Álvaro Seiça (Visiting Fellow) – Kinetic Poetry: From Screening to Running Interactive Language

The third event of the Spring 2018 series of Digital Scholarship Seminar takes place on Thursday 3 May at 2pm, and features a paper on kinetic poetry, a form of poetry that relies on spatiotemporal transitions as expressive literary and visual layers, by Álvaro Seiça, Visiting Moore Institute Fellow from the University of Bergen. The talk presents the rich history of kinetic poetry, by addressing the areas of experimental and digital poetry, as language goes from projected to interactive media.. As ever, all are welcome.

Kinetic Poetry: From Screening to Running Interactive Language

Kinetic poetry is a form of poetry that relies on spatiotemporal transitions as expressive literary and visual layers. Throughout the twentieth-century, kinetic poems have been composed with varied media, such as celluloid film, video, holography, and computers. This unified and untold history of kinetic poetry is presented for the first time in Álvaro Seiça’s PhD study setInterval: Time-Based Readings of Kinetic Poetry (2017). As it is unveiled, the origins of kinetic poetry can be traced back to the Dadaists. When Marcel Duchamp staged rotoreliefs in the 35mm film Anémic Cinéma (1926), he arguably set a precedent for questioning the role of documentary film, textual art in motion, and poetry.

This lecture presents this rich history of kinetic poetry, by addressing the areas of experimental and digital poetry, as language goes from projected to interactive media. The lecture is a screening session, as well as a discussion of modes of kinetic writing. First, it discusses kinetic poetry’s cultural and technological history, by putting forward the argument that digital poetics is deeply influenced by the 1950-80s experimental practices and transmedia approaches, which included film, video, and computers. Second, it presents other timelines of kinetic writing, such as those of animation film and movie titles. Finally, it presents practical methods for reading digital kinetic poems, by elaborating on the notion of “deformance” and the methods of modification. The lecture draws from Seiça’s 2017 PhD study, which goes beyond techno-positivistic discourses on digital poetry by discussing the larger intersections of literature with technology, politics, and society.

Dr Álvaro Seiça is a writer and researcher. He holds a PhD in Digital Culture from the University of Bergen (2018). He published the poetry books Ensinando o Espaço (2017), Ö (2014), permafrost (2012), and the scholarly book Transdução (2017). Seiça has been a PhD Fellow at the University of Bergen (UiB), where he taught courses in electronic literature and digital humanities. He edits the ELMCIP Knowledge Base. His PhD dissertation “setInterval(): Time-Based Readings of Kinetic Poetry” (2017) was hosted by the Electronic Literature Research Group at UiB, and advised by Scott Rettberg and Chris Funkhouser. In 2018, he is starting a 3-year postdoctoral project entitled “The Art of Deleting” at UiB and UCLA, which is funded by a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellowship. @AlvaroSeica / alvaroseica.net

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