25/6/2019 "Digital Latin American Poetry: Experimental Language in the Times of Bits" by Claudia Kozak | Latin American Literature

Literature Today

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Digital Latin American Poetry:

Experimental Language in the
Times of Bits
Claudia Kozak (/en/author/claudia-kozak)

ESPAÑOL
(/ES/2019/MAYO/POES%C3%ADA-
DIGITAL-
LATINOAMERICANA-
LENGUAJE-
EXPERIMENTAL-EN-
TIEMPOS-DE-BITS)

The assertion that a great number of the inhabitants of our planet experience the world through
interactions with digital environments is, at the close of the second decade of the twenty- rst
century, more than obvious. Digital cultures have become our atmosphere.  This is not only
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because we have an ever-growing number of devices that operate on the basis of binary numeric
code programming, not only because it is a quantitatively-evident phenomenon, but because
that same quantity is paired with a way of being digital, an idea of computability that dwells
within each of those devices, and this fact in some way becomes hegemonic in relation to the
experience of the world, and life itself. This is also how it becomes natural and goes by
unnoticed. The algorithmic culture that predicts and directs our mass consumption is nothing
more than one of the most evident facets of the aforementioned naturalization.

But what has happened with literature in that context? Has literature also entered the ow of
digital culture in this naturalized manner? Not so much, and not so little. On one hand, the
digitalization of the written word is of course the order of the day. In fact, a lot of writing
circulates on social networks, although there is also a lot of circulation of images and sounds;
things are written with and read on digital devices, and enormous quantities of text, which were
previously accessed in analog mode, have been digitalized. Nevertheless, digital literature,
strictly speaking –and within what we could consider, as I will argue later, digital poetry—has at
the moment and to a certain extent maintained its circulation in the not so usual channels. I
suspect that this is due to the fact that from the moment it surfaced in the 1950s, when the rst
experiments were carried out with automatic text generators starting with computer
programming, and up to the present, digital literature entails a great experimental impetus. This
changes it into an uncomfortable, unstable object, dif cult to de ne. And this presents at once
an advantage and a disadvantage, a positive as well as a negative. Beginning with the negative,
experimenting with this type of literature distances it from the general public, making it in some
sense inaccessible. This seems to be currently changing, judging from developments in digital
literature that are taking on platforms and social networks such as Twitter, although it is still
not so widespread. On the positive side, we are dealing with a kind of literature that has great
freedom to resist and to ow over transversal and alternative paths, even from within the
digitalization of daily contemporary life that drives more or less hegemonic and standardized
social forms.

Even though digital literature is unstable and dif cult to de ne, I will nonetheless attempt a
de nition so that what I am referring is somewhat clearer. Digital literature is a type of artistic
practice that is in general multimodal, that is to say, one in which diverse languages intervene at
the same time—verbal, visual, and aural, for example—but one which demonstrates the
prominent presence of verbal language, emphasizing the way of saying something and not only
what is said. In addition, that emphasis is not subsidiary to other purposes of discourse (as can
be the case in advertising, where the manner of saying something is very important, but is
secondary to persuasion). It is a practice that, furthermore, dialogues with literary history. In
the case of digital poetry, the dialogue speci cally develops from the type of text that, because
we have been doing so for centuries, we would without dif culty recognize as a poem due to its
tendency to emphasize the experience of the event of the word, the capacity of the word to call
attention to itself, and from there trigger meaning-making processes. 

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Unlike literature associated with the book medium, digital literature is: a) generated in/by/from
electronic digital devices; b) programmed in binary numeric code through its creation and its
use of various software and c) experienced in conjunction with digital interfaces. Texts that are
transferred from print medium to a computer screen or similar devices are not digital literature,
although in the transfer the digitized texts become, to a certain point, digital texts, computable
as discrete units.   

In such a framework, much digital literature is geared toward certain genres, or rather, toward
certain modes of discourse, such as the narrative mode, on the one hand, or the lyric or poetic
on the other, although these tendencies toward modes of discourse can be mixed among
themselves and are not enough to characterize all the aspects of digital literature. Other
questions that must be kept in mind are: a) constructive modalities such as connectivity (on/off
line), automatism (algorithmic generativity/non-generativity), interactivity (yes/no),
directionality (linearity/hyper textuality and hyper mediality); b) authorship (individual,
collaborative production, collaborative reception); c) types of languages that take part (verbal,
visual, aural, movement-image); d) types of supports or interfaces (computer, cell phone, tablet,
screen in public space, etc.).

Against this backdrop, a considerable portion of digital literature, as I described above,

speci cally dialogues with poetry. And in Latin America this has occurred not only in a
remarkable, but also in a pioneering way. First, the texts that were digitally-produced could only
be visualized when printed, so they went from the digital to the analog, but that changed in the
1980s (or even before). As an example, here is a (non-exhaustive) chronology that covers the
initial years (pre-2000) and to keep it brief, only looks at production from Argentina and Brazil,
although digital poetry in various regions of Latin America has unfolded in a continuous and
consistent manner up to the twenty- rst century. Later, I will focus on a couple of more recent
examples and on other regions of Latin America in order to examine the reach of contemporary
Latin American digital poetry.  

Year Title Author Description

Three punch cards, processed by an IBM

Omar Gancedo Card  Interpreter that printed in middle
1966 IBM
(Argentina) space of each card the text that was
previously codi ed in the perforations. 

Ten visual poems in ASCII code printed

Erthos Albino de Souza 
Le tombeau de by a computer after manipulation by a
1972
Mallarmé (Brazil)
software meant for measuring the
temperatures of liquids in pipes.  

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Eduardo Kac Visual kinetic poem projected on an LED

1982 “Não!” screen at the Cândido Mendes Cultural
(Brazil) Center in Rio de Janeiro in 1984.

Daniel Santiago /
Luciano Moreira Visual poem generated by programming
1982 “Soneto só prá vê”
in TAL/II language.
(Brazil)

Augusto de Campos /
Computer-generated animation of the
Olhar Eletrônico 
1984 “Pulsar” visual poem by Augusto de Campos,
(Brazil) previously published in print in 1975. 

João Cohelo
Poem programmed through Advanced
1985 “Universo”
(Brazil) Basic Language.

Computerized visualization with 3D

Fotomontaje/Poema Ladislao Pablo Györi photomontage graphics by Grete Stern 
1986
madi
(Argentina) and synthesizer soundtracking of one
madi poem by Gyula Kosice. 

Augusto de Campos /
Ricardo Araújo / Digital animation in Flash of the visual
1992 “Poema bomba” Laboratório de Sistemas poem of the same name published in
Integraveis (LSI) -Escola print in 1986.
Politécnica USP (Brazil)

Arnaldo Antunes / LSI Digital video-animation of the visual

1993 “Dentro” poem of the same name, published in
(Brazil) print in 1990.

“Rotaciones”
Fabio Doctorovich
1994- Digital visual poems; the last two are
“Abyssmo”
1998 interactive.
(Argentina)
“9MENEM9”

1997- Ana María Uribe  A series of kinetic visual poems with

Anipoemas
2003 sound, using animated GIFs.
(Argentina)

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Interactive multi-media piece with

Mariela Yeregui images, sound, and fragmented texts
1997-
Epithelia (from the artist herself, Joyce, Pizarnik,
1999
(Argentina) Derrida, Plath among others); they form
and disintegrate in real time. 

Gabriela Golder Hypermedia work that combines images

1999-
Postales and texts as verses and poetic prose that
2000
(Argentina) alternate between Spanish and French.

In Search of the Lost Poem

One of the questions that can be posed in relation to poetry in contemporary Western societies
—perhaps since the 1960s—is the loss of a taste for reading it, with the exception of a rather
restricted group. Thus, poetry inhabits the margins of typical cultural consumption, and if we
return to what was said at the beginning of this essay, digital poetry occupies something like the
margin of the margin. However, at the same time, digital poetry shares with digital culture,
among other aspects, the same methods of navigation in the contemporary symbolic universe,
methods of reading that are different from print culture: hypertextual and hypermedial reading,
multiple sensorial understandings not reserved just for the sense of vision, and the speed of
interactions. And perhaps this could enable it to reengage its reading public. Such is the
example of contemporary Twitter-poetry in which poets try out aphoristic writings under the
restriction of a xed quantity of characters, using bots that remix texts from the web—the case
of Poemita (2010-pres.) by the Salvadoran-American Eduardo Navas, is signi cant.

But there are other cases that do not appeal to communication through social networks, but
rather through the already-traditional web page, through which it is also possible to search for
the lost poem.  I will brie y present two examples to prove this hypothesis. 

José Aburto is a Peruvian poet who has been producing digital poetry since the start of the year
2000. His web site http://entalpia.pe/ (http://entalpia.pe/) until recently had as its signi cant
subtitle the following sentence: “poetry has changed state.” Currently, the website’s title is
“Unexpected Poetry”. His digital pieces—he also writes analog poetry—feed into the tradition of
typographic, concrete poetry. In general, these pieces are made with Flash and the poet himself
classi es them as interactive or combinatorial digital poems even though both categories can be
produced at the same time.  Such is the case with “Grandes esferas celestes,” in which a screen
with a white background split horizontally in the middle contains in the upper portion light blue
spheres or bubbles (controlled by the cursor of whoever interacts) that fall toward the lower half
of the screen, from where (in a light blue grid) a verse in two hemistiches rolls out: “chance
grows until it disorders my needs and misplaces cadavers along with the silences.” When one of
the bubbles from the upper part falls onto the poem and touches one of the words, it modi es
the word through a combinatorial algorithm. Thus, “disorder” may transform into “humiliate,”
but also into “moisten,” “encompass,” or “guide”; “my needs” transforms into “your intentions”;
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“misplace” transforms into “conceal,” or “forget”; “along with the silences” transforms into
“under the silences” and so on. The reader-interactive activity resides precisely in the search for
better, more suggestive, poetic options in dialog with the ful llment of the combinatory
algorithm whose code cannot predict who will interact unless the person spends a lot of time
trying different interactive options. 

Eugenio Tisselli, a Mexican poet, net.artist, activist, and programmer has been developing a
proli c activity of digital poetry production for almost twenty years. Thus, midipoet (developed
between 1999 and 2002) is a program of image, text, and sound manipulation in real time that
according to the artist, is a tool for the distortion of current digital imagery and one with which
pieces are produced even today. On Tisselli’s web site, http://www.motorhueso.net/
(http://www.motorhueso.net/), one can access the program itself as well as the poetic creations
produced with this tool, linked to typographic and concrete poetry, for whose visualization it is
necessary to download the program. In other cases, Tisselli’s digital pieces can be executed
directly online and are not necessarily linked to the tradition of visual concrete poetry. This is
the case in PAC Poetry Assisted by Computer (2006), a program developed in Spanish, Catalan,
and English in which, starting with seed verses entered by interactors, lexical substitutions are
generated by taking synonyms from remote dictionaries. In the Spanish and Catalan versions,
the substitutions rst pass through a process of automatic translation that sends the words of
the entered verse to a remote translator, which introduces into the poems a high degree of
uncertainty and opacity linked to the hegemonic modes of circulation of meaning in the
Internet, something that Latin American digital poetry frequently discusses.  The whole process
gives rise to new verses that the interactors can correct as they search for better poetic solutions.
Analogous with the last volume of that famous novel by Proust, Time Regained, which proposes
going in search of lost time, I ask myself, “Are we in the presence now of the regained poem in
the time of bits?”

Claudia Kozak
Universidad de Buenos Aires-CONICET

Translated by Rosario Drucker Davis

Claudia Kozak earned her PhD from the University of Buenos Aires. She is a member
of the Argentinean National Council for Scientific and Technological Research
(CONICET), and is a Professor in the Departments of Literature and Communication
Studies of the University of Buenos Aires. She directs the Master's in Cruces de
Narrativas Culturales (UNTREF), which is part of the international program Erasmus +
Masters Crossways in Cultural Narratives. She sits on the Academic Council of the
PhD in Comparative Theory of Arts (UNTREF) and on the Board of Directors of the
Electronic Literature Organization (https://eliterature.org/ (https://eliterature.org/)). She currently coordinates litElat,
Red de Literatura Electrónica Latinoamericana (http://litelat.net/ (http://litelat.net/)) and Ludión. Exploratorio
latinoamericano de poéticas/políticas tecnológicas (http://www.ludion.org (http://www.ludion.org)). Her books
include: Tecnopoéticas argentinas. Archivo blando de arte y tecnología (2012, reprinted in 2015); Poéticas/políticas

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tecnológicas en Argentina (1910-2010) (2014); Poéticas tecnológicas, transdisciplina y sociedad. Actas del
Seminario Internacional Ludión/Paragraphe (2011); Deslindes. Ensayos sobre la literatura y sus límites en el siglo
XX (2006); and Contra la pared. Sobre graffitis, pintadas y otras intervenciones urbanas (2004).

Rosario Drucker Davis was born in Mexico to an American father and Mexican
mother. At the age of eleven, she moved with her family to Lexington, Kentucky where
her father took a position as professor of anthropology at the University of Kentucky.
Rosario earned a B.A. in linguistics at the University of Kentucky, an M.A. in English as
a Second Language at the University of Arizona, and an M.A. in French literature at
the University of Cincinnati. During the 2007-08 academic year, she was a visiting
teaching assistant at the English Department at the University of Angers, France. She
currently teaches Spanish at the University of Cincinnati Clermont College.

Recommended Reading:
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Digital Lit (/en/tags/digital-lit-0)

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CURRENT ISSUE (/EN/ERROR-PAGES/LATIN-AMERICAN-LITERATURE-TODAY-VOL-2-NO-1)

(/en/2019/may)
Number 10
In our tenth issue, we question the values of literature and journalism in the
post-truth age through the words of Mexican writer Juan Villoro and we explore
new territories of digital literature in a dossier curated by Scott Weintraub. We
also feature memories of the 1968 Tlatelolco Massacre told through graphic
narrative, new perspectives on the translation of Shakespeare into Spanish with
an essay from Braulio Fernández Biggs, and Wayuu literature from the
Venezuelan side of the border than runs through their ancestral lands.

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Table of Contents

EDITOR'S NOTE

FEATURED AUTHOR: JUAN VILLORO

DOSSIER: DIGITAL LITERATURE

ESSAYS

INDIGENOUS LITERATURE

FICTION

POETRY

INTERVIEWS

PREVIEWS

CHRONICLE

ON TRANSLATION

GRAPHIC NARRATIVE

NOTA BENE

BOOK REVIEWS

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La Construcción Poética de lo Sagrado en “Alturas de Macchu Picchu” de Pablo Neruda by

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picchu%E2%80%9D-de-pablo-neruda-roberto)

Función del diálogo en la narrativa de Ernest Hemingway by Alfredo Bryce Echenique

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Mujeres que matan by Alberto Barrera Tyszka

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Cincinnati. Historia personal by Manuel Iris

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Mírame by Antonio Ungar

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When I Walk Through That Door, I Am: An Immigrant Mother’s Quest by Jimmy Santiago
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am-immigrant-mother%E2%80%99s-quest-jimmy-santiago-baca)

El vértigo horizontal by Juan Villoro

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villoro)

La hija de la española by Karina Sainz Borgo

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karina-sainz-borgo)

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Updated 06/25/2019 14:52:20

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