Since 1986, besides videopoetry, E. M. de Melo e Castro worked on a series of experiments with other computer media (suportes informáticos), coined by the author as “infopoesia” [infopoetry], in which he used image editor software. Once more – and this is a fact the analysis by Jorge Luiz Antonio (2001) does not highlight – the prevailing choice of image editors at the expense of word processors reveals the visual affiliation of Castrian poetics. The infopoems’ visual animations acknowledge pixel as the primary unit of meaning, in the perspective of an infopoetic language. Some of the resulting images were published in Finitos Mais Finitos: Ficção/Ficções [Finite Plus Finite: Fiction/Fictions] (1996) and Algorritmos: Infopoemas [Algorythms: Infopoems] (1998), whose initial essay develops “a pixel poetics” and explains the amalgams created in the title. The quest for transgression, which is underlined by the book’s title (1998), is followed by the quest for formal synthesis:
(…) a fixação em papel ou noutro suporte (…) dessas imagens virtuais que são energia luminosa, são apenas atualizações instantâneas de um momento da sua existência. São mesmo uma violência exercida pelo operador contra a natureza transformável e instável dos infopoemas, cuja razão será uma constante transformação, até atingirem o nível da síntese última de um único PIXEL branco numa tela branca. Branco sendo a síntese de todas as cores. LUZ. (Melo e Castro 1998: 13)
[(…) the fixation on paper or other media (…) of those virtual images, which are luminous energy, are merely instantaneous updates from a moment of their existence. They are even a violent act performed by the operator against the infopoems’ transformable and unstable nature, whose reckoning will be a steady transformation until they reach the ultimate synthesis level of a single white PIXEL on a white screen. White is the synthesis of all colors. LIGHT.] (Seiça trans.)
From the Brazilian working phase, another set of chromatic infopoems is available here, in which E. M. de Melo e Castro further explores the creative potential of word as image and image as word, in a series of transformations operated with software.
Read more about this work at:
PO-EX.net: http://po-ex.net/taxonomia/materialidades/planograficas/e-m-de-melo-e-castro-algorritmos
ELMCIP: http://elmcip.net/node/8453