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Review Jan 22 2009 « | »
Merdre! Communication of academic research was the reason the Internet began; long before it became the commercial entity of the......

Donald Eastwood

Communication of academic research was the reason the Internet began; long before it became the commercial entity of the nineties, it was a means of free exchange of research on transatlantic scientific programs under the name the Arpanet. Hard to imagine it in the face of its massive scope and multifacetted identity today, where it has become primarily a place to whittle time away.

Started 12 years ago very much in the spirit of this free exchange of academic research, the conceptual cutting edge of UbuWeb is an absurdly good place to whittle. Its now well over a hundred years since the ever converging characters of Alfred Jarry and his ubu-roi kick started the Avant Gard, but many of its foundations ring true today. Seeded from, amongst many things, a realisation that science was outstripping art, the Avant Gard movements began a technical and almost scientific reconsideration of the building blocks of art and literature in the face of a rapidly changing world. Then it was new forms of communication and reproduction - the worldwide telephone connections, film, flight and other Futurist preoccupations - now it could be seen as the Internet.

One offshoot of this was concrete poetry: essentially poetry that is aligned to the visual as opposed to the musical, and UbuWeb's catalogue of major writers is certainly the section of that you should start with if you have never heard of calligrams, Apollinaire, pataphysics, ludic literature and the absurd.

Just as interesting is the contemporary section, and particularly Kenneth Goldsmith's introduction below the list: "As more artists flock to the web, many become unknowing practitioners of concrete poetry as streaming and morphing of language moves to the forefront of graphical web-based practices, be it fine or commercial art. As such, we hope to present a selection of artworks that historically fulfill or extend the practices of the original practitioners of concrete poetry in the cyber medium."

While net art (art created specifically for the Internet) has still not seen any truly notable practitioners, visual poetry offers a very exciting point of entry to the medium, and one that those resistant to change may find easier to handle: we have, at the very least, accepted the Internet as a fine publisher of the written word.

Have a look through the offerings here.

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