aisyalam

In spite of the fact that a few cases of bird flu have been reported nearby – yet another thing to worry about beyond the threat of dengue – I had another great day up on campus. I’ve nearly finished refining next Monday’s lecture, and found a few more sites to discuss/introduce in next Wednesday’s lecture (both to be posted later). Though I struggled for a couple of hours with the plotting and scripting, I also finished the Flash piece I was working on yesterday, and finished mapping the image and completed linking the Technopoetry Rising interface too. Beyond that, I was lucky to get the attention of a couple of Faculty (FCM) members, one of whom (Hillmy) was (unfortunately) leaving his job as of this afternoon, who offered generous feedback on the designs I have been preparing. I’m always in need of input in the process of creating output, especially since being objective about my own work is nigh impossible. Hillmy offered some challenges to my approach to using an image map as interface, which I will keep in mind as the project continues, but most interesting were Wong’s views on my NJIT Home Page, which she seemed to have trouble with not because it was poorly designed but because it didn’t seem—in her point of view—to reflect my personality. The term she used to describe it was “regal” (the meaning of which we briefly discussed), and I took this as a compliment, as I was after an elegant presentation. Nonetheless, her general reading of it, or observation, was one I had not at all anticipated! I have always felt that you could get a sense of someone by the look of their home page, so I found her assessment most intriguing. I wouldn’t say that it spun me out into some sort of personality crisis, but it did give me food for consideration, to say the least. For sure, I was conscious of projecting a more professional, clearer sense of design, which I do feel is indicative of personal growth and “where I’m at” at this point. My effort is to a certain degree a concession to my colleagues in the MSPTC program at NJIT, who have much more conventional sensibilities. At the same time I pointed out that the design also (regally or not) indicates my appreciation of Islamic art (again, “where I’m at”). In my defense, I pointed out that most of the materials presented (besides the crazy hypertext of my ’03 research sojourn to São Paulo, linked at the top of the page) are indicative of a scholar at work: legitimate research projects, a litany of online publications, course syllabi, and so on. Of course I also had to pull out Whitman’s “very well I contain multitudes” as well. Well, this is the first time in a decade that I’ve made what could be even remotely considered a rational home page, so I guess I shouldn’t be surprised to hear that it didn’t match the expectations of a friend and new associate. On the other hand, Wong did very much like the cd-rom/e-book interface (with its Brazilian mosaic, rays-of-sun façade), which she felt did match up with who I am. Further, she also really liked some of the media works I showed to her. Anyhow, I’ll be thinking about this issue of personality and electronic projection for awhile I can tell.

After all of these lively, stimulating, gratifying activities, which transpired between the hours of 10 a.m.-5:30 p.m., I received a most amazing gift and reward that came in the form of a brand new arriving by international express from Portugal. The book, O Caminho do Leve (The Way to Lightness), is an exhibition catalog for a retrospective of the work of artist and poet E.M. de Melo e Castro, which is now up and running until April 30 at the Museu Serralves (Museu de Art Contemporânea) in Porto. It is an exquisite “coffee table” sized book, full of color plates, which illuminates the trajectory of Melo e Castro’s art from his “Poemas Fílmicos” (1958) all the way to his 2005 “Videopoesia,” “Infopoemas,” and “Poesia Sonora Interactiva.” Along the way, various performances, fractal works, Concrete poems, “Poemas Cinéticos,” and many examples of other work are shown. This is a landmark volume in the study of contemporary expression; I could not overstate its value and magnificence. I’m not sure how high a profile Melo e Castro has on a global level, and who knows how widely this tome will be circulated, but hopefully it will turn many people on to his prolific output. During the past four decades, Melo e Castro has worked with language, text, film, book, object, performance, sculpture, photography, video and sound: a true multimedia artist. As far as I know he was the first ever video poet (“Roda Lume,” 1968), and a real pioneer in many ways (including use of computers to present poetry). Here’s a sentence that encapsulates his work in a general sense, from the Foreword by João Fernandes: “Many of his works decompose and recompose the text into its sentences and words-the words deemed objects in their groupings of phonemes or graphemes that sometimes make significant associations beyond the group of conventions and rules of writing and grammar of a natural language.” I first saw his work in a 1996 special issue (on New Media Poetry) of the journal Visible Language, edited by Eduardo Kac. Since then, I’ve acquired some of his books, studied his ideas (like the “Poetics of the Pixel”) and have written about it in the Prehistoric Digital Poetry book and in the journal Sirena. It is really an honor to have an essay (“A literature torna-se cinética: Sobre os videopoemas de Melo e Castro” / “Literature Becoming Kinetic: E.M. Melo e Castro’s Videopoetry” included in O Caminho do Leve; it is easily the most beautiful book my work has ever appeared in. Other critical essays were contributed by Kac, Alberto Costa e Silva, Antonio Preto, Jorge Luiz Antonio, and Maria Virgília Frota Guariglia, but the really important and incredible material is, of course, the abundance of Melo e Castro’s work that is collected and offered between the pages. To get a copy, write to edicoes@serralves.pt (http://www.serralves.pt).

Back at it again on the morrow. Let’s hope the birds of the world don’t kill us all.