1982 : Eduardo Kac, Não!


Eduardo Kac like Melo e Castro and Augusto de Campos, was there at the birth of videopoem. His first work Não! was released in the same year as the de Campos digitalized ‘Pluvial…Fluvial”. Online versions of Kac’s work are available. Ticker tape parades of neologisms, letter growing into space, rhythmic motion. The seeds of vector animation are evident combined with a formalist approach rooted in concrete poetry give these works an austere rigorous presence.

“Não!, 1982/84 – Created in 1982 and presented on an electronic signboard in 1984 at the Centro Cultural Cândido Mendes, Rio de Janeiro (in Portuguese). “Não!” is organized in text blocks which circulate in virtual space at equal intervals, leaving the screen blank prior to the flow of the next text block. The visual rhythm thus created alternates between appearance and disappearance of the fragmented verbal material, asking the reader to link them semantically as the letters go by. The internal visual tempo of the poem is added to the subjective performance of the reader. The poem was realized on a LED display.” [Source: http://www.ekac.org/multimedia.html

Kac’s digitalpoems over the next decades move into projections on walls, Director-based poems, hyertext, VRML and holography. In essence, he is one of the primary investigators of typography in digital contexts.

Eduardo Kac -- Reabracadabra (1985)
Eduardo Kac — Reabracadabra (1985)

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