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New experiences
emerge in the digital world. New genres appear as different media and
disciplines mix in the electronic arena. We are faced with new ways
of looking, reading and writing and therefore, of interpretation and
understanding. But where are these new forms coming from? How are they
evolving? This is where my research began. Recognising elements in the
digital medium, which were used in Visual/Sound Poetics, as well as
in the Visual Arts, Sound Art and Performance, awoke my curiosity to
find out more about the history and conceptual ideas behind these forms;
particularly the arts engaged in the exploration of visuality, orality
and the semantic/"non semantic" meaning of language.
When I started this investigation the key element that interested me,
was to examine the area of the in-between in the visual, the phonetic
and the semantic area of language and to stretch its possibilities using
the digital medium. Kristeva in Revolution in Poetic Language (1984)
discusses how avant-garde poetry was able to incorporate both the visual
and the linguistic systems of representations. She maintains that there
is an area where the semiotic and the symbolic (Kristeva's terms for
the pre-linguistic and the linguistic) mix in a form of symbiosis in
which they still keep their own identity. The fascination with this
three-dimensional state of consciousness, where the elements of the
linguistic in an aural and visual form escaped their linguistic association
and yet remained linguistic, prompted me to examine this area further
by putting forward the following research question: How can communicative
systems be developed with the convergence of ‘Image-Text, Semantic-Text,
and Phonetic-Text’, using new technologies?
The title of this research: from Visual Poetry to Digital Art: Image-Sound-Text,
convergent media and the development of new media languages, indicates
a lineage, a movement, a shifting from something into something else.
Transferring the main concepts of Visual Poetry into the Digital Medium
is therefore the action that moves and defines this investigation.
Maria Mencia-2003
(more in thesis)
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