Eduardo Kac

As a part of the discussion on how concrete poetry evolved from the sixties into other and more visual and complex figures I came across the brasilian born artist Eduardo Kac (b. 1962), who is most famous for manipulating an albino rabbit (who said Alice in Wonderland) so that it, when exposed to ultravioleet light, looks neongreen. This brings forward a whole discussion about nature versus culture, moral questions an so on. In this context however Eduardo Kac is interesting because of his 'invention' of the term "Holopoetry" which as far as I can see is poems written like holograms, but have a look for yourself at his homepage

A difficult recommendation

For the moment I'm fighting my way through Monika Schmitz-Emans book Die Sprache der modernen Dichtung (1997, München: Fink Verlag) which contains some interesting discussion about modern poetry and especially the part "Positive und negative Schrift. Aspekte einer Poetik konkreter Dichtung" is inspiring. Here she clearly describe how concrete poetry is inspired from Kandinsky (1866-1944) and his distinction between abstract and concrete. Furthermore she describes how the barriers between the genres disappears as a direct result of concrete poetrys way of seeing the work of art just as a thing amongst other things.

Iterature

This time would like to draw attention to the french artist Christoph Bruno who is experimenting with search-engines as a way of creating poetry, my personal favorite is his "epiphanies" (a name taken from Joyce) where you enter a word and the machine generates haiku like poems from fragments of text found on the net. The homepage is called Iterature.com

Speaking of UBU

Speaking or writing about Ubu.com I found a lecture on Modern Poets dealing with poetry and technology, given partly by Ubuweb's founder Kenneth Goldsmith at the Museum of Modern Art. It can be podcasted from the homepage under "Think modern" or by inserting this link into podcasts http://www.moma.org/visit_moma/podcasts/feed_thinkmodern.xml - In any case I want to recommend the lectures on MoMAs homepage.

The main link to concrete, digital and avantgarde literature überhaupt

The first link to be mentioned is also without a doubt the most important: UBUWEB

Welcome

Since an important part of the Bardinale 2007 is Concrete and Digital Poetry I will try to collect ressources on the subjects. That being books of relevance or links of interest.