Subject:
RE: [webartery] [Fwd: Menezes]
Date:
Thu, 27 Jul 2000 01:02:00 -0700
From:
"Jim Andrews" <jim@vispo.com>
Reply-To:
webartery@egroups.com
To:
<webartery@egroups.com>
I am sorry to hear of the death of Philadelpho Menezes. I have
been reading
some of his work online the last couple of hours, and include
two quotations
from him and some links to his work. I see he was also a friend
of Eric
Voss. And probably several others on the list. My condolences.
FROM "INTERACTIVE POEMS"
My view is that hypermedia, developed from hypertext, whether
in CD-ROMs or
in websites, does not come to be used only as an exercise in
mechanical
interaction with the user, but also to suggest rich ways of
mixing different
kind of signs, obliging the user to adopt an intellective
approach to the
exercise of reading. This activity brings the user out of the
traditional
system of languages, separated into their specific fields, into
to an
intersemiotic system of communication. If this interface
between signs of
different languages does not work in a hypermedia construct,
NTC is merely
reducing the activity of the user to a functional and
programmed use of
technology and communication.
http://geocities.com/Paris/Lights/7323/philadelpho.html
FROM "INTERSIGN POETRY: VISUAL AND SOUND POETICS IN THE
TECHNOLOGIZING OF
CULTURE"
"Linguistic and semiotic theories agree with the idea that our
thought is
conditioned by the form and the organization of the signs in a
discourse.
And these theories argue that language is fascist, as Roland
Barthes said,
because it imposes a procedure of thinking and guides us to a
certain
concept of reality which reinforces the system of language. We
can escape
from this vicious circle only if we are able to perceive the
fragility of
the links between signs and thought, language and reality.
Poetry is the
chief guide for this practice because it exposes the sign as a
touchable
event that makes signs as real as the material world, in spite
of the fact
that signs are a creation of thought. An expressive language
based on new
ways of combining different kinds of signs gives rise to
another form of
rationality and another conception of reality, but this is
possible only if
this language constitutes itself at a complex semantic level of
interpretation varied degrees of signification. Experimental
poetry of the
last four decades (especially concrete, visual, and sound
poetry) faced the
fact that transgression and strangeness have become meaningless
in a society
saturated by daily technical changes. It confronted also the
end of a
utopian perspective which nourished the sense of revolution of
the
historical avant-gardes and put in its place the realm of
technological
features as a way to bring poetry perpetually up to date (as if
it also
brought the poet physically renewed)."
"Experimental poetry today, what I conceive as Intersign
Poetry, must
confront the realm of visual and sound effects and must try to
find ways to
organize signs, in order to fill the technological products of
poetry with
the richness of ambiguity and complexity that signs contain
when they are
worked as ambivalent phenomena aimed at interpretation."
"If the first technological phase was marked by the idea of
against
interpretation, experimental poetry today, which includes a
second
technological phase, must work on behalf of reading visual and
sound
effects. It would keep the spirit of experimentation, then
nourished by an
opened utopia, a pluritopia which expresses a permanent sense
of reinvention
and variation (or transformation) of the world."
http://www.thing.net/~grist/golpub/polk/gmenezes.htm
Some other work by Philadelpho Menezes:
http://www.thing.net/~grist/l&d/menzes/le-menez.htm
http://www.thing.net/~grist/l&d/menzes/lmenez1.htm
http://www.pucsp.br/~cos-puc/face/s1_1998/poesia2.htm
http://www.pucsp.br/~cos-puc/epe/mostra/catalogi.htm
http://www.pucsp.br/~cos-puc/epe/mostra/phila.htm