Since the 1960s I have established myself in the middle ground
between literature, visual art, and film, practically and theoretically;
what has been especially exciting has been investigating the origin and
history of these border zones. Thus, a certain knowledge has become
increasingly reinforced, which at the outset I would like to formulate as a
thesis. [1]
If one considers the development of the levels of media, then it's
striking that, around the turn of the century, the inroads made by the
technical media (like records, photography, and film) radically changed
[2]
the self-understanding of the artwork and of the artist and that today with
the penetration of the electronic media of communications systems this
self-understanding has just as strongly changed as we approach another turn
of the century.
What this means is that even with the influence of the technical
media from the last turn of the century, artworks still came into being-no
matter how far they may have distanced themselves from tradition and sealed
themselves off from received aesthetic laws-and there were artists as well
who still were artists, even when they would rather have seen themselves in
the role of producers and engineers removed from a belief in inspiration
handed down from on high.
In contrast to these, there now stands a vision that Florian Rötzer
has formulated in a small contribution, "För eine Äesthetik der
elektronischen und digitalen Medien" (For an Aesthetics of the Electronic
and Digital Media) (1991). "Artworks of the media networks must, I imagine,
be a kind of viruses that release themselves from their author and set
loose unforeseeable effects: an art without artist and without artwork."
[3]
This question fulfills what Flaubert already prophetically foretold when he
wrote, "The art of tomorrow will be impersonal and scientific." In 1924
Karel Teige, a Czech avant-garde artist, cited this sentence of Flaubert's,
in the form of a question: "Will there still be art?" [4]
Once this vision is understood as having become a reality, two
clear lines of development emerge.
One line shows the development from original artwork through the
loss of the original's aura to reproducible, copiable object; and from
there from materially graspable to immaterially thinkable product, from
closed artwork to an offer of open communications.
The other line shows the artist working out of himself, equipped
with few technical means, who discovers and completes his work personally
and without foreign materials; through the organizer, who with all
imaginable means constructs objects; to the maker of active and interactive
communications forms, from Happenings to the use of digitalized electronic
communications systems.
In both cases, artist and artwork seemingly disappear almost
entirely. Their function and existence are hardly any longer recognizable.
Into their place steps the activated recipient, in whose head the "artwork"
first arises by virtue of his power of imagination. [5]
In this historical process of development, there is a whole series
of thoroughgoing changes that affect the so-called purity of the genres (as
in literature and the fine arts), their media (the book and the canvas),
which push forward the mixing and breaking up. The general question is
broached of what art can any longer be when the electronic media seem to
push aside the print and technical media.
In the past we find increasingly almost prophetic prognoses of this
development, especially in literature and its medium, the book.6 In his 1912
work Ecce Poeta, in the chapter "Dichtkunst ist Atavismus" (Literature is
Atavisism), Egon Friedell says:
there is no consensus that literature from now on and for always will
remain the most important spiritual means of expression. . . . It is not at
all decided that in a hundred years a kind of publicity effectiveness won't
exist, that urgency, many-sidedness, and agility will not be just as
important for writing as were the book and the newspaper for the platform
speaker and wandering preacher. To this can also be added a much more
important inner reason. We have said it before: Phantasy is a kind of
atavism. Since literature, however, is mostly still a function of fantasy,
so must literary art gradually disintegrate . . . . But as culture grows,
fantasy recedes and with it literary art. In the Iliad there is already
less fanstasy than in the Thousand and One Nights. It is possible that
literary art in time will disappear altogether. This doesn't mean, however,
that the writer will disappear. On the contrary: when literary art stops,
there will be more poets and greater ones. . . . Moreover, there is also no
agreement that necessary "works" belong to the process of writing poetry .
. . . [7]
Thus, in 1924 Walter Benjamin clealy states that "the book in its received
form faces its end." [8]
In 1931, Bertolt Brecht said, "But from the beginning they take
from us the apparatus we need for our production, because this way of
producing will always be further detached from what preceded it; we will be
forced to speak through increasingly denser media. . . . The old forms of
transmission are changed by the newly emerging ones; the old don't conquer
the new . . . The technification of literary production is no longer to be
undone." [9]
Then, in 1944 Raymond Queneau noted, "One is ill-served if one
believes in the superiority of the book and rejects that connection with
other means of expression that are being delivered by modern technology
(movies, radios, television). One should not imagine that nothing
acceptable is to be found outside the book." [10]
Finally, in 1963 Helmut Heissenbüttel writes, "Where this direction
points can today hardly be more clearly stated. One can surmise a move
towards the development of a new stage of human expression. In this stage a
new canon of new art types will possibly be determined. For now, except for
the direction, only the greater or lesser degree of detail of the criteria
remains to be established." [11]
Also, El Lissitzky [12] places the previous form of the book in
question, given, it is true, that the new work in the book's interior
doesn't yet suffice for its traditional form to be entirely burst asunder,
but still one must learn to see the tendency.
This tendency-the similarly anticipated overall
development-outlines an answer to Lissitzky's claim: "the endlessness of
books must be overcome." He does this in "Topography of Typography,"
beginning with the reference to a "new optics" and ending with the
"electro-library" or, as we would now say, the electronic database as part
of a complicated network.
With the promotion of the new book goes that of the new writer-in
the double sense of the word, an author ("Schriftsteller") who lays aside
inkpot and goose quill and follows other laws of form. Lissitzky refers to
the notorious reciprocal conditions of content and form when he says, in
"Typographical Facts," "You can see how right where new areas of
intellectual and language creations open themselves up organically, new
typographical forms arise-modern advertisements and modern poetry," and he
gives as examples American magazines of dadaist publications.
A departure point for Lissitzky's media critique and the new task
for writers is his well-known formulation of the domination of the visual,
the symbiosis of literature and visual art, which, as he says, "visual
poetry" will be.
Exactly this point is found as well in the above-mentioned Karel
Teige. In 1923 in his manifesto "Painting and Poetry, " he writes, "We
stand before a logical conclusion: a fusion of modern painting with modern
poetry. Art is one thing, that is, poetry. You see PICTURE POEMS, which are
a solution of the problem, which painting and poetry together are. It seems
that sooner or later this fusion calls forth perhaps a gradual liquidation
of the traditional painterly and poetic methods . . . . The new art stops
being art; new areas are born, and poetry expands its borders. . . ." [13]
When Teige says, "One reads the poem like a modern picture-the modern
picture one reads like a poem," this shows a tradition recognizable already
in an early book title, Fritz Gansberg's Das kann ich auch: Eine Anleitung
zum Bilderschreiben und Fibeldichten (I Can Do That Too: A Guide to Picture
Writing and Primer Poetry; Leipzig, 1913).
The search for a poetic language that "sooner or later would
involve all the senses together"-thus Rimbaud in 1873
[14]-must be considered
against the background of an expansion of literary genre borders, the
mixture of genres, as well as of the language skepticism and language
crisis that arose around the turn of the century, whose existence can be
seen in the drawings of the dadaists, perhaps in Hugo Ball's journal entry
on March 5, 1917: "The decision of poetry . . . to dismiss language is
imminent." [15]
An important moment that furthered this development was
visualization, the meaning of seeing, to be found in programmatic writings
like August Endell's 1905 "Vom Sehen" (On Seeing), or in Heinrich Wölfflin,
whose 1908 essay says, "Visible things signify to the living generation
more than to the past. One values the pleasures of sight the more, and what
is mediated by the eye has an augmented worth as over against the merely
mental." [16]
The influence of the technical media, above all, of film, is
certainly responsible for this. Symptomatically, we read in the September
1916 issue of Lichtbild-Bühne, "I believe it is through the cinema that we
have first learned to see. The joy at seeing is awakened. We no longer want
to assemble sober letters into words which by spelling and fixing of
meaning are a mental exertion, but lightly and fleetingly to enjoy the
reading of images." [17]
The reaction to this is well-known. Various forms of the book as
object will be tried out, to offer a more meaningful and more pleasing text
to the eyes. Cobden-Sanderson's important treatment of the subject, The
Ideal Book, 18
is published as early as October, 1900. Still, the question
of form, which must be seen above all also in connection with the principle
of the "total art work," is only an outer sign for a far-reaching mistrust
of the book medium. [19]
In this briefly sketched overview, the forerunners of a literature
now are developed that later lead to concrete and visual poetry and that
themselves could reach back to historical starting points, such as those
that jump genre borders and go all the way back to the controversial words
of the lyric poet Simonides of Kos in the sixth century B.C., who said that
"painting is mute poetry and poetry is speaking painting." [20]
This history of visual poetry, simultaneously also a history of a
mixing of genres, first had to be written: from the position of Horace's
"Ut pictura poesis" in the Ars poetica (verse 361); to Lessing's Laokoön;
to the Berlin and Viennese lectures of Wilhelm Schlegel; to Schiller's
research in "On Naive and Sentimental Poetry." The romantics could once
again be read afresh, authors like Novalis, who in the Fragmenten says,
"Nothing is more poetic than all changes and heterogeneous mixtures," [21] or
temporally even further back into the seventeenth century to Baroque poets
like Georg Philipp Harsdörffer, who in Frawen-Zimmer Gespräch-Spiel and in
his Poetischen Trichter offers a plethora of examples of this thesis: "The
painter should be a poet, or the poet a painter, not with the brush, but
with the quill: both, however, stand together; this one helps that, that
one this." [22]
It is really astounding, that in view of this received poetics and
of the seemingly so well-circumscribed terminology of literature, the
glance of the artist at the same time always already also reaches over its
own genre borders, so that a special quality was seen in the proximity of
literature to the visual arts since "pictures" also appeared in formal
pictures and in metaphorical speech in the area of literature.
Thus, beginning with the origins of writing, the picture alphabets,
we have examples of the mixing of image and text from the Greek magical
papyri to the early figure poems of the Greek bucolic poets, Porfiry's
Latin grid poems, the variants of the successors to the Carolingean
Renaissance, the Baroque text figures, the scrolls of the sixteenth century
and their predecessors up to the free text-pictures of the turn of the
century somewhat as in Mallarmé and Apollinaire, which the experiments of
the futurists and dadaists followed, continued, and expanded, to entirely
unique forms brought through by the artists of concrete and visual poetry
of the second half of the twentieth century. [24]
Concrete poetry got its name at the beginning of the 1950s. It is a
language art form that is closed, international, and non-mimetic,
proceeding from the material qualities of language: from the verbal, sound,
and visual materiality of words. The graphic forms of single letters, the
white space of the book page, the constellation of letters vis-à-vis one
another, the change of reading habits, the combinatory possibilities of
letters and words on a surface, the ignoring of syntax and metaphor, the
free play with language material that simultaneously goes against the
literalness of language-this calls for a wholly new reception attitude on
the reader's part. No customary left-right reading will work, no usual
sentences, no given sequencing, not even words that had once been
complete-the reader must himself become productive, discover
constellations, determine double meanings of words, develop his own history
with the language material being offered.
The term concrete poetry emerged in 1953 in a manifesto by the
Swedish artist Övind Fahlström. In 1954 Eugen Gomringer defines and
describes concrete poetry in his manifesto "Vom Vers zur Konstellationen"
(From Verse to Constellation), without using the term. This he first uses
in 1956, after which he met with representatives of the Brazilian
Noigandres group at the Ulm Hochschule (Ulm College). There Gomringer was
secretary to the Swiss constructivist Max Bill; this line of connection
shows the closeness of concrete art and concrete poetry. Gomringer prefers
to refer to a much earlier essay of Ernest Francisco Fenollosa (1853-1908),
"The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry," published by Ezra
Pound in The Little Review in 1919, in which "concrete poetry" [25] had
already been mentioned.
Since 1954, Gomringer has referred in many publications to the
communications posssibilities mediated by a changed notion of poetry, and,
above all, he has supported and promoted "the idea of a universal common
poetry," claiming that in a changed society the ongoing existence of an
individualistic poetry would have to be scrutinized.
But the postulates of concrete poetry-to be simple, understandable,
communicative, essential, and exact-were not satisfactorily achieved. It
seems that the degree of reduction, the mass of abstraction, and the
language-theoretical research necessary to guarantee a certain style caused
the poets gradually to forget the environment. At its most extreme point,
very few signs driving forward the process of abstraction over the specific
alphabetical signs offered anything that would have made possible an
identification of the public with the new poetry. Hermetics instead of
communication was the result.
The term concrete poetry, especially in the 1950s and 1960s, was
often used synonymously with visual poetry. But this description merely
refers to the visual materiality/form of appearance of concrete poetry.
This visual realization of concrete poetry texts must be strictly
differentiated- based on different qualities, predominance, and functions
of elements foreign to art-from works of international visual poetry that
have been developing in parallel.
Put otherwise, only by force do the visual components of concrete
poetry emerge from this poetry's already inevitable organization of text-
and letter-material. Thus, the end product appears not as picture but as
constellation, of whose necessary space and surfaces we become conscious.
Works of visual poetry are essentially more complex pictures and as
such to be recognized. Next to the graphic qualities of letter materials,
picture-like elements (color, forms, drawings, collages, and so on) serve
as contrast, mirroring, or distortion of the semantics of words used.
Therefore, here we have text-pictures-picture poetry, as Teige says.
Thus, in the area of visual poetry's aesthetic quality, there can
be found always more levels. Picture- and text-information shrunken and
mounted as fragments should provide room for poetic play. In this way, the
recognition of material and its origin plays an important role. The montage
piece cut out of an advertisement signifies not only what this piece says
literally but also brings in the gathered semantical area of the ad. If
more source areas are now related to one another, we can quickly see what
multiplicty of possibilities for semantic and formal connections is
offered. Thus, it is not requisite that all the varieties of poets be
united with one another. As well, limiting the showing of possible
correspondences once again allows the public free rein for its own
creations.
With its fictional character, individualistic poetry produces
personal worlds that the public might interpret on which it could build or
from which it could recognizably benefit. However, these personal worlds
don't respond to the public. Perhaps concrete poetry was nothing more than
this. Moreover, in the last analysis visual poetry is fictional, because
all poetry stands under the dictate of fictionality. But the difference
from concrete poetry perhaps consists in the fact that this inclusion
proceeds from the fact that in visual poetry there is more world in the art
work itself, constantly leading the fight against fictionality. The
internally orderly constellation of concrete poetry was in principle an
artistic form that in the best of cases had a representational character.
The words were investigated as words and were not seen with regard to their
environmental function. Concrete poetry understood the word as material
word, as sign.
Visual poetry can make use of the word always only in context, in
connection with its source or origin, its environment (poster,
advertisement, catalogue, letter, and so on). The source must be
recognizable; only then is it worth it to place this word in its entirely
special context function, so that aspects result that are critical,
humorous, or even theoretically recognizable. In this way, several tasks
come together-language criticism, social criticism, criticism of more
complex or more primitive language communication, and so on.
If concrete poetry has concerned itself with language as material,
then visual poetry tries to investigate context as material, and insofar as
visual poetry generates other contexts from context fragments, the public
will be sensitized with regard to new ways of seeing and thinking. The
public will be shown that there are no good systems of reference, that
there is always only just a given case, that the single observer is in a
position to considerably augment his creative capabilities. At the same
time, we note the request that the environment be seen as one in its
constantly changing states.
If concrete poetry has sharpened language awareness, then visual
poetry tries to develop-at the same time building up and perhaps going a
step further-a language-context consciousness, an awareness of the
environment of language. [26] Thus, one might bring together the following
points for a terminology, although the maker of visual poetry need not be
conscious of them: [27]
Visual poetry:
alters literary and art terminology
reacts to the development of the media
defines afresh the role of the producer
looks for the recipient as producer
draws up new models of communication, aesthetics, and contents
places in question received artistic rules
opens itself to all themes
works with invented and found materials
claims no eternal value.
Or:
It doesn't limit itself to a definite culture area or language condition:
visual poetry is international, found on all continents, and has existed
for centuries.
It is intermedial and interdisciplinary; that is, it is not limitable to a
definite artistic discipline like literature, visual art, film,
photography, computers, and so on: it is found among all the arts and
therefore also among all the media.
It is not the object of science, yet at the same time is the object of many
disciplines: literature, art, typography, advertising, media, and so on.
It seemingly possesses no history, yet at the same time ties together many
lines of development and influences, not the least being a paradigm shift
from the culture marked as literary to that of the visual and of media of
this century.
It seems to be absent from the awareness of publishers and gallery owners,
or it is regarded as out of date, but at the same time it is present in
many of the world's great collections and museums; it is regarded as not
"marketable" by big presses or known galleries, but continues with an
unbroken power of production to be exhibited in a plethora of subversive
exhibition spaces and goes on being published by small presses.
It possesses no single form of appearance and does not allow itself to be
frozen on certain techniques, materials, formal or content programs: its
versatility is its program.
And finally: visual poetry can be understood indeed as an art form, but it
doesn't have to be. Hence, it can be ideas-and a delivery system for all
the areas of the modern information and communications society. It can also
be understood as so-called applied art, when its innovations in
advertising, technology, and electronic media demand, without having to
fear coming up against poetics or aesthetics.
Or:
Visual poetry is the changeable relationship of visual art and
literature, of picture and text, of figurative and semantic elements, the
connection of both art forms in an intermedial space, the sensory reaction
to any kind of communications form coming from the environment, the
reservoir for important recognitions from collage, concept art, concrete
art, used by different imaginative varieties of realism, for the
establishment of evidence and in all the conceivable ways that a logical
language deploys.
Visual poetry introduces new processes of sensation through
calculated play, experiment pitted against tradition, and its artistic
project is developed through experience; it is also a reflection of and
answer to the unfolding of the media landscape and to the especially strong
reciprocal pollination and interpenetration of the arts we have witnessed
in the twenthieth century.
Finally, visual poetry can be seen as a possible form of expression
in the development of our information- and communications society. Visual
poetry can react to the new forms of media (video, computer, holography,
laser, and so on), is a form of expression independent of a certain medium,
which can enter creatively and innovatively into interactive communications
models.
Or plain and simple in a sentence:
If concrete poetry has been made to serve against the wearing out
of language and for the discovery of a new literalness, a new material and
language awareness, then the chief service of visual poetry lies in the
discovery of a new context awareness and new language reference systems,
whereby languge no longer means only alphabetic language.
And how can it continue?
In a lecture entitled "Hat Schreiben Zukunft?" (Does Writing Have a
Future?), Vilém Flusser has shown a possible further way. He says,
Writing down is the expression of a false awareness. . . . From all sides
there appear pictures (photographs, movies, television, videos, computer
pictures), a universe of technical pictures, which break through the crazy
stream of inscription. They are the new kind of pictures. They turn up not
out of ancient history, myths, the preconscious, but out of a new way of
writing. Not out of legends or inscriptions, but out of prescription, out
of "programs." These programmed pictures, therefore, are not more or less a
relapse into the inscriptions of illiterates, but, on the contrary, a push
forward to the inscriptions of a prescriptive writing. We may expect a new
literature: no longer notated, but prescriptive; no longer documents, but
programs. . . . Future literature will no longer be spoken language but
will note down "ideas" (somewhat like the Chinese). [28]
Flusser could thereby have predicted the end of the book age, and
the ongoing discussion would be simultaneously confirmed, for which Michael
Wetzel's 1991 work stands: Die Enden des Buches oder die Wiederkehr der
Schrift. Von den literarischen zu den technischen Medien (The Ends of the
Book or the Return of Writing. From the Literary to the Technical Media),
which tries to explain that the end of the book in no way includes the end
of writing. [29] Nevertheless, we must not lose sight of what Marshall
McLuhan wrote already in 1964 in Understanding Media : "Already our western
scale of values, built on the written word, is faltering because of the
electronic communications media-telephone, radio, and television." [30]
But what does "end" mean in this connection, or the "disappearance"
of the art work and the artist mentioned at the beginning? Naturally,
something else steps up to take its place, and this must not be something
less, as the culture pessimists try to persuade us. Because we can learn
from media history also that the anxieties and horror scenarios of the
collapse of culture will always be newly formulated with a beautiful
regularity, whether in the example of television as a drug, or the
computer's omnipotence-a condition that holds true not only in the present
(and not only in these two media), but is also recognizable in even more
beautiful regularity right with the respective emergence of newer media.
The emergence of the technical media of photography and film
threatened to dry up the creativity of the fine arts and literature, and
the collapse of the theater was imminent. [31] The forest fire of television
threatened film culture and reading behavior. Audio- and videocassettes now
seem to be suppressing the book, and the computer similarly undermines all
human abilities, after which not only will texts, colors, and tones be made
tracing the artistic existence but also the makers have already themselves
long since become nothing but pieces of artistic worlds, beyond real time
and real space: virtual-real, and at the same time not real. [32]
In an essay that appeared already in 1988, "Das Verschwinden der
Fiktion. Über das Altern der Literatur durch den Medienwechsel im 19. und
20. Jahrhundert" (The Disappearance of Fiction: On the Age of Literature
through the Media Changes in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries), Klaus
Bartels has brought to a point these worries-or better, this as yet
unmastered defiance. He speaks of the "De-realization of the real through
the electronic media, the becoming unreal of the real," by which we make it
difficult for ourselves. Since the Enlightenment, the visual techniques of
learning have been rejected. Towards the end of the eighteenth century, a
pictureless, rational reading was postulated. This was now thoroughly
cancelled through the above-sketched development, and, as a result of care
for "the continuation of literary culture," the understanding was denied
that "visual fiction undoes the monopoly over literary fiction" and "that
this in no way means the collapse of culture, since the existence of the
book, of literature, or even of culture is not at stake, but only the
mastery of the literary function over the visual," says Bartels. [33]
But this innovative development with help from visualization can
still lead to problems, which Paul Virilio addressed on the occasion of the
publication of the Media-Art prizes in Karlsruhe in 1992. He began his
talk, "Whereas earlier there was a craft of seeing, an 'art of seeing,' we
now face an 'undertaking of sensually perceptible appearances,' that one
could take as a malignant ulcer, the industrialization of seeing groping
around itself throughout form."
Virilio speaks of a mechanization of seeing that could lead to the
inflation and disturbance, but no longer to a further sensitization of,
sensory allure. Thus, he asks:
Given this "disturbance of apprehension," which befalls each of us, it
would perhaps be advisable to give earnest thought to the ethics of
customary perception. Will we soon lose our position as eye tools of
sensory-perceptible reality to technical, substitute media, to protheses
of all kinds (video and camera surveillance), that make us rely upon them
for assistance, for the visually impaired-a paradoxical blindness thanks to
the over-illumination of the visible and of the development of this
sightless seeing machine, that is attached to this "indirect light" of the
electro-optic, the future of the "direct optic" made from sunlight or
electricity? [34]
Even clearer is the following by Fred Forest:
Driven from the currents of the time and fashion, must we now acknowledge
the picture's zero point, after which we are shoved right up to
literature's zero point? . . . With the spread of the media and the
explosive unfolding of technologies, the picture does not stop
proliferating around us and multiplying itself. And it is right here that
doubt strikes us. Is this sea of pictures, which is flooding us to the
point of saturation, perhaps nothing other than a last dispersal?
. . . Have we already overstepped the culture of the picture that many
still highly esteem? Will the picture kill the picture? . . . The
background of the latent crisis of the picture is the crisis of reality,
which unavoidably confronts us. It is directly bound up with a new form of
relation, which has constituted itself over the mediation between the
individual and the world of electronic techniques of all kinds. Pictures,
so it appears, become intelligent. . . . Yesterday we still looked at them;
today they already are observing us. In an interactive relation that
remains unclear whether we still possess the privilege of the initiative
and of creativity, they test our ability to give answers. . . . Certainly
it is true that we have become mistrustful faced with the mass-produced
picture, in that we discover that it can deceive our senses and our
judgment . . . [35]
When now applied to what Forest says, moving towards the turn of
the century, must we reckon with a crisis in perception after the language
crisis of the last turn of the century? At least in 1988 Virilio was
already referring to the possibility of a crisis of perception in Die
Seemaschine [36]
Virilio establishes that after "synthetic" pictures now the time of
"synthetic" seeing has dawned, which has been defined through phrases like
"automating of sensory perception," "motorizing of the gaze," "ocular
training," "prothesizing of the gaze," and "sightless seeing machines."
"Which effect," Virilio asks, "which theoretical and practical
consequences" follow "for our own view of the world?"
This questioning closely explores the value and definition of
reception on the basis of possibilities of changes in perception and
thereby at the same time the question of the future development of
communications altogether.
Thus, three factors-once again brought together-play a considerable
role. First is the resolution of the monopoly of literary fiction through
the visual.37 There is the "invasion of the visual" 38 in a culture still
dominated by the literary until at least the last turn of the century.
Second, we have the break-up of classical mass communications, which was
able to develop with the coming in the twentieth century of the technical
media-LPs, photo, film, and so on. Third, we see the "de-realization of the
real through the electronic media," 39 among the results of which are to be
considered the quality as well as the function of the communicator and the
recipient against the background of a fully new Space-Time fabric. [40]
On the one hand, the break-up of literary fiction through the
visual can now be clarified with the development of audiovisual media; on
the other hand, this break-up is also a consequence of the language crisis
of the turn of the century, next to which the visual media have also
brought forward other "ersatz languages," such as, for example, expressive
dance or the visual forms of poetry. [41]
One should question if this first language crisis follows the
second language crisis with the influence of the electronic media in the
second half of the twentieth century; if now in the audiovisual area
something is also lacking of the linearity of a closed system, such as, for
example, that of film language; if "language" underlies what the new
(creative) electronic media offer in terms of changed forms of production
and ways of perceiving.
In any case, one could also ask if, after the language crisis of
the last turn of the century, there now follows a crisis of pictorial view,
an aggravation of the picture, the loss of the picture's autonomy, thus a
kind of perception crisis called forth through possibilities of
simultaneous duplication and freeing of oneself from limits, above all,
through the disappearance of reality in favor of a simulation of reality in
which the real and artistic collapse together without distinction. These
perceptions change that simultaneously reflect the mechanisms of sense
perception, themselves to be co-determined not only through products but,
above all, through these very producing media.
Paradigmatically, a genre like visual poetry itself could now
innovatively embrace the audiovisual media and with them become
interactively productive for recipients (and vice versa), to counter the
danger of increasing reproductivity that is able-through a flood of
pictures, the exhaustion of language, and word reduction-to work against
the ominous levelling of reception ability being driven by the rapid
development of technology.