Leitura
de nós: ciberespaço e literatura
by Alckmar Luiz
dos Santos
Itaú
Cultural, Sao Paulo, 2003
148 pp., illus. with CD-ROM. Paper, N/A
ISBN: 85-85291-39-7.
Reviewed
by Stefaan Van Ryssen
Hogeschool
Gent
Jan Delvinlaan 115, 9000 Gent, Belgium
stefaan.vanryssen@hogent.be
Itaú, one of the leading banks
of Brasil, has set up a threefold program
of support for contemporary arts. "Rumos"
supports artists through training and
formation, production support for upcoming
talent and new forms of expression and
diffusion. Over the past years Rumos has
received 7007 requests by both individual
artists and groups, and these by themselves
are already a wide and diverse database
documenting the dynamic Brasilian art
scene. Rumos Itaú Cultural Transmídia
is a specific subprogramme targeting the
technological, electronic and digital
arts who are by definition at a continuously
moving frontier. The present book is the
third in a series of catalogue-like publications
about the many facets of this programme.
It was commissioned by a group of critics,
academics, executives from Itaú
Cultural and even a DJ. Its aim is to
understand the modes of poetical
creation using computers and networks
and based on hypertextual structures,
bringing poetry and other apparently literary
creations to the Internet (my translation,
p. 7).
Drawing heavily on the French tradition
(Barthes, Baudrillard, Balpe, Kristeva,
Lévy and Virilio, to name but a
few), professor Alckmar Luiz dos Santos
starts from major and minor premises to
come to primary and secondary conclusions.
P. Major involves the fragmentation and
multiplicity of texts, issues of identity
and subjectivity in cyberspace, knowledge
of/at/about networks and a new electronic
aesthetics. P. Minor is about the
possible spaces of writing, the relationship
between author and reader and interferences
between medium and content. Obviously,
themes that have been developed by authors
from the Anglo-Saxon as well as from the
Continental traditions are revisited and
brought together. And the same goes for
the Conclusions. A. Luiz dos Santos basically
summarizes current ideas about novelty
and repetition, border crossings, excess
and excessivity and the dichotomies of
space and time, place, and moment.
The examples and images in the book are
taken from both international and Brasilian
literature, and the CD-ROMs has a hypertext-like
set of poems, illustrating the principle
of navigation through cyberspace. Thus,
this book is aiming practically only at
a Portuguese and Brasilian readership.