From Oral Poetry to Tridimensional Poetry

Memory defines human existence both individually and collectively: it is necessary for the evolution of the person and society. The loss of memory leads to the physical and intellectual death of identity. In order to avoid and exorcise existential oblivion, mankind has developed systems to pass on memory and preserve it. One of the oldest of these is poetry that, thanks to its rhythm and rhyme, makes the precise memorizing of a text easier. Thus it effectively communicates the deeds of heroes as well as the prayers, ideals and sentiments that characterize human beings and their culture. Society, thanks also to the heritage of knowledge that has been passed down, continues to evolve and change rapidly: the new technologies transform art, modifying the codes of language and above all the inclusion and typology of the data that constitutes the collective memory. In the era of motion pictures poetry loses some of its evocative effect and its function for transmission. The visual memory is predominant because the brain assimilates information without making the effort of concentrating and decoding input, for example from the sound to the word or from the sign to the word. Instead the image is simply there: one only has to look at it, often without even paying attention to it. The poets updated their heritage and their linguistic techniques in order for the poem not to fall into oblivion. Even in ancient Greece poetry already wove images into the different levels of narrative and memory, by using calligrams for example. As regards experimentation with sound phono-symbols. Video poetry was not just a trendy invention, on the contrary it opened up a whole new area of experimentation. The poem has always progressed in human history, maintaining and adapting the discoveries it made so that the physical, material, linguistic and technological areas that mankind had conquered became spaces for a new representation and analysis of poetry. Modern society also changes language, by mixing sounds and breaking down the meaning of words. It empties language of content and makes poetry inane, thus imposing another transformation upon poetry. In order to maintain its linguistic strength today poetry establishes a dialogue with the real or virtual space and with objects, becoming the theme and the epicentre of many video-installations.