POIESIS <POEMA>ENTRE PIXEL E PROGRAMA</>

You can’t tell a story without a beginning. One beginning for the (hi)story of our “poiesis”– exhibition is another exhibition. “p0es1e. digitale dichtkunst” took place in the East-German town of Annaberg-Buchholz in 1992. On the initiative of André Vallias, we presented an international selection of language art, for the first time, which conceptually works with digital technology: computer-graphic poems by Silvestre Pestana, Fritz Lichtenauer, and André Vallias, digital video poetry by Augusto de Campos, Richard Kostelanetz, and Arnaldo Antunes, code and sound poetry by Friedrich W. Block, holopoems by Eduardo Kac, and interactive diagrams by Jim Rosenberg.

A great part of texts that permeate contemporary life are almost invariably not seen by human eyes. They are texts made for machines to read. Texts that record information, from the minuscule “pictorial element” (PIXEL), which form the mosaics that shine on the screens of monitors and electronic panels, to the complex set of instructions and procedures that allow us to generate and manipulate information (PROGRAM). The exhibition asks itself: what does the poet (“he-that-makes”, from the Greek POIEIN = to make, to produce) do in a context where frontiers between letters and numbers, images and sounds, etceteras and etceteras, are increasingly porous?