Poem for Today
workshop and talk
(salt)
Aewol, Jeju
2024.01.26
chris hamamoto

Concrete Poetry used abstraction and language to collapse the meaning of the language in upon itself – so words were not only signifying an external meaning, but they themselves were meaningful as graphic form, and in reverse graphic form would transform language’s interpretation. This is a useful diagram by Mary Ellen Solt, a poet and pioneer scholar on the movement.

So these type of poetry is interested in closing the relationship between an idea and its representation in written/spoken language. fundamental to this is to understand the difference between the something that is concrete with something the is abstract.

This poem by Bob Cobbing is not only referring to a square by writing the word “square” or describing it, but by setting the text in the form of a “square”. The poem is what is says, and vice versa.

Here’s another way to say that...

Language, written word, spoken word, paper, font, ink are put in the same plane — as elements working in unison to convey a single message.

We see this in this work by Mary Ellen Solt where the visual properties” of the name of a flower suggests the “shape of the flower” itself. The relation between form and thematic content is extremely tight.

The German philosopher Max Bense referred to the concrete poets’ actions as the creation of a perceivable object “with linguistic means.”

The concrete, therefore, is in opposition to the abstract since all its characteristics are available to the viewer, the concrete is “nothing but itself” and the concrete work of art “uses its material functionally and not symbolically.” it is not pointing/representing anything else.

In this example the idea of “silence” is performed by the lack of the the word “silence” at the center of the poem.

The movement as we know it now, was defined after the second world war, and was brought on in many ways by an increasingly globalized society.

During the early 1950s, São Paulo magazine Noigandres (which was composed of brothers Haroldo and Augusto de Campos who are considered the founders of the movement) began to treat language in an abstract way.

We see here and example of such relation between poetry and advertising. Decio Pinatari’s work, Beba Coca Cola, or ‘drink coca cola’, subverts Coke’s slogan transforming it into the word “cloaca”

More on how concrete poetry is defined...

So, the concrete work is to be perceived in its entirety as a unified object, rather than read in a particular sequence.

However, even the floating, dismembered characters used in this practice required a certain level of literacy, since Concrete Poetry, by default, is bound to the use of language. For that reason, whoever views Concrete Poetry is also always a reader, or a viewer/reader.

Ian Hamilton Finlay sculpture in Stuttgart was the word schiff (ship) carved in reverse and can only be decoded when it floats reflected on water

An example of a optic or visual piece would be this work again by Ian Hamilton Finlay where a horizon is created by the word horizon.

Another example, which may also look familiar as a reference is Albers by Jiri Kolar. In this piece one of Albers’ color studies is recreated based on the ‘grey’ level of each pattern of characters

A phonetic piece would be Vite by Henri Chopin, in which the arrangement of the text influences how it is read. Each line is read from left to right, in approximately the same amount of time. Vite means Fast in french.

this work is a written poem on sound. it account a battle based on the author (Marinetti)’s experiences on the battle field — emulates sounds of gun fire, explosions and so on. his playful arrangements on the words defy syntax and grammar, animating them through non linear compositions. we start seeing movement, even when the work is static.

examples of kinetic poetry are vast. i will show a few examples where movement is implied graphically, rather than physically enacted.

in this piece by Zdanevich for Tristan Tzara, movement is achieved via typographic variations. the poster uses material from over 40 fonts.

more than kinetic poetry with these few slides, i want to show the use of kinetic typography. and we will try to identify a few categories of techniques for achieving such effect. these hopefully they will become useful for the exercise we will do today.

This is a cover from 1966 for IDEA magazine. if we saw before “variation” as a strategy on the previous example, this is a good one for the use of “fragmentation" to generate a sensation of movement. it shows elements as separate pieces that relate but also retain their individuality

here, a poster by Muriel Cooper uses over-printing and “repetition” as a way to express the notion of something being active, in development. though this poster is static it is a precursor to her animated work and computer generated graphics that would define her practice at MIT

this is a poster in Japanese that relies only on different sizes of the same two words: forest and grow. using “uniformity” with “contrast” it eludes the sensation of movement

this is an exhibition catalog for the dutch animated film titled “frame by frame”. it moves gradually towards a more advances state. se we see sequentially / progression as strategies to create the illusion of movement

this poem by Emmett Williams called sweethearts, uses the medium, the structure of the book, to deliver movement in a more literal way

over a series of pages, it arranges the letters of the word “sweethearts” in a variety of compositions to illustrate an encounter between the words "he" and "she".

It starts in a square grid, and characters are moved around and removed to form new phrases

The poem is distributed through the whole dimension of the book, instead of the one page. This asks the reader to perceive it as an object and participate in the act of creating meaning as it flips the pages.

The concrete poem communicates first and foremost its structure.

so as we see with the book as a tool of sorts, an important aspect of this type of works are the mediums used to create them. for instance Piete and Ilse Garnier would often use the typewriter to create their art

Over time the typewriter became popular as a tool. Take as an example this work titles Series Towers

we are now in the 1980s. this is when online bulletin boards were popular, and we started seeing drawings made of type, that we now know as ASCII art.

These bulletin boards, were like message boards, forums, online communities. A foundational work of ASCII, is ‘spying at the wall’ in which alphabetic characters are used to illustrate a figuring peering over a wall

These works can be seen as early internet emojis or memes, as they were recreated with new emotional and formal complexities, it’s meaning growing and adapting based on the situation

Over time they grew formally more complex

also ASCII extended itself into animation, as evidenced in Buenos Aires born artist Ana Maria Uribe’s ‘Anipoems’

Malware or viruses also became a venue for this type of art, with hackers taking over and corrupting peoples computers while leaving graphics behind. This reminds me of the horizon piece we saw before.

these are screenshots of simulators showing the visual effect early computer viruses would have on the infected computers.

this next one reminds me of sweethearts

Or this version of Emmet William’s sweethearts which was reimagined through a web interface by Mindy Seu

Of course artists are engaging more directly with current technology and our networked condition. For instance, “All Catalogs (A-Z) 2002 is a text piece that is comprised of the names of all the available mail-order catalogs listed on the internet”

This work embraces the ephemerality of information online, the artist Penelope Umbrico saying: “I also make no attempt to update the links so All Catalogs (A-Z) 2002 is a time sensitive piece: At some point when all the links are dead, the piece will be dead as well.”

Art collective JODI makes site how code is translated by our browser, embedding messages within the source code which is rarely seen. For instance, on their homepage the visitor is confronted with an inscrutable mess of type

however, when the source code is viewed it is revealed it’s actually ASCII art which gets parsed differently when rendered via the browser

this piece by Damon Zucchini looks at modern communication methods through the lens of familiar graphic user interfaces and their relationship to type

the project performs the errors you might get when typing by hand and questions the sincerity and automation of thank you messages

This work mirror domains, looks at unclaimed domain names that share the same extension but in reverse, creating palindromes

Thinking beyond language as text to graphic languages, we see other explorations. For instance, Form by Sebastian Ly Serena creates a Rube Goldberg-like machine that reassigns web browser interface actions and responses to perform new behaviors

This lecture only scratches the surface of the history of Concrete Poetry and web-based poetry. Furthermore, there is an additional connection that can be made between groups like Fluxus, and other Conceptual Art works which look at the programatic and score like nature of coding works.

In this exercise we'll look at this connection, in relation to ASCII and web poetry. Specifically, we'll look at a math concept popularized around the same time as the Concrete Poetry movement, and how we can use it to delve more deeply into the work of Ana Maria Uribe.

Let's check the prompt!