netpoetic.com

It is with great pleasure that I now announce the beginning of the project “PO.EX’70-80 – Digital Archive of Portuguese Experimental Literature”, financed by the Science and Technology Foundation of the Portuguese Government (MCTES), with European Funds (Ref: PTDC/CLE-LLI/098270/2008). This project will have the duration of 36 months, and will have as Host Institution the University Fernando Pessoa, Oporto, Portugal.

The aim of PO.EX’70-80 is to provide continuity to the Project “Portuguese Experimental Poetry – a CD-ROM of Dossiers and Catalogs” (FCT 2005-2008, Ref. POCI/ELT/57686/2004), which studied Portuguese literary experimentalism of the 1960s and created a digital archive with the most relevant magazines, catalogs and publications of that group of poets. Requests by several agents and recommendations from our consultants have led us to identify the need to extend the reproduction of Portuguese Experimental Poetry into the 1970s and 1980s. This new timeline will allow us to develop the studies and the collections already begun, now including visual and sound poetry, video-poetry, happenings, and cybernetic literature – all of which can be seen as extensions and renovations of literary experimentalism of the previously analyzed period. Within this framework, we will consider a connection between concrete and digital poetics.

The present project, characterized by its openness and free access to resources, will therefore continue the task of preserving a literary legacy which may be at peril. The following goals should be highlighted:

• To actively contribute to a better knowledge and dissemination of Portuguese poetry of the 20th century;
• to motivate new theoretical propositions and new didactic and research methodologies, by connecting theoretical investigation to the development of a hypermedia archive;
• to contribute to the preservation of literary documents that are fragile and rare;
• to freely distribute and disseminate experimental literary production in schools, universities and cultural institutions, creating the conditions and strategies for the use of new technologies in the production and dissemination of contemporary literature;
• to attain new and diverse audiences, by means of free Internet access to the resources, proposing literary readings by means of electronic media which students can understand and enjoy;
• to encourage the production of electronic literature by offering young writers the required skills and technical conditions for the use of digital tools and platforms in their creative processes.

It should be stressed that we aim to start, within the scope of this project, a Laboratory of Digital Writing, coordinated and supervised by team members. In this Laboratory we expect to offer adequate technical conditions for the development of artistic residences of poets and writers with an interest in multimedia and hypermedia digital platforms. The potential of programming languages as specific technologies for literary writing could be explored on a collaborative basis. In this way, we hope to foster the development of internal networks of production and digital literary creativity, documenting and later extending the process and its results, namely by means of an on-line publication platform.

More info can be found @ www.po-ex.net

Tags: e-literature | experimental literature | preservation

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