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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.

 

 




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