Originally published in hyphen magazine, N. 12, 1996, pp. 9-13.

Kurt Heintz

In the late 80s, I was dispatched by Letter eX to cover a joint readingby Palestinian and Jewish writers at the University of Illinois. The programwas held in a gallery filled with art from Palestine: drawings by childrencaught in the intifada, sketches and paintings by Israeli and Palestinianartists and Arabic calligraphic art.

That last element harkened to a moment I had at the Alhambra in Granada,Spain, and really triggered my imagination. Classic Islamic culture refrainsfrom direct representation in art, so the creative spark has to find otherreleases -- designs, decorations, abstractions, patterns, textures -- whichravish, delight, and enrapture the eye in lieu of more earthly and literalpleasures. A visit to the Taj Mahal in India or to any other great mosquewill verify this. This calligraphy, the high art of presenting the poetryof the Qur'an, is a divine and reverent mediation.

Since then I've wondered whether there is such an experience in thesecular west. After all, what do we do with our language? We spit it outwith aggression and verve on stage. We publish it in plain books and readit in polite gatherings. We spike pop music with it. Occasionally, as inAvital Ronell's "The Telephone Book," the nature of the textis itself a text, an alternate channel to the words themselves, but evenRonell's typographic channeling is less an aesthetic expression than acritique of communication. It aspires to artistic ends, and touches them,but it does not suggest such ends are the central purposes of the book.

Enter telematics, hypermedia, and holopoetry.

Telematics are the constellation of arts which use networks and long-distancesystems as the media for the artist's message. Telematic art originatesin one place on Earth but is perceived and interpreted by the viewer ina different place entirely. Hypertext, such as is found on the web, canbe considered a telematic form if it's part of a long-distance connectionfrom author to reader. Holopoetry is as it sounds, poetry composed in holograms.Artists in these forms often have a hacker buried deep inside them whois pushing artistic buttons in their human host's consciousness. They trythings which may seem kluged, oblique or sublime, but they gravitate towardfrontiers driven by the novelty in the collision of art and technology.

When I encountered Eduardo Kac on the Internet, my search begun at theAlhambra finally took a turn. Kac is an articulate, soft spoken media artist,born and raised in Brazil, living in Kentucky and now of some renown inthe United States and abroad. Kac's words do not sit still on a page. Theyhave dimensions an motions of their own. They play specifically for thereader at the reader's request. Rather than tessellate into patterns instone, they move and evolve with theatrical effect in time and space.

To be sure, we've already been partly exposed to this process. Televisionexploits such creative titling to sell us air travel, credit services orcola. There's an interesting comparison to be made between the presentround of commercial for Nexxus hair care products and the experimentalpoetry videos of Richard Kostelanetz. In the commercials, descriptive andinviting language flows through a woman's hair in ways with amplify andcomment on the words themselves; letters regroup into phrases and blendinto a prescription of beauty. In Kostelanetz' videos, letter may simplywink on or off, or change one at a time to compose new words or nonsense,as though someone were trying different permutations to solve a crossword,revealing coded relationships.

The credit of the Beats and their contemporaries, who coined a concretepoetry by typing poems in the shapes of their subjects, both textual endeavorshave a prior graphical example in the West. However, commercial semioticshave outpaced fine art because the capital incentive drove the processharder. The text in the Nexxus ad carries subtle connotation by its curvymovement, its typeface and even its varying degrees of soft focus. Thetext invites the viewer to contemplate the relationship between its actionand its printed meaning. In contrast, the typical television viewer wouldbe unimpressed by Kostelanetz' video works, which use flat typefaces andvery simple rules of composition. In this comparison it's important tokeep the commercial's agenda in mind, to remember that the play of theadvertiser's words happens on the advertiser's timetable, not the reader's,and the message is still beholden to a product, not itself. The Nexxusad is a creative commercial, but it's not art.

Of course, the web is a playground for such graphical adventures, andEduardo Kac is very much at home there. (To see how at home he is, jumpto http://ekac.org.) Kac has also workedin a mix of other telematic and new media art forms. He is a video-conferencingveteran of some years, has used robotic cameras as part of his installations,and has toyed with subliminal text in e-paintings. While still a youngartist in Brazil, he relished tampering with the very commercial semioticsmentioned above through his graffiti and billboard installations.

I asked Kac to visualize his personal poetic cosmos on the web. "Whenyou open it you're looking at a black 3-D space at a particular point,"he says. "As a shape crosses the boundary of the screen, it clipsto reveal the volume inside." The words are cast as three-dimensionalfigures in this virtual space. One may approach them from any angle, maneuveringat will around the letter forms and other objects in this space. "Youhave to decide whether to move closer or farther to determine what yousee. Eventually you may zoom right by it, and go through long distancesof empty space until you see small bits of light which are themselves newwords," Kac says. The distance encourages a kind of psychologicaljourney for the viewer who will see little or nothing unless they activelymove within the virtual space. The language must be pursued and that pursuitdepends on the reader's state of being.

In the sense that perspective in this synthetic realm is governed bythe viewer, encounters between the reader and the language are not structuredin the linear sense which you are enjoying here on the printed page. Theencounter with the words and their form is sculptural, architectural, nearlyphysical. Says Kac, "The words are almost like a solar system in thatsense. You're moving around and you may never come to them in the sameangle. As much as I've tried I've never managed to read the same text twice."

Now, the concern for how a word looks is not the strict domain of videoor hypermedia producers. Performance poets have been occupied with thehow of words since they started. As it turns out, Kac's own poetic rootsextend to performed poetry in Brazil. "In the very beginning, I readpoetry publicly, but that was in the late 70s. I moved away from that traditionalrecital mode of poetry because the work I did in the 80s involved a lotof performance." Kac did not want a static reading of static text.His work "was written to be performed. It was previsualized to bein a public square in Rio or Saõ Paulo, with the rhythms, the punchlines, the free-flow of a public presentation."

Toward the end of this performance period in 1982, Kac began experimentingwith holography as the medium for his poetry. Holography afforded him achance to "print" his poetry, so to speak, while retaining thegraphic and dimensional qualities he enjoyed as a visual artist. It alsoadded viewer involvement to the text. "Writing is a process with involvesthe freezing of your thoughts, culminating in making marks on a page,"he says. "Words that are fixed -- even if you're using collage, creativetypography, whatever -- always ended up on the page. There is somethingto be said about the compositional rigidity that even the most radicalpoetry could not overcome." In other words, it does not matter whatone writes; the printed page can only portray text in specific ways whichother media can exceed. "I wanted to do something that could be developedover the years which others could work, too. Perhaps we [poets] would haveto wait for holography to become cheaper to explore, but there was no reasonwhy others couldn't produce holopoems."

The interaction with a hologram is a direct precedent and, for Kac,a direct model for the VRML (virtual reality modeling language) universe."The text doesn't sit there in fixed relationships. The relationshipsare subject to violent transformations and oscillations which are dependenton the viewer, the turbulent environment," he says. So there is nonecessary linear sequence for the words.

"Holography is not scriptable. What holography gives you is a 3-Dspace. Since the beginning I developed a discontinuous syntax. Discontinuityis not a metaphor," Kac says. You'll see different things in the holopoemwith regard to where you physically stand and, as you move about, figureswill change. As in Kostelanetz, the appearance or disappearance of a singleletter can change the meaning entirely.

Kac continues, "Even when you're looking at a holopoem in serialtime, this time is reversible. It's removed from the flow of time, thesequentiality of syntax. You're not really dealing with a linear, harmonicsyntax structure. You can go from left to right, but also from right toleft and the text is still open to signifying in both directions. Whatkind of time is this? It's definitely not linear time as we know it. It'ssuspended. This is only possible in holography."

The comparison above between the high-production commercial and fringeart-poetry films is not lost on Kac. I asked him for his comments on thatNexxus ad. "As TV became more sophisticated so did the text,"he says. "What's impoverishing about this is that all these new potentialsare being used to commodify the world, to sell. We need to overcome thisbias. This is a form for our time. There's no reason why poets shouldn'tembrace it." But commercialism has marked television as a dirty mediumfor writers. "In the same sense that television tries to get us tolook through the tube at the happy couples on the beach and see that thewar scene is clear, TV wants us not to look at the tube to perceive themedium, to see the degree of manipulation in place," Kac says.

But why are most writers never concerned with such representations oftext? According to Kac, writers are similarly caught up in a focus on thewords coming through the page rather than appreciation of the page itself."Writers are alienated from their environment. This idea that theword [on the page] is pure somehow is a fallacy. We're going to collectivelyreveal that writing has always been circumscribed by the textual environment."New writers will begin to address both aspects of publishing, what is saidand how it will look, Kac explains. This echoes a current voice in thepoetry film movement, that of Canadian scholar William Wees who advocatesreading the poetry film as "image-text"; the image is elevatedand merged with the text into a common unit since the perception of thetext cannot be separated from the text itself, a process as true for booksas it is for film.

The near future promises some real change as Kac describes. The "we"to whom Kac refers above is a gathering of hypermedia artists who intendto change how the critical elite regard poetic text. Kac is a guest editorfor a new media poetry issue of Visible Language which will address hypermediapoetry in theoretical terms and will be published as a hypermedia documentso examples can be accurately cited. "It's a small publication bythe Rhode Island School of Design," he says. "My ideas are finallyembodied on paper, and I've been working on it for two or three years."Kac's story will discuss "not so much new ways of distributing verse-basedpoetry but documentation of innovative poetry which cannot exist by anyother means than [being] digital, electronic or photonic... poetry thatcannot be presented in paper. The media that the poets are working withare very diverse: hypertext, holography, virtual environments, and videopoetry based in text." The issue includes a monograph by Dutch theoristEric Vos who examines all the pieces to analyze the common threads andincludes a "webliography" so readers can link to other on-lineexamples.

The page as we know it may no longer sit still, be silent or, for thatmatter, be flat.

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