PO-EX.net: Arquivo Digital da Literatura Experimental Portuguesa

The aim of PO.EX'70-80, as a research project, is to provide continuity to the first research project “Portuguese Experimental Poetry - a CD-ROM of Dossiers and Catalogs” (FCT 2005-2008, Ref. POCI/ELT/57686/2004), which studied Portuguese literary experimentalism of the 1960s and created a digital archive with the most relevant magazines, catalogs and publications of that group of poets (http://www.po-ex.net/evaluation). Requests by several agents and recommendations from our consultants have led us to identify the need to extend the reproduction of Portuguese Experimental Poetry into the 1970s and 1980s. This new timeline will allow us to develop the studies and the collections already begun, now including visual and sound poetry, video-poetry, happenings, and cybernetic literature – all of which can be seen as extensions and renovations of literary experimentalism of the previously analyzed period.

Within this framework, we will consider a connection between concrete poetics and digital poetics. The present project, characterized by its openness and free access to resources, will therefore continue the task of preserving a literary legacy which may be at peril.

We will follow three main courses of action. Each of them enfolds in a series of concrete tasks.

1) Collecting and Theoretical Framing – The history of the relationships between literature and other arts (design, painting, sculpture, performance) will allow us to better understand the experimentalist production of the 1970s and 1980s. Starting from a theoretic and critical awareness of the processes of mediation effected by the intervention of information technologies, it is our aim to propose a taxonomy that allows us to organize, understand and classify the conceptual relationships displayed in the collected texts.

2) Digitalization, Translation and Re-creation – The process of digitizing (audio and visual capture) the Portuguese experimental literature (visual and sound poetry and video-poetry) will be framed by a set of theoretical texts. Therefore we propose the translation of articles and manifestos that can help the public to understand the presented works. However, this digitizing process does not apply to some of the texts we will work with – texts that are dynamic, interactive and/or generative. Therefore, it is necessary to use processes of software emulation, accompanying them with the recovery and historical study of programming software (cybernetic literature) which is unavailable at the moment. Apart from this emulation, which corresponds to a literal archive, we will also invest in processes of digital transformation and re-creation of some of these works, with the use of multimedia and interactivity.

3) Platform and Dissemination – The creation of a digital platform for the dissemination of experimental literature will have to be sufficiently open, relational and comprehensive. The contents will be presented according to previously defined taxonomies and ontologies. The presentation of magazines, catalogs, theoretical texts and manifestos can also be complemented by collections of artists ́books, personal web-pages, biographies, bibliographies and interviews, thus connecting theory with current forms of literary creation.

Lastly, it should be stressed that we aim to start, within the scope of this project, a Laboratory of Digital Writing, coordinated and supervised by team members. In this Laboratory we expect to offer adequate technical conditions for the development of artistic residences of poets and writers with an interest in multimedia and hypermedia digital platforms. The potential of programming languages as specific technologies for literary writing could be explored on a collaborative basis. In this way, we hope to foster the development of internal networks of production and digital literary creativity, documenting and later extending the process and its results, namely by means of an on-line publication platform.