play of concrete poetry
in print. In 2002 Andrews published an audio-visual version
with increased sensual effects. In Enigma
n^2 the
letters of the word meaning are not shown in changing
positions, but the word is spoken, manipulated by software.
As Andrews explains in a private
email November 2002:
“The
sound itself starts out with the word 'meaning' backwards
and then there are two normal repetitions of the word
'meaning'. The program randomly selects a starting point in
the sound and a random end point (after the start point).
And it selects a random number of times between 1 and 6 to
repeat the playing of that segment” – with the
option for the user to set the start point by clicking on
the wave form. Andrews is certainly right seeing Enigma
n^2 “as a kind of continuation of Enigma n
in that it's concerned with the enigma of meaning.”
(private email) And indeed, hearing these endless,
interrupted, randomly looped attempts to articulate the word
»meaning« may support this aim. However, whereas
Enigma n required contemplating the deconstruction
one sees on the screen, Enigma n^2 allows just
dipping into the hypnotic atmosphere of sound mix and visual
effects. The original philosophical effort of the
anagrammatic play in Enigma n has been released;
concrete poetry has turned into music.[25] Thus, we can say that concrete poetry at least
partly carries out the same shift from symbolic concerns to
sensual stimulation Darley sees for visual digital
aesthetics. There are good reasons to assume an irresistible
‘mood for technology’ itself behind this
transition, on both sides of production and of perception.
This mood for technology can be marked as digital kitsch on
the basis of Ludwig Giesz’ definition of kitsch as
giving up the specific distance between I and the object in
favor of a feeling of fusion and surrender to the object
(407). Such a mark, of course, would display an absolute
“meaning-centered approach” to aesthetics, which
Darley questions in his book: “Is ornamentation, style,
spectacle, giddiness really aesthetically inferior or,
rather, just different (other) from established motions of
literary, classical modern art? Is an aesthetic without
depth necessarily an impoverished aesthetic, or is it
rather, another kind of aesthetic – misunderstood and
undervalued as such?“ (6) Darley seems to have
the support of Susan Sontag, who wrote in her famous essay
Against Interpretation as early as 1964:
“In a culture whose
already classical dilemma is the hypertrophy of the
intellect at the expense of energy and sensual capability,
interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art.”
Sontag recommends a deeper interest in “form” in
art and Darley suggests we approach the
“‘poetics’ of surface play and
sensation” (193) open mindedly and without reservations
resulting from concepts of cultural pessimism. However, Darley even
seems to have the support of particular moments in art
history. In a certain way the “aesthetics of the
sensual”, the “culture of the depthless
image” is reminiscent of the debate of formal
aesthetics in the beginning of the 20th century,
when the visual sign was considered self-valuable, and ought
to be freed from its meaning-bearing role to the “pure
visual”. Shall we consider
Enigma n^2 – and moreover those pieces of
software-art which deliberately focus on “surface
play and sensation”
– a return to formal aesthetics? Is the autonomous self-centered technical
effect – the code as a
self-sufficient presentation on the screen – the
contemporary equivalent of the “pure visual”? Is,
again, this aesthetic of the “surface play and sensation”
appropriate to
the character of our time and of this technology? In an age of theme
parks and progressing semi-analphabets, in an age of
“spectacular dictates of the culture industry”, as
Hal Foster complains, one feels the need to stand up against
the sell-out of meaning and to fight for artifacts which
still demand to invest and practice hermeneutic energy. One
even feels reminded of the Austrian architect Adolf Loos,
stating in 1908 in his essay Ornament und Verbrechen
with regards to the aesthetic hybridity of Art Nouveau: "The evolution of culture is synonymous with the removal of
ornament from utilitarian objects." (20)[26]
However, the question is not only whether one should fight
or not, but to what extend this fight may succeed within the
realm of digital media. The response of a reader of Epos
der Maschine proves that the reading of kinetic concrete
poetry easily can miss the author’s intention. In this
case, the author hoped for readers using the mouse with
curious passion and promised the serious reader a spectacle
not only on the screen but in their head as
well.[27]
His fascinated reader, however, writes: “just the way
it deals with script and typography! I don’t need to
read anymore! How words shove into each other and circle and
appear and disappear and and and and and!” (webring www.bla2.de; entry to
Epos der Maschine) The medium itself seems
to foster such an attitude towards surface reading, and an
attraction to programmed effects. The medium’s click
gesture seems to favor curiosity which cares for what is
promised behind every link rather than for what is to be
discovered between the lines and signs. Lev Manovich says
about his first visit on the Flash-site praystation.com:
“I was struck by the
lightness of its graphics.” Of course, in this
case lightness is different from lightness in Middle Age
illuminated manuscripts where the light was intended to
release the truth of a text from within. Lightness of
graphics on praystation.com stands for ease and
lightheartedness. In the light of this difference we are
finally back to our starting point, which now deserves a
second look. What about lightness either way in David
Small’s Illuminated Manuscript? Let’s recapitulate
which situation of perception Small’s installation
provides. The embellished book in a dark room attracted many visitors,
gathering around this ‘virtual camp fire,’ curious
how the display of text was working. In order to read
the text one had to stop moving the finger and wait till the
text settled down. One
can imagine how hopeless it was to decipher the words with
five or so pushing people eager to experience the power of
their own fingers. However, this does not
change the fact that the book did provide certain texts. These texts draw the attention to a third meaning
of the title, which does not stand for a technology of
presenting but of thinking. Illumination refers to
Enlightenment; the famous Illuminatenorden (illumination
order) may bridge the association. And indeed, the assembled
texts all are dedicated to a specific topic of
Enlightenment. Smalls’ piece is, as he himself
explains, “a collection of writing on the subject of
freedom.” Among
these writings we can find the American Declaration of
Human Rights, Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Four
Freedoms speech to the congress at January
6th in 1941, Martin Luther King’s letter
from the Birmingham jail from April 16th in 1963,
and Georg W. Bush’s Address to a Joint Session of
Congress and the American People from September
20th, 2001. Is this thematic
orientation pure chance? Is the viewer intended to consider
together both aspects of illumination: freedom and truth? The arrival of the text
in September 11th adds the perspective of
contradiction and inconsistency to the topic of
enlightenment and religious or secular truth.[28]
To those who did not release themselves into the simple
logic of friend or enemy, right or wrong, September
11th made clear the extent to which freedom still
remains an unsolved problem. Though, president Bush in his
Address promised: “Whether
we bring our enemies to justice, or bring justice to our
enemies, justice will be done,” one knows the subject
matter is much more complicated than this statement in the
wake of the terrible events of September 11th
implies.[29] As increasingly
different positions of politicians and public writers have
shown, there is no clear indication about how to be just
– and as Derrida states in his book on justice, justice
is an experience of the impossible: one cannot objectivize
justice, one cannot say »this is just« and even
less »I am just«, without having already betrayed
justice (33). Freedom of the subject, one should conclude,
includes the freedom not to side with one of the offered
‘truths,’ but to remain in the process of doubt
and search – because the actual problem is the illusion
that we are in the right. One can also say: “Absolute
truth abolishes a habitable planet.”
[30] This statement brings
us back to the illuminated manuscripts by Günter Brus,
from where this is quoted: “Absolute Wahrheit schafft
einen bewohnbaren Planeten ab”. With this piece, if not
before, the illuminated manuscript has given up its genre
specific gesture of revelation. Now it uses this gesture
only to call it into question. The poetry of revelation has
turned into Luminous Poetry (Leuchtstoffpoesie), as
Brus calls his illuminated manuscripts; the light has lost
its symbolic value to release the truth of a text from
within. One could say: enlightenment has moved on to
postmodernism. We encounter this
mutation of illumination as revelation into illumination as
lighting in Small’s installation as well. Small’s
illuminated manuscript obviously does not intend to
reveal the inner qualities of its text. It rather suggests
playing disrespectfully with the text. The way the text
appears undermines all of its authority. The ironic
precondition of this understanding is that one nevertheless
finally reads these texts, for example on the Internet.
Here, on our home computer, Small’s installation would
find its completion. And here we would realize that kinetic
concrete poetry might play with formal effects in a
manneristic way and still provide a deeper message, which we
ought to discover. Behind design and surface spectacle is
still room for deeper meaning. If artists make the effort to
hide such meaning beneath the technical effects they deserve
an audience that is patient and curious enough to have a
second look. [1] The tube reminds
of Schuldt’s Glastextkörper from 1965; a
glass tube whose surface displayed several sentences. [2] See
Marinetti’s Zang Tumb Tuuum, first published in
journals between 1912 and 1914, and Tzara's cubistic
calligrames. [3] Gomringer and the
Noigandas poets of São Paulo agreed upon this term to
describe the new poetry in 1956 unaware of Öyvind
Fahlström who had already written his “manifest
for konkret poesie” in 1953. [4] See his homepage:
http://www.uol.com.br/augustodecampos/ [5]
‘Prose of Space’ would be a text like Lewis
Carrol’s The Tale of a Rat, which is presented
in the shape of a rat tale. [6] Whereas the
system of reading consists of discrete elements which
possess meaning as such, as words (lexems) one can look up
in a dictionary, the system of visual perception consist of
non discrete elements, which will be structured as an amount
of discrete signs only on the base of the projection of
hypothetically assumed signifiers onto the visual object.
Only within this projection a specific shape or a specific
color will have a specific meaning. - For a differentiation
between concrete and visual poetry see Dencker, 174f. and
Weiss. Note Emmett William’s focus on poetry
rather than concrete and his objection against the
de-emphasization of poetry by too strong analogies of
concrete poetry to the visual arts (Williams, V).
[7] For the
‘lingualisation’ of painting at the beginning of
the 20th century see collages such as Carlo
Carrà’s Manifestazione interventista
(1914) or Kurt Schwitters’ Merzbilder. A
former version of such ‘lingualisation’ are
Giuseppe Arcimboldo’s allegorical portraits in baroque,
a later example are Niki de Saint Phalle’s readable
sculptures like La marièe from 1963 with the
weddings dress out of little objects such as a snake, baby,
plane, car, birds or shoes. [8] End of the 1990ties Günter Brus’
exhibition "Leuchtstoff - Poesie und Zeichen -
Chirurgie" was shown at places like Kunsthalle
Tübingen, Kunsthalle Kiel, and Neue Galerie der Stadt
Linz. [9] Translation by the author, see
the German original: “Durch die Isolation von
Wörtern aus dem gewohnten ‘Ablauf’ der
Sprache erscheint das Sebstverständliche der
Sprachgewohnheit plötzlich neu, fragwürdig,
unverständlich; die intendierten Sprachgewohnheiten
werden aufgebrochen. Das ästhetische
Nicht-Selbstverständlichnehmen des
Selbstverständlichen könnte modellhaft sein
für das gesellschaftliche
Nicht-Selbstverständlichnehmen des Gewohnten,
‘Normalen’.” [10] Chris Bezzel
speaks of an “aesthetical alienation from the social
alienation” and states: “revolutionary writing
means the revolution of writing.” (“ästhetische Entfremdung von
der sozialen Entfremdung”, “dichtung der
revolution bedeutet revolution der dichtung.”) (35f.) [11] Hocke speaks of a
“manieristische Para-Rhetorik” (146) [12] Hugo Friedrich
notices the hypertrophy of artistic means and the atrophy of
content (597). Ernst Robert Curtius states the randomly and
meaningless plethora of ornamentation in manneristic epochs
(278). Hocke differentiates between Mannerism and Baroque
and states for the latter to revitalize docere
against delectare (146). This statement follows the
thesis of Erwin Panofsky who considers Baroque in his essay
Was ist Barock (1934) a return to the principles of
Renaissance classicism, a “reaction against
exaggeration and overcomplication […] a new
tendency towards clarity, natural simplicity, and even
equilibrium” (23). For a new exploration of this
perspective see Peter Burgard The Poetics of Irony: Opitz
and the (Un)Grounding of German Language, who reveals
the various forms of Baroquen art to subvert the systematic
principles underlying Renaissance art.
[13] Bremer writes the
title line for line one under the other until the page is
covered with the intention that the reader will have
difficulties to really read line for line and rather be
provoked “not to keep in line but, on the contrary, to
get out of line [thereby setting] the reader free in
the realm of his own possibilities, the realm in which we
are brothers.” (Williams, see entry for Bremer). See as
well Ivan Steiger, who builds the word NEIN (no) out of many
YES (ja) words, suggesting that (or asking whether)
obedience will finally turn into resistance. [14] This piece from
1966 sets the words »ich«, »denke«,
»etwas« »ist« in a circle so that it can
be read in a different order. See the word painting
The Fall of the Tower of Babel (1964) by John
Furnival, where the letters of the phrase “peace for
the world” and its Russian translation mingle more and
more to build a house of meaningless noise. Both pieces are
included in Emmett William’s Anthology of Concrete
Poetry. [15] In Wind
the letters w-i-n-d all over and back and for build the word
»wind«; in Tinguely the letters
t-i-n-g-u-e-l-y shape an object, which looks like a Tinguely
sculpture (see Emmett William’s Anthology of
Concrete Poetry). [16] Wassily Kandinsky
considers material effects to “endlessly
augment[s] the reserve of spiritual values”
(123, quote from: Drucker, 62). [17] The Cubist
Maurice Raynal states: “But the truth picture will
constitute an individual object, which will posses an
existence of its own apart from the subject that has
inspired it.” (Quote and further discussion in:
Drucker, 65). For a discussion of the concept of the image
for image's sake as an aspect of formal aesthetics see
Wiesing. For the contemporary attention to the material
components of signification in linguistic theory (Saussure,
Russian Formalism, Prague School) and essays by poet
practioners see Drucker, chapter one. [18] For this tendency
in art and design see Wick, 11. For examples in literature,
which dismiss the grand narration of the 68’s movement
see Christian Kracht’s novel Faserland (1995)
and Benjamin von Stuckrad-Barre’s novel
Soloalbum (1998) [19]
Indiscussing postmodernism I refer to Michel Foucault’s
understanding of postmodernism as an attitude of mind rather
than a phenomenon of a specific time in history. In contrast
to humanism as a theory about mankind tied to a certain
point of view suchas Christian, atheistic, and Marxist
humanism this attitude is skeptical against teleological
ideas and the belief in progress and opts for building
identity on the base of the hermeneutics of the other (see
Foucault: What is Enlightenment?) [20] Manovich compares
the Tirana Biennale 01 Internet exhibition with exhibitions
in the early 90s. [21] Manovich speaks
of the media-artist as “a parasite who leaves
[sic!] at the expense of the commercial media“
and concludes as reaction to thirty years of media art:
“We are tired of being always secondary, always
reacting to what already exists” [22] See
Manovich’s note: “Many of the sites which inspired
me to think of ‘Flash aesthetics’ are not
necessarily made with Flash; they use Shockwave, DHTML,
Quicktime and other Web multimedia formats. Thus the
qualities I describe below as specefic to ‘Flash
aesthetics’ are not unique to Flash sites.” [23] A more
philosophical version of mouse-magnetism is Antoine
Schmitt’s gallery of entities “avec determination” – www.gratin.org/as/avecdetermination
(see review
in Paris Connection) . [24] This is the
answer from Squid Soup in a private email when asked for the
intention of their piece. In the same email Squid Soup
explains the production of meaningless text as follows:
“1. take a random book off of a random shelf and open
at a random page; 2. read a random passage; 3. repeat steps
1 and 2 a few times; 4. take recorded passages and cut them
into small pieces (samples); 5. Change the speed and
direction of some of the samples; 6. stick them back
together in a different order.” [25] Or should one say
concrete poetry has turned into sound poetry? In his email
Andrews states: “A kind of strange
generative/interactive sound poetry/music. I have my stereo
hooked up to my computer, so my computer speakers are my
stereo's speakers. I play it sometimes (fairly loudly) for a
few minutes to hear if I can figure out more about that sort
of music.” [26] Cited by Forster,
who discusses Loos in the context of total design almost a
century later (14). For the original text in German see
Glück. [27] See interview with Urs Schreiber
in: dichtung-digital.org 6/2000 (www.dichtung-digital.de/Interviews/Schreiber-23-Aug-00) [28] On the one hand,
it is emphasized that the Islamic ‘truth’ of
Dschiad against the western world and culture cannot be
taken from the Koran and that Islam is a peaceful, tolerant
religion. On the other,
western intellectuals underline that western convictions and
values are not universal and cannot simply be imposed on
other civilizations. Both cases relay on hermeneutic
procedures and exemplify their immense practical
consequences. [29] This is even more
true in a country that, as Noam Chomsky reminds us, the
World Court has condemned for international terrorism (84).
[30]
An example for the political consequences of such linguistic
and philosophical understanding of the relativity of all
systems of thinking is Jean Paul who, in
the time of Napoleons attack of Germany took an in-between
position between German nationalists and Bonapartists
stating: I am neither biased nor conceited enough to
absolutely side with one party. In a different context he
declares he wants to keep himself open to the partly truth
from all sides since he does not want to make his I to a
temple, altar or even representative of the absolute truth. (See original version:
“[Ich bin] weder einseitig noch eingebildet
genug, mich mit aller Meinung für eine Partei zu
entscheiden”, and: “[Ich will mich der]
theilweisen Wahrheit von allen Seiten offen
halte[n], weil mein Ich kein Tempel, Altar oder gar
Repräsentant der himmlischen Wahrheit sein
kann.”] (Bertram, 93, and Berend, 81f.) Bertram, Heinrich:
Jean Paul als Politiker, Halle 1932 Berend, Eduard
(Ed.) Jean Pauls Sämtliche Werke.
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