alire

Publisher
Location: 
Paris
France
FR
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Short decription: 

Philippe Bootz met the poet Tibor Papp in 1988; from this meeting came the idea to create an electronic review on floppy disks, and to group together authors working on electronic text. The L.A.I.R.E. collective (Lecture Art Innovation Recherche Ecriture) was created in October, 1988. It included, besides Philippe Bootz and Tibor Papp, Claude Maillard, Frédéric Develay and Jean-Marie Dutey, poets who were experimenting with the digital medium.

Its first action was the effective realization of the alire review. The very first issue (0.1) was created for the inauguration of the review in the Pompidou Center in 1989. This number is an object which contains programmed poems on diskettes, printed works on paper and a work of sound poetry on a video cassette. It was with the n°1 issue (March 1989) that the specificity of the review became clearer: diskettes came with a notebook which contained only theoretical thoughts (there was no more video cassette nor printed work). This was the first clear assertion in France that digital literature existed and that its only medium was the computer.

The review was identified in 1990 as the oldest review in the world which effectively diffused the programs of the works. It published the animated poetry created by the authors of L.A.I.R.E until 1992, then it opened up, from alire6, to the works of digital literature of all genres created by French authors. It published foreign authors from alire8 (1994). It was the only review on digital poetry until 1996. In the 90s, Alire is particularly representative of the diverse approaches in digital poetry before the Web.

In the 2000s, the adventure of Alire coincided with that of a collective, Transitoire Observable. As the years went by, the authors of alire acquired the conviction that programming was at the center of digital literature and that it was essential to look more closely at the new forms, specifically programmed ones, which it could produce. Following Alexandre Gherban’s initiative, a digital and plastic poet, the Transitoire Observable collective was created, based on the assertion that all the components of the device (screen, machine, program) were interdependent in the work. The founding act was a manifesto cosigned in February 2003 by Alexandre Gherban, Philippe Bootz and Tibor Papp.[13] This collective opposed itself to videopoetry, which considers programming as a mere tool used for the production of a fixed multimedia object, totally observable and considered as the work. It also differentiates itself from software art, which asserts that the code of the program is the work. For the actors of the Transitoire Observable collective, the multimedia event accessible to the reading, the only legible part of the work, the observable transitory, is only a passing and observable event of an active programmed process, its forms being produced by deeper programmed forms, sometimes even

In 2004, the 12th issue of Alire was dedicated to the Observatoire collective (dissolved in 2007). The latest volume (N°14) of Alire was published in 2010, but it was only intended for libraries and institutions, and not for the general public. According to the Alire publisher, Philippe Bootz, the review might continue, but not in a CD-ROM format.

(Source: Serge Bouchardon, "Digital Literature in France")

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