[syndicate] epoetry2007

[epistolaris at freemail.hu]

I have attended in Paris  a part of the e-poetry festival.
It was a good opportunity  to distinguish some different traditions
and backgrounds, specially the French one, based largely on sound and visual
poetry. 
I also listened to many academics coming mostly from literature studies trying
to grab aesthetics of animated texts and multimedia, with more or / apart of
few exceptions /with less success.
However, i saw and i heard very few things worthy to note.
There was plenty of simply tragic presentations, of the type of dancers in
front of a 
poetry reading	accompanied with sound, in better case with animation, video,
and very few works exploring the interactive, generative aspects of the
literature 
assisted by computer.  The internet  meant in this festival only that a
remote performance is possible, or it served for the presentation of a web-page
as
a poetry performance. None of the presentations dealed with the internet as an
environment to be explored in an artistic way.
The performances that i liked the most are not online so far, unfortunately.
But the website epoetry2007.net is supposed to grow gradually, covering in the
end the whole festival, so probably my favorite ones will appear as well: The
Poem to Scour by Philippe Bootz (F), - if this work will be online, it is good
to know that one has to scour really hard with a mouse to see the poem -, and
the work of Jerome Fletcher (UK) that investigated layering, the confusion
between accretion and erasure in writing in the frame of a Java applet.  The
text-generating sound performance of Joerg Piringer (A) was a real-time
experience, but one can get an idea of it through the documentations on his
website. Noemata's performance we could enjoy online, but it did not get to the
festival, unfortunately. Alan's work was performed at the festival, the
reactions to it were good - personally i have seen it online only.
greetings from Paris,
anna